🏢 Ryan Anderson, Vice President of Global Research and Insights at MillerKnoll

A Mission Focused on Workplace Strategy, Research and Insights

Welcome to this edition of The Switchboard. Here’s this week’s article which features a conversation with Ryan Anderson about researching and investing in the world of work.

About Ryan

Ryan Anderson serves as Vice President of Global Research and Insights at MillerKnoll. His team leads MillerKnoll’s research, shares insights publicly across the world, and provides workplace strategy and application design services to MillerKnoll customers.

With nearly thirty years of industry experience, Ryan’s work has centered on how the places we inhabit can be better designed to support healthy, inclusive, and productive communities. Ryan hosts MillerKnoll’s Looking Forward podcast on the future of work and regularly speaks at public events about MillerKnoll’s historical and current research.

He is a member of the SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) Executive Network, an Executive Fellow at Woxsen University in Hyderabad India, and has been featured in a wide variety of publications such as The Wall Street Journal, NPR, the BBC, Fortune, Bloomberg, and beyond.

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What sparked your path into your current work?  

I grew up and live in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The furniture industry has always been critical to our local economy. When I went to college, I said there was no way I would work in furniture. It seemed boring. But, the more I explored the industry, the more I realized how vital it is to the prosperity of the community. 

When I realized how much the furniture industry was investing heavily in research, it further piqued my curiosity — they were studying how technology was changing work and how work environments could evolve to become better. 

I tried out marketing and sales but ultimately landed on R&D because I realized if I focused on research — in theory, I wouldn’t get bored. I would always be searching for solutions. That curiosity and desire to have a positive impact on my hometown really shaped my path. 

What’s one pivotal project that shaped your career?

In 2012, I started focusing on distributed work. Looking back at this moment, I realize that I had an unplanned 8-year lead on the study of remote work considering how much it’s a top-of-mind topic today. At the time, I was partnering with Microsoft with the Head of User Experience at Skype looking at how video and technologies would enable greater distribution of remote work experiences. 

Around the same time, I was approached by Paul Miller of Digital Workplace Group to participate in a public debate in London. The topic — were office spaces relevant in an era of emerging technologies? As a former high school debate team member, I relished the opportunity. The ideal way to prepare for an experience like this is to argue against yourself. By looking at both perspectives, I became interested in remote-first companies — 37 Signals was one of the first pioneers. 

What struck me most was that working from home needed to be supported better, and that offices would evolve rather than disappear. While most of these companies had offices, they called them their Studios or Hubs. I observed that these spaces were all about improving connection between distributed team members in new ways. This gave me a greater sense of what a physical workspace might need to offer in the future to stand out. It was a precursor to what we’re seeing now as offices are not a place to go to send emails all day, but a place that fosters connection and promotes healthy community and engagement. This really helped our team to think ahead and when the pandemic hit, we were prepared with this knowledge and understanding to help others. 

Can you tell us more about your high school debate experience and how it has shaped your professional path?

Debate is the single most impactful activity that prepared me for my job as a researcher and a speaker. There’s a misconception that debate is only about arguing. It is about arguing, but, that’s not the skill that should be taken from it. There are three skills that I’ll highlight. First, it teaches you how to quickly understand a topic through the practical application of research. 

Second, it teaches how to think through iterative outcomes, such as preparing for the various pivots that might occur in a conversation. Thinking through a variety of outcomes and forcing yourself to adopt others' perspectives is a really helpful exercise. Third, learning to argue with yourself from multiple angles helps you find a balanced perspective. If done right, it can help create a degree of empathy. 

When I look back to when I was 16 years old, I was already spending my summers researching and standing in rooms in front of hundreds of people by the fall. That gave me great experience for the research and sharing of insights that my team leads. 

Editor’s Note: Learn more from Ryan in his own words in this LinkedIn post.

How does your work intersect with communications? 

For me, research only exists to be applied. I actually named our team the Global Research and Insights team. Because Research is the process of digging, but the insights are the gold. If you really want to help someone, you can’t just communicate research. I see this all the time — we did this research, here’s a report —  enjoy these 45 pages! That’s not what we do or what we want to do. We do the research. But, within our group, we have full-time insight sharers who either go out and speak or others who will sit down with a particular organization — it could be a school, a hospital or a business —  and help figure out how these physical environments can help their people and help you achieve their goals. 

It starts with a desire to be able to help people and draw from research in a way that’s relevant. It means you have to understand the consumption journey. There aren’t a lot of people out there talking about this. For me, it’s a really big opportunity to be able to say what are the challenges people are facing; have we discovered opportunities to help them and how do we meet them where we’re at?

I talk to our Marketing Team and External Communications team at least three to six times a day. They are my closest partners to take what we know and help make it available to anyone who might have a question. 

What about your connection to Internal Communications?

Internal Communications is so critical. A lot of my time is spent talking to organizations undergoing major change and they're changing their workplace to try to support new ways of working. The space design is important but half the battle is change management and internal Communications. I am a huge advocate for the strategic and creative use of employee communications/internal communications because that's how organizations change. 

When consulting recently with an organization on the redesign of their headquarters and all of the new ways they’d like to work, I thought the space design was great, but what really impressed me was how they engaged the employees and communicated the intent of their changes. They kept people updated in many important ways — from the cafe setup to the desk arrangements to new technology. They did a masterful job for employees to be part of the changes. This is so important because if people walk into an office design that they aren’t briefed on, it can be disorienting.  

Listen to Ryan in his own words:

What skills are needed to succeed professionally in your field?

I emphasize the need for good listening, writing and speaking skills. There’s a balance between writing for consumption and still being able to accurately represent an idea. It’s natural for some to write in very academic language. But you need to be able to explain it to others in a professional way. It’s about taking complicated topics and simplifying them to help people consume insights that can improve their decision-making. There’s also an element of empathy that’s needed in this process as well. 

What projects are you particularly proud of accomplishing over the years? 

Our Looking Forward podcast has been a highlight. In the midst of the pandemic, we had to reevaluate our communications tactics. When people started working remotely, CEOs, CHROs and CFOs started asking — do we need offices anymore and what’s the role of physical offices? They wanted to know if they should keep spending millions of dollars on an office anymore. It was easy to say yes, that you’re still going to find value in having a workspace, but more depth was needed. 

During quarantine, I remember saying to people — you’re cooking from home — do you no longer need restaurants? People said they loved restaurants, and they didn’t want to replace them. So, we realized there was an issue that they didn’t love their offices — there was a problem with the value that spaces were delivering. 

But, this topic is complex, and to really get into it, it took a medium that unpacked a lot of that information without forcing people to read huge papers. It also needed to be portable — only so many people are going to read a book on Office or Workplace Design. 

Since our research is done in combination with dozens of bright collaborators, a podcast became a good opportunity to break this information into bite-size 30-minute pieces. We brought some of the people we find interesting into the mix and created a resource for anyone who has ever worked in an office environment to help think about the future or work in new ways, as well as reach the C-Suite to help them make better choices. Our guests have blown me away. 

I’m also really excited about the work we’re doing on Inclusive Design. It goes beyond accessibility. The idea is that if you’re going to design anything —  written communications, a physical product, or a space, then you should include the people who you’re trying to serve in the process — a broad array of them — so you can gain a fuller empathetic view in terms of their range of needs.

The results should be better and more adaptable. This has been happening with the design of physical workplaces — schools, hospitals, homes, offices and most recently the innovative Harkin Center. Our work into inclusive design and how we’re sharing it — a podcast episode, a White Paper, a guidebook we helped publish - is really meaningful to me because it’s meaningful and forward-leaning. But it’s complex content that we have to get to the people who need it. 

How do you continue learning about your field?

I block time on my calendar for learning and being free of meetings to think. The only way to really feed yourself is to secure time for that nourishment and growth. I also walk my dog for an hour every day that’s a time when I’m going to learn something — I’ll call someone or listen to a great podcast. 

Learning mostly comes from one-on-one conversations which help me understand how people see the world. I also try to talk to customers, at least 50-100 per year. I spent time talking with the top Remote experts and real estate leaders in the world. I also travel a lot to understand what’s happening, for example, I was in Singapore and gained knowledge about regenerative architecture. It’s pretty wild = there are plants growing out of the exterior walls of skyscrapers! 

I also have my favorite podcasts — Scott Galloway’s Prof G, Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale, and Shankar Vadentam’s Hidden Brain. My absolute favorite podcast is NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. It’s really a fun format, you learn a lot and it gets you laughing. 

This summer you shared a LinkedIn post that caught my attention. Can you tell us more about the story of the Herman Miller Company Picnic Poster?

If you look at modern design, form follows function. In 1970, Steve Frykholm, who had a 45-year tenure at Herman Miller, was hired out of the Peace Corps to be a graphic designer. He was given a pedestrian task to design the company’s summer picnic poster. But what he designed was so inventive and stunning, it’s now in museums, including the MoMA! It became iconic. Plus, it got the employees really excited about those picnics! 

The takeaway is that some tasks might be viewed as boring or rote, but the way Steve approached it was a reminder that applying our creative energies to the right  opportunity can be a game changer. We all need to assess where to apply our energies to make the biggest impact in the world. Learn More: Herman Miller’s Poster Child.

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