How many times have you wished a crystal ball could give you a glimpse into the future of work? Oh, what a breeze HR would be…
In lieu of a fortune-telling orb, many companies seek out workplace consultants to help guide their HR strategies. One of those experts is Peter Miscovich, executive managing director at consultancy JLL. He’s helped C-suite executives at companies including Accenture, AT&T, and IBM design and implement hybrid workplaces since the 1990s.
Miscovich, along with Sanjay Rishi and Benjamin Breslau, published The Workplace You Need Now: Shaping Spaces for the Future of Work in 2021 to help companies create future-oriented workspaces. He shared with HR Brew the lessons people pros can learn from the book.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What are HR takeaways from the book?
It focuses on the personalized workplace, the responsible workplace, and the experiential workplace…it focuses on the four Cs of value from our perspective, and that includes culture, collaboration, creativity, and community. The book is organized to be both conceptual to provide background on the future of work, and where work has been and where work is going…
It has over 30 client case studies, including our work with the likes of Microsoft and other leading clients on the how of hybrid. So, from an HR perspective, having worked and still working with a number of CHROs, if we look at the employee value proposal for 2024, 2027, 2030, the how of hybrid is important, the how of talent attraction is important, the how of digital upskilling, AI enablement, human-to-machine collaborative eco-systems, how all of this comes together was the focus of our book in 2021 and 2022…We’re now in 2024, and the book still has relevance.
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How has hybrid work changed since the ’90s?
We had a very long hybrid winter until the pandemic hit. And, then in a matter of three weeks, 3 billion people went remote, which is really remarkable when you think about the scale and scope, volume, and velocity of hybrid and remote adoption that occurred in March–April 2020. But, as we fast forward now to 2024, the challenges are both an investment challenge, an infrastructure and technology challenge, a workforce and change management challenge, and a leadership challenge. And, all the CHROs that I work with closely, they’re trying to navigate their future of work and future of hybrid strategies, and their varying degrees of success.
One reason I’ve been doing this for 25 years is that it’s continuously changing…And, I cannot keep up with the volume and velocity of both talent and workforce change, workplace change, technology change…Clients require a lot of navigational support to navigate all the challenges I just mentioned…The challenges are actually increasing, and they are accelerating in terms of intensity. And, then you can layer on that geopolitical challenge, you can layer upon that climate risk and resiliency challenges…So, it’s a very rich and complex environment, especially for the CHROs and CEO leadership teams to navigate their future work strategies in a successful manner.
What makes a hybrid workplace successful?
It doesn’t happen overnight, and the more successful clients that we’ve been working with for 10 years or 15 years, are successful because they’ve embedded hybrid into their DNA as an organization. They have a leadership cohort, a leadership vision, and an employee value proposal that is cogent, visionary, and comprehensive.