Back in November, Innomate/UXT’s director of Growth, Neil Collins, had the opportunity to interview Max Davies from Crestron, where Max was kind enough to share his extensive experience in the AV industry. Max and Neil had an insightful discussion about the rapid transformation we’ve witnessed in the workplace, especially in recent years.
During their conversation, Max discussed the swift evolution of AV and workplace technology, and its profound ongoing impact on firms like Microsoft and Zoom, highlighting how these developments are transforming business environments of every scale.
The Workplace Transformation
Neil: The topic on everyone’s mind is just the general workplace transformation discussion, there is just so much going on right now. What’s the world looking like from your perspective?
Max: It’s looking very exciting. The great thing is that as we kind of sit in front of each other and, you know, sort of end 2022, 23, we’ve seen at least 10 years worth of change in about 4-5 years. It’s almost a distant memory now, but before COVID happened, everyone was talking about how the world was going to change and how we were going to modify our workplace practices and all those types of things, and you know, the embryonic sort of ideas were there, we had the early starts of teams and zoom, and we had activity-based working, we had all those things were starting to be real thing but I don’t think anybody really actually had the science to back up if any of it actually worked or was always needed rather than wanted, I think. But then, of course, Covid hit and all the stuff that we know now, but then we started to adapt very, very quickly, so we’ve seen things like, you know, going home, we’ve seen changes mode of operation in terms of the way that we work, we’ve seen technology having to change really really quickly, and that’s the exciting bit because, at no other time in recent history, we’ve seen technology change so quickly. I think I would even go as far as to say that it would take a World War to make technology advance as quickly as COVID did, and we owe a lot to those types of events to push us forward as a civilisation.
Neil: Yeah, it is a necessity mother of invention situation.
Max: It is, that’s exactly right! We’re not quite sure what the future holds, but what is exciting is that there is an acceptance now that nobody is an expert and that everybody is learning as they go, and I think that’s a very heartwarming place to be.
Neil Collins (left) and Max Davies (right) are discussing the workplace transformation.
The Pivot
Neil: How is this affecting the strategy and the pivot conversation? Do we need to move to suit the needs of our end users or our customers or do we need to get ahead of them because we know what’s coming next?
Max: That’s a really good question! I think there is always going to be a place for a manufacturer or for an organisation to drive technology with innovation. We wouldn’t be sitting here if certain inventions hadn’t manifested and we learned how to adopt them. There is often a challenge, and this is not just the AV and collaboration world, but there’s a challenge around – are we using the technology for the sake of technology’s sake, and do we need to? It’s those sorts of things that we sort of genuinely will ask our clients. We are guilty of this too; we’ve got a lot of really cool toys that we’re making for you, and we’re solving technology problems every day for you, but we do often have to sometimes place the embryonic idea in somebody’s environment to say we think this is a tool that can solve a problem for you and here’s why. Can you investigate that? I think there is a level of responsibility that the technology manufacturers, inventors and even suppliers and owners need to ask themselves – are we doing this for the right reasons? Are we genuinely solving a problem? I mean, if we look at, for example, organisations that we deal with at the moment, I mean we see that the adoption of technology, the move to hybrid work, all these types of things, they’ve been done for lots of reasons but is that because you want to change a company culture or is it because you want to retain staff, or because you want to provide a better quality of life for your employees or is it just because you’re moving buildings and somebody gave you some money. Why are you doing all of that? It changes globally as well; I mean, in Australia and New Zealand, for example, we have a very highly paid and trained workforce, but not enough of them. You know, if you go to different regions and people are treated very differently because “hey if you don’t want to do it, somebody else will”. I think it’s a geographic discussion we have to have around how organisations are approaching this as well; we’re lucky in this region that we’re often the kind of petri dish of experimenting, and we can get away with a lot more; we spend more on technology and more on construction. It’s a cool place to be!
Return to Work
Neil: We’ve got this world now, we’ve set up and enabled, partially because we were forced to do so through COVID, we’vee got hybrid work and we’ve made it very easy for everybody to be anywhere where they want to be now. What sort of impact are you seeing on workforces that are trying to return to work and specifically in the AV world?
Max: Yeah, the return to work, it’s an interesting place.
Neil: It’s still polarising people, right?
Max: It’s massively polarising, and I think that I’ve spoken about this. It’s my job to talk to people about this, but there are driving forces that oppose it. In reality, a lot of organisations take it, like Atlassian, for example, who famously turned around and said we don’t need you in the office anymore. That’s absolutely fine; you just go and do what you need to do, but they’re employing certain types of self-driven people who generally are kind of project-based, doing what they need to do anyway.
Neil: Highly trackable in terms of results, outcomes and expectations?
Max: Yes, I mean, I work in account management, so on the sales side of the world, and to be frank, keeping track of salespeople is fairly easy because you give them a number, and if they don’t hit it, then you tell them off. But then when you’ve got the knowledge workers, and you’ve got the ones that need to go to the office or financial teams or HR departments, they’re the ones that had to adapt to that. The studies tell us that the ones who have to adapt the most are actually the managers. The ones who are actually responsible for these people, because generally speaking, people do adapt, but they adapt in their own ways, but how do you measure that and how do you catch if it’s good or bad as to whether or not they’re sort of falling off that line? That’s the biggest challenge there as well.
Neil: Yeah, I agree. I feel like that’s developing some new skill sets as well. From my personal experience, some of that management layer that never had to adapt, they’ve been embedded with over 10 – 20 years or so to this, almost like what an engineer would be used to, working in an agile environment, as in everything’s transparent and everything is trackable. Now you’ve got marketing teams, creative teams and art design teams trying to work that way as well, and I’ve seen a real challenge in that situation, but I wonder if it’s for the better or if it will be short-lived.
Max: I don’t think we can actually say if it’s for the better or for the worse, it’s happening anyway. The best thing we can do in any industry, and certainly when we sit in this AV collaboration type service industry that we are, we need to adapt very quickly to make sure that we’re providing the services to the clients who are adapting there and the best thing we can really do is to keep track of what people are up to and try and see what they’re doing.
Are people still making mistakes?
Neil: There are a lot more businesses now with clearer ideas as to what they should be doing, what they can do and what options are available to them. Are people still making mistakes? Are some people getting this terribly wrong because they are stuck in a certain mindset?
Max: Yeah, there are some, but I think one of the elements we have to always respect here is that what we do on a day-to-day basis is not what these guys do, and one of the values of using trained professionals like consulting entities and people that do this every single day, it is their bread and butter, and that’s what they do. One of the hardest conversations to have with a client who started down this journey is to let them know they are right but to ask them to get some references and understand the process because there is a process to follow even if you want to be innovative and do something that nobody else has ever done, you still absolutely need to follow some degree of path. I do believe there is still resistance to seeking professional advice, and that’s a real shame because I remember having a tender interview years ago with a certain client who turned around and said, “Thanks anyway, we don’t want to do what they do, we want to be innovative”, and my response was, we were innovative every time, but the point is that there was a process to follow. I think the other mistake that we see, never before we’ve seen, is the proliferation and the kind of overt communication between brands selling into organisations, so it’s everywhere from LinkedIn to direct marketing to whatever it might be. People are so much more aware of what they can do, but again, should they? And we often have conversations with clients and say, “That’s a great idea, but is it tried and tested?” – no. So I think those are still mistakes, but one of the biggest challenges is moving too quickly, and we are still working in environments where timing is generally dictated by construction projects. I believe that technology standardisation and implementation should not follow the trend of construction, and if you can image a graph that shows activity over time, it should be a nice curve and a steady sort of rise – what we actually see are bumps, and those are construction projects, but you should be able to just sort of plot that course nicely and calmly but we don’t so we got 5 weeks to assemble an AV standard, it’s going to be installed in a year and go. It shouldn’t be like that, and I’m not alone in thinking that. I think you won’t get a good result if you rush this.
Does anything still surprise you?
Neil: Does anything still surprise you about this industry?
Max: I’m constantly surprised by how far we’ve come; I mean, we are sitting in a podcast studio in front of technology that didn’t exist 3-4 years ago. I’m surprised by how things just work. Think about where we were; we used to have to do every project bespoke. Every room was designed from individual bricks of stuff put together with different cabling and different programming. Now, we actually have a baseline; we know what we are after. A client can generally walk in and know what they want to do. From a recent technology perspective, I was just telling you earlier that we released our connect adapter recently, and I can actually plug in a Crestron connect adapter on-air media, and it literally works, no drivers, nothing, and for me, that was a moment because we’ve been talking about this for years you know imagine a scenario you can wirelessly connect something in a meeting room and don’t have to worry about what it’s connected to.
Neil: Wow, that’s the unreachable world that we all dreamt about.
Max: Yes exactly, and I think we are genuinely cashing in on those promises, we are getting to a point where the technology has caught up with the ambitions.
Neil: I couldn’t agree more; I think that’s phenomenal because we’ve been pushed into it. Again, we keep going back to the pandemic, but out of it has come some phenomenal innovation and innovating for the sake of innovating; it seems to be going away now.
Max: Yeah, I heard a great quote from a book that I’m currently reading, and it actually talks about innovation being a product of not only capability but time. It gives a really good example of a self-driving car. The first idea of a self-driving car, I think, was kind of broached in the 50s, and the closest thing they had was taping a brick to the accelerator. It doesn’t mean the idea was bad; it just means that you had to consider the time aspect of it as well because now we’re genuinely at a point where the self-driving thing is happening, and I think that’s a thing we all have to consider. Innovation sometimes has to have a healthy dose of reality associated with it as well and going on from that is that bleeding edge has to come with some understanding that you are bleeding edge. Innovation is a product of capability and time, and we all have to see how that all pans out, but we’re seeing some real things starting to appear now we could have only dreamed of 20 years ago – like AI. I mean, all of a sudden, it lands on our lap, and we say, okay, we got AI. What does that mean to us? And now you’ve got Microsoft running around and talking to businesses, saying we created this product; look what it can do, but hey, what do you want it to be doing? That’s a fantastic place to be in. We have the ability to say, “We’ve got this thing, and we don’t really understand what it’s capable of doing, but here’s your opportunity to import into a product that’s going to literally change the way the world works, and that’s fascinating, it’s huge.
Neil: It’s a big part of our philosophy as well; we live by the reference “long live the user”, and we try not to just use it as a marketing device; we say to ourselves daily, what would the user do here, and what does the user want? Then we ask them – is this the right experience for the end user, or have they just been forced into this environment or forced into this experience by a different business owner or business developer?
Max: Exactly! I’m from a Consulting background, and I do still love the pure consulting elements of user journey mapping and persona mapping and those types of things and taking the time and the trouble to build a persona like this person goes to work every day and they need to do this type of job and they have these expectations and this is their knowledge base and this is what they need to achieve, how do we map them into our environment? I get the feeling a lot of that stuff isn’t done as much anymore because it tends to be one size fits all, and I think, unfortunately, we do that. The downside of standardisation is that I think sometimes we can be guilty of saying, “Oh, we’ll just do that because it works”, whereas we should be asking ourselves, “Is this suitable for us?”
A big thank you to Max for coming in and providing such valuable insights into the world of workplace transformation. Stay tuned for more engaging conversations on the future of work and technology. Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Spotify or YouTube, and turn on notifications to stay updated when we release new episodes.
You can watch the full episode right now here.
