Redefining the Digital Workplace
Simplifying workplace management, the Meraki way
A lot has changed at Meraki since our humble beginnings in 2006, from the size of the team to our ever-expanding product line. (Oh yeah, there was that Cisco acquisition, too.) But if one thing has remained constant over the last 10+ years, it’s been Meraki’s maniacal focus on simplicity, on reducing complexity and empowering people to pay more care to what truly matters to them.
While we love talking about simplicity when it comes to Meraki’s products, we also do our best to apply this ethos internally. We’re always looking for ways to streamline internal processes and reduce confusion, so that our employees can focus more on doing their best work and less on navigating unintuitive processes and unnecessary bureaucracy.
Recently, the Meraki IT and Facilities teams joined forces to unite as one department: Digital Workplace. The goal of Digital Workplace is to build a more progressive, results-oriented approach to workplace management. To learn more about the impetus for this new organization, I sat down with Chris Hilsenbeck and Levi Toney, Senior Director and Director of Meraki Digital Workplace, respectively. Here are some of their thoughts.
Why did you decide to merge IT and Facilities into a single Digital Workplace organization?
Levi: Most people don’t realize this, but IT and Facilities actually have a lot in common. These departments overlap in their purview and function in similar ways — they’re both service organizations, they both have a help desk, and they both have the same constituents. We’ve realized that bringing IT and Facilities together made sense because there’s lots of overlap on projects large and small, whether it’s developing a new office or troubleshooting a wonky telepresence system.
Above all, we wanted to ensure a seamless experience not just for our own staff, but also for our customers: Meraki employees. Rather than making them figure out who to go to whenever they have an issue, we’ve centralized that line of communication so all operational requests go to a single place and are handled by the same group of people.
Can you give an example of how the newly created Digital Workplace team was able to simplify a routine process?
Levi: We frequently have projects that require involvement from both Facilities and IT, whether it’s setting up a new hire’s workspace or managing a town hall. Previously, it wasn’t clear who should ask whom for help, and as a result, you often saw duplicated efforts. Occasionally, things would fall through the cracks because it wasn’t clear who was owning what. It was clear that a more coordinated effort was necessary.
Now that Facilities and IT have come together and members of both teams have started to get trained on shared responsibilities, smaller projects can be owned by one person instead of two. For example, a single person can coordinate the vendor logistics for a town hall as well as ensure that the town hall has adequate AV support.
Something we’re working to streamline is the way Merakians communicate internally. Currently, employees use different email and chat platforms; it’s a fragmented experience, so people don’t immediately know the best way to contact employees in other departments. Now that we’re one team, it’s much easier to manage a transition to a common set of platforms.
What are some larger trends in workplace management that Digital Workplace is keeping a close eye on?
Chris: There’s a lot of really interesting activity going on in the industry. After their employees, the most important assets for many companies are their physical spaces. It’s important to consider how these facilities have changed over time.
Systems like lighting, heating, and security all use digital technology, but until now they’ve all operated within separate spheres and been managed in different ways. What we’re seeing now is greater interconnectedness between these systems — for instance, lights can now be connected to switch ports and employees are beginning to carry their access credentials on their smartphones. As a result, there’s more analytics available around how people interact with building systems. This data lets us optimize space allocation and utilization based on actual activity rather than assumptions of how people work.
Security, both physical and logical, is a core competency for us, and we’re looking for ways to improve our security stance over time. You never really want to say you’re good at security; it’s a practice we build into all of our planning.
Where do Facilities and IT differ?
Chris: Though we’ve unified into a single Digital Workplace team and work on a lot of initiatives together, we still realize there are differences in the way Facilities and IT tackle their workloads. Keeping these differences in mind is really important to the way we route work and choose service owners.
In general, Facilities has a long-term horizon: often ten years or more. The projects Facilities invests time and money into usually require more long-range planning and forward thinking, so that side of the house tends to be slow and methodical in its approach. When you’re looking at big capital improvement projects — whether it’s adding lab space, installing new cooling systems, or opening up additional floorspace — they generally have a planning cycle of a year or more.
On the other side, IT is necessarily much more responsive and agile. Networks and resources need to be able to be brought up and down quickly when you’re in growth mode, and IT has to be able to respond to the needs of the business. As a result, it can be tough for IT to act strategically, despite the necessity of doing so.
Creating the Digital Workplace team was important to ensure that both Facilities and IT could cooperate on short- and long-term projects. We’re also using a lot more data to predict trends in our business as well as to keep ourselves accountable about how we’re serving Meraki employees.
The Meraki Digital Workplace team has a lot of exciting projects planned for 2018 and beyond. Interested in seeing the impact of these projects yourself? Check out jobs at Meraki!
