 Next up, I have the pleasure of introducing you to an expert in the workspace industry, Ryan Anderson, who is the Vice President of Global Research and Insights at Herman Miller. Much of Ryan's work is centered on how technological and social changes have enabled ways of working and living, and how the places that we inhabit can support positive, productive experiences. So how does that translate at home? We know that a comfortable, intentional workspace can make a huge difference in productivity as well as your physical and mental well-being. Ryan's going to share with us how individuals and organizations can adapt to existing environments, whether it's a small city apartment shared with friends or a large, single-family home in the suburbs, so that you can live your best work from anywhere life. Hey, everyone. I'm Ryan Anderson, Vice President of Global Research and Insights at Herman Miller. I'm thrilled to be able to spend some time with you today talking about creating great home workspaces. If you don't know Herman Miller, we're primarily known for the furniture we make for homes, offices, hospitals, schools, gaming environments, and beyond. We love talking about how great design can impact people's lives, and today we're going to dive into that as it pertains to home workspaces. By the way, I am active in the chat right now, so if you have questions or thoughts as we go through, feel free to ask, and I'll be happy to help you. Our goal for the day is pretty straightforward. We're going to try to talk about how the design of home workspaces can improve productivity, health, and just our general experiences, our enjoyment of these spaces over time. I'll be drawing upon over 60 years of research into future of work and workplace, including home workplace. In fact, we released our first work-from-home product all the way back in 1941, so we've been thinking about this for a while. I'll also include several statistics specifically from a tool that we created to help people have better experiences working from home, which I'll tell you about later. About 20,000 people have used that tool, so the statistics you see will be drawn from that data. And ultimately, I want to provide you with frameworks and tips. Yes, some dos and don't dos as far as the design of home workspace, but more importantly, I want to be able to zoom out and talk about at a bigger level what really makes an effective good positive work-from-home experience or not, so that you're equipped not just to think about the design of specific parts of the space, but to really improve that experience overall. So we'll start with this framework, which is people process place. This is the way we do our research at Herman Miller. We don't start with the spaces. It's tempting to at times, particularly when you make and sell furniture, but you really can't get the spaces right until you ask who's using them and what are they doing. And so that's where I want to start with us today. Your home workspace or maybe this is for your employees. I know some of you might be tuning in to think specifically about your own space. Others might be representing an organization thinking about your employee's space. In either case, just know that homework spaces are often not just used by one person. 54% of the people that have used our work-from-home tool have said, yes, the spaces are dedicated for individual use, but 46% are shared. And we tend to see those percentage of shared even higher in big cities and outside of North America. And so give some thought to your own situation. Are you the only person using the space or is your spouse or partner potentially going to be doing work or other activities from here? Might you be sharing it with older people or younger people? You know, multi-generational households, we're at an all-time high since World War II, even before the pandemic, but we saw them increase in 2020 and the evidence suggests that they're still increasing in 2021. So even if it's primarily you using this space for work, it might be that you've got a child who's using it for homework or an older person in your household, connecting on video with friends or family, think through that as holistically as you can. And try to think about the differences in abilities, physical, cognitive, sensory abilities, activities, and preferences, because it'll make a difference. The way that we'll approach designing the space might be different, even the objects. You know, does it make sense to have a chair that has more manual adjustments that can be really fine-tuned for one person, or does it make sense to have a chair that doesn't require many adjustments so that it's easily shared between people and so that the person who uses it the most doesn't come back and say, oh, somebody adjusted my chair every single time. So these are just some of those factors. So think about the users both now and in the future, who might be using the space next week or next year. And then once you've given some thought to the who, now let's start thinking about the various activities, you know, what people are actually doing. And I'd really encourage you, if you've never done this, to try to catalog what you do in the course of a week. You can go back and look at your calendar, or you can just grab a notebook and start writing some things down. Because the better you get at understanding the full breadth of activities that you do, the more you'll be able to determine whether or not your home workspace really does or does not support it. Because in a more traditional office environment or a hybrid situation, we can rely on corporate offices to cover off on some of these activities. But when it's work from home as a full-time remote or remote first approach, we need these home workspaces to cover off on as many important activities as possible. So that we don't find ourselves saying, oh, I just have a really tough time doing this. So I've put a few words on this slide, process work, email, expense reports, learning, training, concentrated creative work, you know, do you have a place where you can be in PowerPoint or a spreadsheet for a couple hours at a time? How about contemplation or deep thinking? You're not using any tools, you just have to think through something. Video presentations, different types of communications, synchronous, asynchronous. But also, even beyond work, is this a space where you might want to use it for gaming or use it to watch some TV or some streaming media, I should say. It wouldn't actually be a TV, but you know, I'm a parent of some teenagers. Sometimes I lose control over the TVs in our house. I've been known to come to this workspace and use it to stream some content just for enjoyment. And by the way, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about my own home workspace too, just as an example of some of how I approach this, just because it can be a little bit more relatable. But give some thought, what are the full breadth of activities that you really need to make sure that you've got covered or else you're going to find that your productivity suffers as a result? And then as we turn our attention to place, think through the various places within your home where some of these activities can happen. There will be a primary space, probably with a desk and a desk chair, but that's not the only space that some of these can happen. Maybe some things want to happen from your dining room table or your kitchen. We don't want to see you spending hours and hours in a place that's not ergonomic or comfortable. But there might be some activities like I've got a phone call, just an old-fashioned audio phone call that I decided I'm going to take from the back porch. It's good to think of this as a continuum of spaces within your home. Even if you're in a real small apartment in a big city, chances are you'll have a primary, but also a few secondary spaces. And you can then begin to ask the question, what activities can happen where and what should the primary workspace really focus on? I'll tell you, in terms of my work life, I love working outdoors. I spend time working on my back porch a lot. I might take an audio call from my sofa in the middle of the day just to kick back. I spend most mornings starting out in a very consistent way. I get up, have a cup of coffee, sit on the back porch. Think about what I want to get done in the course of the day. And then I take my dog for a 45-minute brisk walk. During those walks, I might use it to think about what I'm going to say during a presentation or think about a conversation I need to have with someone or even listen to a podcast so I can learn. So in my mind, I think about all these spaces, even the sidewalks around my neighborhood as places where some of these critical activities occur. And the more you think about it, the more you can make sure that your primary workplace and your secondary within your space is designed to support those activities we talked about before. Now, let's turn our attention to the actual design of the spaces. How do you begin to go about thinking about creating this space? Well, I'll give you another framework, not surprisingly, which is think about the surroundings, the furnishings, and the tools. I know we're a furniture company, and of course I'm going to talk to you about furniture. But it isn't just the furniture. Like in that image, the surroundings here include these beautiful exterior windows. The furnishings include a chair and a table. The tools can include not only digital, but analog things, books, pens, anything you need to accomplish your work. And when you think about these holistically, it's the best way to create spaces that really work together. So let's focus a little bit on those surroundings. 52% of the people who have used our work from home tool say they have some sort of dedicated space, dedicated room or space that can be closed off from the rest of their environment to do their work. 48% don't have that. Now, as I dig into the data a little bit more, not surprisingly, it's more suburban rural locations and countries with larger homes where we find that to be the case, like the US, Canada, Australia. You get into spaces that are maybe smaller architecturally or you'd have less likely to have a spare room, places like India, mainland China, a whole host of other areas. Then you're going to have to work with different constraints. And it is possible to think through the surroundings, even as taking basically a portion of what is essentially a larger shared area that may be used for living or dining other things and still create a great work from home experience. Begin by thinking about boundary. Boundary can mean a number of things. It can mean walls, but it can also mean screens, foldable modular screens include curtains. Anything that provides you some privacy, some visual privacy, or that can act as a backdrop. And backdrops are important for those of us that spend a lot of our time on video, including me. You can see in this picture, as well as my own home workspace, the desk is pulled away from the wall so that the video camera is pointed at essentially what is a controlled environment behind me. I think most of us remember that BBC video that went viral with that guy being interviewed and his kids busting the room behind him and all this chaos ensues. Hey, that's home life, right? We've got kids and pets and all sorts of other stuff going on. I think it's best to keep the chaos in front of us. So having something with some opacity, something like a wall or a screen or a curtain behind us makes a ton of sense to try to make sure that our views are protected. So those are some of the considerations with boundary, but it's not just boundary. It's other things that are related to our surrounding as well. Lighting, critically important. If you get some natural light, that's wonderful. It's great, great for the body and the soul. But make sure that it's not hitting your screen and creating glare. Maybe have it coming in in front of you as opposed to behind you. If you don't have access to natural light, there are still some ways of using great artificial lighting that you can think through beyond just throwing in a normal light bulb. In this particular home office, I've installed an additional pendant light above my desk. I've used a light bulb that actually can be changed to change the color temperature. There's something known as circadian cycle. I'm getting real geeky research here on you here. Sorry about that. But basically the sun in the morning is more intense with cool temperatures. And then the afternoon, it's less intense with warmer temperatures. You can even replicate that with light bulbs inside your house. So think about the lighting, whether it's artificial or natural. And then maybe even think about some additional natural elements. There's a kind of a school of design known as biophilic design. It's just kind of this movement to try to help create interior environments that replicate outdoor habitats. Really interesting. But it's things like plants. And you can see that I've got plants behind me, fresh air. Fresh air does some really good things. It clears out the CO2, which can actually improve our cognition. There's some really good studies showing that as the air quality of a space gets worse, we don't think as well. And it's just as great getting that breath of fresh air. Living in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I can't always open up my windows in January. But even that might open them up a little bit. And then views. Views are so important so that we can do something other than look at this pane of glass, you know, a couple feet from our face. Sometimes we'll say 2020 rule, meaning every 20 minutes, take 20 seconds to look at something 20 feet away or farther, just as a way of trying to change your depth perception, get your mind thinking. I actually have put an aquarium in my home office on the other side of the wall. There's some good research indicating that looking at aquariums lower blood pressure. That's why you find them in dentist offices and doctor's offices. And so whatever those might be, this combination of views, natural element lighting, really you want to be an environment where you feel nurtured and taken care of. So that's surroundings, or at least some of the considerations for surroundings. Now let's talk about the furniture. We need good furniture to be comfortable and productive. 62% of the people that have used our work from home tool said they experienced some discomfort throughout the workday, top issues, back, shoulders, neck. Those are heavily correlated with our seated posture. Only 24% of people who use the tool said they have organically adjustable work chairs. Interestingly, our research as well as the research many others indicate that when you give people the choice of what they can get to improve their home office, they almost always start with good desk chair and for good reason. Let's talk about why. This is a weird thing to say, but your head weighs about what a bowling ball does. And it is effectively balanced on top of your spine, which is designed to be in an S shape in order to effectively balance that amount of weight. If your head leans forward too far and that spine can't be in an S, it's almost like putting that bowling ball on the end of a fishing rod. And you can imagine the toll that it would take on our neck, shoulders, back. And so we need to try to maintain that S shape in your spine. And as we often say, the eyes will win. Meaning it's usually what we're looking at that draws us into other postures that are sometimes not very helpful. So I'll show you in a minute, making sure that, yes, you've got a great chair, but that you think about what you're looking at. And in particular, if you're somebody that uses a really small device that it's not constantly drawing you forward is really important. In fact, you might even ask yourself right now, what kind of posture are you in? Do you feel like you feel the back of your chair engaged with your back and that you can maintain that S shape? Or are you perched on the front of a chair or a couch leaning in towards something? Ideally, we really don't want that for long durations. The last thing I'll say here about chairs is there's a lot of talk about the importance of lumbar support. It's just kind of gotten into our conventional wisdom that lumbar support is really important. It is important, but you know what else is really important and maybe even more important is sacral support. So our back has different zones, thoracic, higher than lumbar than sacral. That little yellow part of the image is our sacrum. It's right above our tailbone. And as you can see by its shape, it wants to rotate forward like that. And so the picture on the right is one of our chairs in body. That happens to be the gaming version of it. You can see right at that base to support that sacrum, it rotates the person's hips forward, which does a great job of helping to keep that overall spine in S shape. So lumbar support, yeah, but really pay attention to your sacrum and what your overall back does when you fully engage with the chair back. I want you to have an image of what really kind of holistically healthy seated posture looks like. So I'm going to violate every principle of PowerPoint and presentation by putting this image, which is kind of an eye chart out there for you. You don't need to read all the details, but I do want you to just soak in on the different facets of this image, starting kind of at the bottom. Her feet are firmly planted on the floor. That's important. Her legs coming up to her knees and down are in a 90 degree shape. And we often see people not doing this. Either they're putting their feet on their chair base or they just can't touch the floor because their chair is adjusted too high. Probably because their desk is too high. This kind of acts as an ecosystem. Ideally, we want those feet flat. We want those knees at that 90 degree angle. If they're down too far, we'll get too much pressure on the back of your leg. We don't want that. It can inhibit blood circulation. Likewise, we don't want knees way up above our hips hitting the bottom of the desk because that's going to be problematic as well. Notice that her back is fully engaged. Her arms are to her sides and in a 90 degree angle with her arms moving forward and her eyes are looking straight ahead. And so we want movement throughout the day. We don't want to sit static like this for long periods of time. But if you want your back to be really effectively supported, as well as the rest of your body throughout the work day, keep this image in mind. And if you want to dive deeper into this, by the way, we've got all sorts of videos and other resources on hermameller.com that talks about healthy sitting. Now, let me just talk about a couple other things, which are our desk surfaces and our storage. 72% of the people that have used our work from home tool say they do have a dedicated surface. So they're not working from the dining room table, which is great. Only 11% have height adjustable surfaces, which we understand. It's not something that everyone has had a chance to get or can afford. But a couple of considerations. If your desk surface is not height adjustable either through an electronic mechanism or manual mechanism, do try to think about getting that desk right when you install it at the best proper height. So high enough so that it's not sitting on those legs, but low enough so that you're not trying to get up to reach it. Many desks do have the ability to be installed at different heights, even if they're not necessarily adjustable after they're installed. So get that right the first time, even if you've got a kind of jewelry bed desk a little bit. But then if you can ideally try to get a height adjustable desk. It has all sorts of benefits. One is what I just said, which is just for normal seated work. It's better because you know you can make sure it's at the right height. But then there's also the benefit of getting it up a little bit higher, maybe from when you're on video. So the camera is looking right at you, not up your nose, but also standing. And I do want to say a word or two about sit stand. The goal is not to stand for long periods of time. Standing is actually more harmful over long durations than sitting. And so the ideal is that you're taking breaks throughout the day to adjust that up. Stand for maybe 15 minutes, sit back down, we want movement. Our ergonomists often say your next posture is the best posture. And if you don't have that height adjustable surface, you can still get that movement, right? Like I said, go to the kitchen and maybe put your laptop there on the counter and work for 10 minutes, come back to your desk. We want that kind of movement. The last thing I'll say here is just like we talked about primary and secondary workspaces, surfaces also kind of have like this primary secondary thing. Our desks are our primary surfaces. Ideally, we don't want them cluttered up with tons of stuff that we're not using. So keep that primary surface for the tools and the content and the things that you're primarily working with. Think about having another surface, it could be the top of a storage cabinet where your other anticipated things might be found. Maybe it's where work that you might not reference every day, but you might reference once a week or once a month sits so that we don't find that your primary surface is all cluttered up. Now let's turn our attention to tools and then after that I'll begin to wrap up. There's tons of different tools that we use to do our work, including all of the digital things. But like those surfaces, they also kind of come in primary and secondary forms. Meaning your laptop, webcam, mouse, keyboard, maybe microphone are things you're probably using a lot. So they belong on that primary surface. But there's other things, could be notebooks, could be pens, papers, could be a printer that maybe you want to think about as having in a secondary location once again so that it doesn't clutter up your primary work surface. External monitors or a laptop stand like what's shown in this image can be very helpful in terms of maintaining that great posture like we talked about before. Because why? The eyes always win. When we get that surface up we're less inclined to hunch over looking at a small screen. Wi-Fi extenders and mesh networks also relate a lot to the design of home office space because sometimes we'll find that there's an area of our home that's a little bit removed from the cast that we want to use as our primary workspace, but because it is removed it doesn't get good connectivity. Invest in the tools necessary to get the Wi-Fi to the place that's best rather than sacrifice that and find yourself working in the middle of a busy living room. A good Wi-Fi extender or mesh network can do really good things as can noise cancelling headsets. Oh my goodness they can really deal with some of these spatial things that we can't control otherwise. They can help isolate acoustical distractions for you. They can also help reduce the distractions for the person you're interacting with through these microphones that are able to cancel out anything other than voice level frequency. So those are just a handful of the considerations around tools and then we just need to think about how all of this comes together. I'm going to break another PowerPoint rule by transitioning from these beautiful Hermmiller images to a picture I took an hour ago of my own home workspace. You know I've worked primarily from home for years. This is what works for me, but you know what? I've done lots of little tweaking and experimentations. I have another bookcase off to the side that you can't see here that holds my printer and some other tools but I've got a primary work surface that works really well for me. I like to keep it clear. I adjust it a lot. The area behind me, yeah I can set a few things there but it's primarily there for plants and other things that make my surroundings into something that I like and yes there's a boombox there because I love to crank the tunes when I do email. Loud music and email go really well for me. You also can see I've got an external mic because I do a lot on video. A great ergonomic mouse from Logitech. So think about what's right for you and make it work as a system and if you still need more information there's an excellent tool for you which I've already mentioned many times our work from home tool wfh.hermanmiller.com. It is not a sales tool. It doesn't recommend any products to you. It is solely there to help make recommendations. It also gives you a score. Don't worry so much about the score. Look at the recommendations and how it's seeking to help you not only in terms of physical ergonomics but also some other dimensions that we didn't really unpack yet today. Cognitive ergonomics related to how we think and feel as well as social. You know we might think of social ergonomics as how the space impacts our relationships and yes that's really important in corporate offices where there's lots of people together. It's still really important working from home. You are social people. I'm a social person. We need to think about all facets of our work from home experience and this tool is designed to help you do that. So I hope that that has given you some new ideas, some new tips, more importantly a more holistic view of what you can do to take control over the environment around you or to empower your employees to do so to create productive, healthier and ultimately just better work from home experiences. Thanks.