What is a Modern Workplace?

[00:00:00] Mitch Herrema: Hello, and welcome back to Make Others Successful a podcast about modernizing your workplace and improving your organization's communication, collaboration, and business process automation. Today we're tackling the question, what really is a modern workplace? Being a modern workplace can mean a lot of things, but there's one thing that's certain, it's always a moving target. So, we'll be talking through the three areas that we focus on, and those are communication, collaboration, and business applications and we're going to give a glimpse into each one of those to see what they really look like in a modern workplace, as well as a little history on where they've come from while we do talk about some specific technologies, know that these can be applied agnostically independent of a specific technology. It's more about culture and mindset then anything. So, let's get into it. Please enjoy the conversation with Matt Dressel, Mike Bodell and myself, recording a podcast in an open office is an interesting task. Sorry, we're too little to have a dedicated studio space, but like we're joined here with a couple of people working in the background while we chat

[00:01:07] Mike Bodell: Or as Matt would refer to us rinky-dink.

[00:01:10] Matt Dressel: Yeah, you like that and we are rinky-dink, that's what we are.

[00:01:14] Mike Bodell: I think there's a word bounty on that if you say rinky dink during the podcast.

[00:01:19] Matt Dressel: Well I mean its recording right now.

[00:01:21] Mike Bodell: So I'm going to jot that down. I think we should do word bounties for our podcasts.

[00:01:27] Matt Dressel: And at the end say who got the most this is silly.

[00:01:32] Mike Bodell: Figure a way to have not know what, not everybody know what the word is. They are what the boundaries are and then have a way.

[00:01:38] Mitch Herrema: So we have our listeners try to send us what words they think were random in the episode and what, maybe they can get a price or a prize or something.

[00:01:48] Matt Dressel: If they guess what the bounty word was.

[00:01:50] Mitch Herrema: We're going to gamify everything.

[00:01:53] Mike Bodell: I actually really, I like the idea of word bounty in a podcast.

[00:01:56] Matt Dressel: I think it's okay. I think you got to figure out the mechanics of it.

[00:02:00] Mitch Herrema: Okay. Let's get started. Let's do it introductions quick.If I haven't had a chance to meet you yet, my name's Mitch Herrema. I help with a lot of the operations here at bulb and do have a background in development.So I helped with software development and some of the power platform development that goes on at bulb.

[00:02:21] Mike Bodell: My name is Mike Bodell and I am the business apps lead hereat bulb and I also have kind of a software background. I've been doing this kind of thing for 20 years, plus in a consulting way but I'm responsible for heading up the charge when it comes to things like Power platform, no code, low code things like that and the Microsoft 365 space.

[00:02:41] Matt Dressel: I'm Matt Dressel and I also am leading a group here at bulbDigital, specifically the communication collaboration group, focused on things like intranets and teams everything to do with, like I said, communication, collaboration.

[00:02:55] Mitch Herrema: Cool. So to set the stage a little. We have a topic today, which is what does modern workplace mean? So everywhere we say, we're a modern workplace company and it's maybe not obvious as to what that means all the time and it can have different meanings. So we wanted to define it according to our context and talk through some of the different areas that we focus on for modern workplace.

[00:03:25] Mike Bodell: When we say we're a modern workplace company, that means we help other organizations learn how to be modern workplaces. In addition to that, it also means we're a modern workplace and we strive to be a modern workplace. We have not achieved the ends and I don't think there is a panacea or ideal state to be in. We're talking about bulbtopia, there is no such thing as bulbtopia, really and so I think our journey is one where we continue to strive. To improve and use the tools that we have at our disposal to make employee experience, customer experience better all the way around

[00:04:00] Matt Dressel: Modern workplace is not something that stops. There were modern workplaces that you could have worked at 10, 15 years ago. That now look very different and the concept of a modern workplace is making constant improvements and looking at what you're doing and comparing that to what technologies and processes are available and making sure you're applying them on a regular basis, somebody who goes through a modern workplace project 20years ago, if they haven't done any work since. They're way behind the times now. Right? 20 years ago. Yeah. They, when they got done, they probably were a pretty modern workplace, but today by today's standards, they would be, ancient in a lot of ways.

[00:04:35] Mitch Herrema: If you're someone that is listening and you think, man, there's a better way to do X at my organization. There's a better way.Communicate about a certain topic or work on documents together to automate business processes. This is maybe a package together picture for you so that you might be able to take it, share it, use it so that you can know the breadth.Of what a modern workplace looks like in our eyes.

[00:05:04] Mike Bodell: That makes sense. So do we want to talk about some kind of specific examples in the different areas and what a modern or what a workplace would have looked like then versus what a modern workplace looks like now?

[00:05:14] Mitch Herrema: So I brought these old timers here that can help share what the workplace used to look like. My first workplace had slack my professional workplace, right? Like after college had slack I haven't been in a pre slack world in the professional workplace. So I brought Matt and Mike along to, to talk a little bit about those. So we're going to go through what these areas used to look like in an organization to what today looks like to what the future may be looks like. So area number one that we're going to talk about today is communication. Mike, can you talk a little bit about like defining what communication is and then we're going to. What it used to be and what it is today.

[00:05:56] Mike Bodell: So communication is any number of things and you can think about it in terms of emails back and forth between individuals, right within an organization or groups of individuals or you might think of something like corporate communication. How does something come from the top down, and how does that get disseminated how does corporate receive feedback from the bottom up, that's another form of communication, Matt are there any other ones can think of?

[00:06:20] Matt Dressel: Lot of people think about it also from the point of view, like a marketing group when we talk about it, generally speaking, we're not necessarily talking about modernizing your marketing or your external communication, right? We're really talking about communication inside of your organization and when you talked about the corporate communication one of the ways that I like to talk about it is anytime you're thinking about a very small group of people trying to distribute information to a larger group of people, that's the thing that we're talking about, they're not necessarily directly communicating back. That would be what we would call collaboration we're going to talk about it later, but anytime where it's like a, generally speaking, a one-way communication path that's what we're talking about.

[00:07:00] Mike Bodell: So methods that corporations might use to keep their people organized, updated and energized about the mission.

[00:07:07] Mitch Herrema: What did it used to look like? Say, I don't know, 10, 15years ago?

[00:07:13] Mike Bodell:I think a lot of it was large meetings, physical everybody come to the, to the cafeteria or to the lunch room or talk about what's happening, certainly that's one way and I think that's still a valid form of communication in the modern world where we're all together. I think it's been a little bit different for the last year, given the pandemic situation but that would be one way. I think email is probably another way and then there's obviously like the paper memo, right?

[00:07:40] Mitch Herrema: Didn't someone to have to walk around an office and drop stuff off everywhere.

[00:07:44] Mike Bodell: Yeah, the corporate mailman.

[00:07:47] Matt Dressel: I've never worked at a place while that's not true. The first place I worked there, it was, they had a whole campus of buildings and that yeah. They had corporate mail and they send stuff back and forth.Generally It wasn't for distributing, like corporate communication as much as it was more for delivering individual messages between people but it was very common to have like a newsletter that went out once a month or once a quarter and it was, in a lot of ways it was physical and if it wasn't physical, it was some PDF or other method of disseminating that information but it was very manual, very formal content.

[00:08:25] Mitch Herrema: So what came next? When did it start to shift?

[00:08:28] Matt Dressel: So communication about this has been shifting for a longtime at various organizations for various reasons a lot of it had to do with the size of the organization, what they're trying to communicate and how frequent, obviously if you're going to print a physical piece of media and send it to a lot of people there's a lot of effort involved in that and so there was always a desire to make that go quicker be easier, be able to do more and so I think a lot of the change happened with email, right? A lot of the anything that would happen by paper started to happen by email and so people would create distribution lists to say, Hey, I'm going to, send this message out to all the organization and sometimes that would be like the actual newsletter.Sometimes it would be little bits of information but then obviously people had problems with that because now I get 10 emails a week related to communication and it just gets lost in the noise there's not a lot of meaning. So a lot of places struggled right around the time that I started getting into the workforce, intranets as a concept we're becoming more and more prevalent people liked the idea of having if you're not familiar with what it is, an intranet isis a website, but it's target audience instead of being for the public is meant for your organization, people that work with you to disseminate information but a lot of places struggled with actually doing it I have the money to hire a team of web developers to develop an intranet and develop custom pages and all of that and that kind of progressed into, there's a lot, there's been a lot of tools to try to make that easier and fast forward all the way till today.There's now a large number of options for solutions that allow you to easily create pages. You don't need somebody who knows a bunch of HTML. You don't need somebody who has a bunch of of technical expertise to design pages and implement content and today, a part of a modern workplace would be some form of an intranet, whether or not that be a full, multiple sections multiple areas of content or whether or not that's just pretty simple, basic information about,HR benefits, policies, procedures, that type of thing and news, that's definitely one component of it and then also some sort of digital notification.So whether or not that be using notifications and other systems like teams like slack, like email to notify people when things are going on, whether or not, or if that's a push notification to an a built-in app on a mobile device, with 20years ago, not everybody had a mobile device today almost everyone, whether or not it be a corporate provided device or a personal device, everybody's got mobile device. That's been a huge change in the last 20, 30 years. Mike, anything else that I missed?

[00:11:18] Mike Bodell: To your point about mobile device like I would say one of the tenants of modern communication is all of this stuff that we're talking about is available on any device, accessible on any device, anywhere, anytime and much of it is also what you might consider it to be persistent it lives longer than just the moment that it was communicated and can be found later which is valuable for new people in the organization. Or, oh, gee whiz. I need to go find that news article or that newsletter that was published do I got togo dig through my email and my inbox and I don't even know if it's been archived or deleted or can I trust my corporate intranet to have an archive of that and be easily searchable?

[00:12:00] Matt Dressel: Yeah. That's a great point. Yeah. The worst part of that whole thing is if you are an organization that's growing, you hire somebody new and they want to go, somebody references the news article that was in, three months ago, they don't even, can't find it in their email it doesn't exist.They have no way to get access to it because it's, there's not a place where I can go find it. I have to go talk to somebody else and see if they can send mea copy of that thing that they got an email.

[00:12:26] Mike Bodell: I guess the one other thing that I would raise is the use of video streaming tools for doing corporate communication?

[00:12:33] Matt Dressel: Rather than email, yeah. Send an email with a video link to it.

[00:12:36] Mike Bodell: And something like that is effective in the scenario where you're not all in the workplace or in the scenario where you have a lot of different offices in different regions and you need to gather everyone to hear the message at the same time. Somebody comes back from vacation and needs to hear that message. They can play back that video.

[00:12:51] Matt Dressel: A lot of places are finding it a great way for executives to communicate more regularly, right? To wait for a quarterly meeting to hear from, an executive maybe too long, maybe once a month, they can send out, a three minute video clip to everyone and, talk about how things are going and that makes it really easy to do that rather than trying to find a scheduled time where everyone can meet together, and it can be a little less formal. It doesn't replace those formal things, but it definitely organizations are doing that on a regular basis.

[00:13:19] Mitch Herrema: I think we should talk more in a future episode about may bean intranet and how all that stuff lives on there and some strategies. Is there anything else? Could you maybe just sum up if someone is embracing modern workplace communication at an organization, what does that look like today?

[00:13:37] Matt Dressel: So it really boils down to a thoughtful and stream lined process for disseminating information and from a tool perspective intranet is definitely something you should be considering figuring out how to use email communication in conjunction with notifications via slack or via teams or via a push notification to help notify people. So figuring out what works for you, some organizations and the reason I'm saying it this way and not like saying, this is what you should do is if it isn't super prescriptive, if you're an organization that has a lot of people that don't have computers, right? My answer about the technology is going to be a little different than somebody whois full of users who sit at their computer all day long and aren't really mobile too often. So it really does depend, but it's really going to be an intranet, some sort of technology to store this information. house this information for everyone A way to use that, to communicate notify people. LikeI said, slack teams a push notifications through an app or something like that and then also really a group of people who are focused on that communication.So some organizations will have a marketing department or a communications department, but when they think about it, they think about it exclusively external. You should have someone who is focused on. Making sure that your internal communication is delivering on the corporate experience that you want for your employees.

[00:14:58] Mitch Herrema: Maybe when you get to a certain threshold of size, like dedicating a person to that,

[00:15:02] Matt Dressel: if it's not dedicated, you should just have somebody who's thinking about it, right? Like you should have somebody that took a day and said this is the style that we use for this type of communication and these are the types of things we can use. communicate.

[00:15:14] Mitch Herrema: So our next section is collaboration and I know communication and collaboration intertwined quite a bit. So maybe we'll talk about some of the same solutions in reference some of the same things, but can we talk about what collaboration is and the context of what we're talking about when we say we want to help someone with their collaboration?

[00:15:34] Matt Dressel: Yeah. So I can take a high level a minute. I talked about a little bit on communication being going from a small group of people to a large group of people, in a one directional. So it's generally speaking from that small group to the larger group collaboration is any time that you're trying to have that two-way communication, either chatting back and forth, like actually talking back and forth about a topic all the way to, doing or organizing projects with task lists and due dates and calendar events or working on documents to create a proposal or anything really. That's the core of what collaboration is.

[00:16:09] Mitch Herrema: Okay. So tell me a little bit about the old world of collaboration and what it used to look like to collaborate with someone at work.

[00:16:17] Mike Bodell: I think it was almost exclusively prior to the tools that we have today scheduled physical, physically present meetings everyone together at some level which everyone loves whiteboards and all of the stuff that goes along with that at least in my experience

[00:16:34] Matt Dressel: And shortly after that, people would send documents back and forth. So the next thing would be email. So it was very common even 20years I'll email you the PowerPoint that I just worked on, you go make updates and email it back to me and then the third person emails, the another in-between and says, Hey, I made an update too and now you've got three versions of the same document, which one's right that's the classic collaboration nightmare which was very common. Like you just said, file shares like local file shares that was also a common thing. Of course, the problem, there is two people open the document the same time and you save over the top of somebody else but that's what people were doing for a very long time and even today, people are doing that a lot of people are still doing that that isa common thing. They're very comfortable with email attaching something, trying to keep track of it that way managing documents that way.

[00:17:20] Mike Bodell: Assigning a specific individual as the scribe, during a meeting.

[00:17:24] Matt Dressel: They also, when you think about it, now we have automatic transcriptions but it also is like for project stuff, it's you'd use a piece of software, right? So you'd use project or something like that, but even then it's still a document and you'd have to send it back and forth and manage it that way. Maybe you were advanced enough to do like project server or use something a little bit more modern, but generally speaking, all of those things were done. In that same kind of mode where it wasn't true real-time collaboration, what we call real-time collaboration. It was very serial collaborationI would make a change, try to send it to you, you would make a change and send it back to me that's generally how collaboration has gone for a long time and then more recently, if you want to talk about it now.

[00:18:04] Mitch Herrema: When did it start to shift?

[00:18:05] Matt Dressel: A lot of it shifted when you started to move of from physical file shares physical file shares have been a problem forever because the file infrastructure would just wasn't built for collaboration like that when you started to have SharePoint and Google drive yeah. So Google docs is that like the next level, the first level though was just. Having a tool that would put those files on a server somewhere and then manage synchronizing that back and forth and the conflicts. So in that world, you're really still dealing with stuff on your local machine, but now you have this tool that would synchronize the data out to a server and back to someone else's machine, and then would tell you, oh, you edit this document at the same time. Somebody else had it like figure out the conflict. So it was a little bit better than a fileshare but it still has a lot of the same challenges and then the next level was when you started to have Word online, you started to have Google docs. You started to have Google sheets. You like all of these collaboration tools that now allow you to edit in real time and even now so today, even in the desktop apps for all of the office, 365 apps, you have real-time collaboration and it's, there's been huge strides in that regardless of whether or not you're on the web, on the desktop anywhere you can now collaborate fluidly and that's only talking about documents that doesn't even talk about the real-time collaboration related to meetings. So now, like back in the day, there wasn't really an enterprise level communication platform, it started with Skype for business it's that, then it moved into, several iterations of that, quite frankly and then now you've got teams, you've got slack these things now allow you to have real-time communications all the time and be connected all the time about anything right? Chatting or white boarding or doing lots of different things. So both of those things have greatly transformed how we collaborate.

[00:20:00] Mitch Herrema: Like every time you're talking about tools, you say aMicrosoft product first it's like you're plugging Microsoft.

[00:20:06] Matt Dressel: The first thing I said was Google docs. I did. Cause I said maybe I said one drive and then Google docs.

[00:20:12] Mike Bodell: Everybody should know we focus on Microsoft products.

[00:20:15] Matt Dressel: I don't use Google Gmail for my personal email. I've never used a Google document entire life. Google sheets is terrible. You should never use it.

[00:20:24] Mitch Herrema: There's some bias going on here people

[00:20:26] Mike Bodell: We should probably cut that out so one other two way thing before we move on from collaboration, when we're talking about like Microsoft specifically, right? We can talk about tools for getting feedback from your employees, right? So Microsoft forms is a great tool for doing internal surveys. You can do external surveys with it too but that's just another way, right? To open up that dialogue. So that it's not just all corporate is communicating down to you like they can actually get some feedback on the stuff that they're.

[00:20:55] Matt Dressel: We didn't mention you've now got monday.com. You've also got a what's the other one, the other two, A sauna ,Trello, a planner in the Microsoft space. You've got Calendly for doing calendar stuff is basically this the whole concept is to take little pieces of that collaboration that used to be really manual, put it in the cloud, allow people to work in a very collaborative way and you can go on the list is almost never ending, right?There is so many apps that have from a collaboration perspective, move to the cloud and allowed you to have that same real time collaboration experience.

[00:21:30] Mitch Herrema: Yeah. I want to highlight, you talked about Calendly just for a second. If you don't know what it is, it's a tool where you can wire up your calendar. To an online service and they can provide an interface for someone to go in and book time with you. It removes so much of that back and forth scheduling and makes it so easy to just grab time with someone.

[00:21:52] Mike Bodell: I feel like I should plug the Microsoft tool Bookings.

[00:21:55] Matt Dressel: Bookings, Isn't exactly the same thing. I think the same thing and the name of it is it's escaping me. It's Find time, and just to be really a hundred percent clear their target market, I need to schedule a meeting with somebody, not in my organization. Obviously, if you're only scheduling stuff with your own organization, you can use outlook and it'll tell you what their schedules are the problem is I don't have the permission to go look at somebody else's schedule and this is basically allowing you to say, I don't care. These are the people who I want to be able to look at, where I have, where they can find time and you can block stuff out and whatever and it basically solves that problem, but it's an example of modern workplace.

[00:22:28] Mitch Herrema: So I think that does it pretty well for collaboration.Lastly, we have business apps. Mike, do you want to give us a little bit of an overview of that area and what we mean by business apps.

[00:22:39] Mike Bodell: Sure business apps is anything that you can think of that you might use to run your business, to store data for your business, to enact processes for your business, the things that make your business run. So you might think of an ERP system or point of sale system or a customer relationship management system all of those systems are tools that your employees or you use. To make things happen for your business and ultimately deliver some thing for your customer and those things, they come in a variety of shapes and sizes.There are the big package softwares that you can buy off the shelf and hire a team of that vendor to come and implement that for you and customize it. There are homegrown applications that you might build from scratch using, dot net code or C+ back in the day and. We also need to remember that some of those business apps are built by individuals within the organizations out of their own initiative and innovative temperaments and they might use something like anExcel spreadsheet that can become critical to a business by the time they get done putting a bunch of functionality and data into it, or even like an access database application that's something that we often see that becomes integral to a business and how they function.

[00:23:50] Mitch Herrema: I was thinking about saying something, but I don't think I want to say I think that gives us a good picture. Can you walk us through what maybe business apps used to look like?

[00:23:59] Mike Bodell: Yeah a lot of what I just talked about is what it used to look like obviously those things are still in existence, but ultimately those things were either large pieces of software that required a number of individuals, a large team to implement either to write the code, test it, deploy it or to implement from a package solution. If you think about some of the big solutions that are out there like Salesforce or some of the old ERP that you might get from IBM or Oracle or things like that, you were not only making a large capital acquisition for the software, but you were then going to embark on a project that involved your team, as well as the vendors team to actually implement that in your organization, based on your needs and processes and that's kinda what it used to look like and then when you think about the, like the access database side and the Excel spreadsheet side those are like for small businesses, those become like integral pieces and they need them. To survive at some point in time but they become so dependent on them and really the challenge there that we have seen historically is that those specific technologies aren't really geared for the enterprise. So if you think about something like an access database application usually they're delivered on a file share and you have all kinds of issues with multiple people accessing that data or that application at the same time and ultimately conflicts and things like that and you get the same thing with an Excel spreadsheet. If two people are trying to deal with an Excel spreadsheet as their data, that they're dealing with at the same time from a file share, they're going to get all kinds of conflicts and things like that and so those types of things, pose challenges and organizations, back in the day and even still today implement all kinds of rules and things that they do to get around those challenges but truly. The challenges and in today's world, there are a number of ways to overcome those challenges.

[00:25:47] Mitch Herrema: The buying process used to be, we're going to invest in this huge thing, or maybe it's a little bit cowboy, hard to invest something into someone's little pet project that maybe not set up the right way.

[00:26:01] Matt Dressel: Yeah and when you think about those, like cowboy little projects, right? It's really there's an immediate and very focused need that somebody has and somebody has a great idea on how to, meet that need or solve that problem and they do it and everybody's super happy until a year and a half later when the team has grown and they realize, oh, this thing breaks once a week and we got to deal with it.

[00:26:25] Mitch Herrema: So let's move forward in time a little. How did this changeover time and evolve into where it is today?

[00:26:34] Mike Bodell: So a lot of the change that we're seeing today is focused around. Making tools and making development suites, if you will, more accessible to what you'd call the citizen developer. So you'll see a lot of things out there related to no-code or low-code solutions and in the Microsoft365 space, right? We're talking about power platform, which includes power, automate power apps even dynamics to an extent and the intent there is you're providing enterprise level application platform capabilities and putting the power to create those things, to create functionality in that platform, in the hands of the people who are actually going to be using the application, the innovators in your organization. So rather than hiring a team of developers right who know how to write a bunch of code and follow all of those software development life cycle processes, you can actually have somebody in your organization basically a power user, right? Knows how to use Excel really well or maybe it's the person that built the access database that you've been relying on for the last two years. Those people can easily pick up the skills needed to build an enterprise level app using something like power apps.

[00:27:43] Mitch Herrema: Yeah. I think the no code portion of that description is helpful because for a while it was an investment in a software project that someone actually knew had to know how to write code, had to know the syntax and how to structure a project and how to develop it and all that is pretty complicated to the average person that just wants to get something from A to B.

[00:28:09] Mike Bodell: And one of the things I would point out and Matt, you can probably talk a little bit more about this when we say no code, low code and citizen developer that doesn't mean that you can't, or that you shouldn't put some sort of framework around it, or guidelines like guardrails for your team to be working within because there are gotchas, there are things they're going to get stuck on right ways to do things and wrong ways to do things that will ultimately down the road. If you're not thinking about it they'll catch you and then you'll have to come back and do that again. I don't, Matt, you probably have some experience with some of those types of scenarios and the proper way to manage that.

[00:28:45] Matt Dressel: It really comes down to having a transition, right? The point of low-code no-code is that you want to try to get the ability for people who know the business process. Get tools in their hands that allow them to start the process of creating something that would improve their process. So they can figure out whether or not it works or not, as it gets more and more complex you want to move that into someone who maybe has a little bit more development experience can apply some of those life cycle methodologies like you were talking to the low-code no-code solution, which to do all of that requires a process and a better understanding across your organization about where these fit in your organization because it's not just all about shadow it and, letting people do whatever they want. It's about using it as a way to accelerate your overall goals, right? If you can spend a week on something and figuring out that is a really good idea. Okay. Now how do we get that to go bigger and make it something that is useful?

[00:29:43] Mike Bodell: You mentioned about like people just doing whatever they want to do. One of the other things like we've talked about more formal apps in this conversation so far, but the reality with no code and low code. There's an opportunity for personal automation now that hasn't been there before and it's technically, if you're in that Microsoft 365 environment, for example, it's just available to you and you can make your day better, right? As somebody who's functionally doing something in the business, you can make your day better by using that personal automation but again, that's the thing that you want to be able to manage as an organization and if you're small, it's not going to be so bad, but if you're a larger organization and you've got, hundreds or thousands of people building personal automation, things you want to have a handle on what's out there and what you're letting them do and connect to and where they're sending data and things like that. So it's, that's something that you have to think about as far as your business apps are concerned. I think it's very powerful. To be able to put that in the hands of your people, but at the same time, you have to be able to manage it.

[00:30:41] Mitch Herrema: We actually talked about that a bit in our previous episode, which is ownership of resources in the power platform. So one of these processes that helps organize maybe someone being a cowboy, but building in an an automation in a place that other people can access it and what recommendations we have around that. If you could summarize what is a business that is embracing business apps today, look like if you could sum it up in a few sentences.

[00:31:10] Mike Bodell: I honestly I look at that and I say, that's a business that is leveraging these tools, actually allowing their employees to use the tools, letting them innovate because that's ultimately where new ideas are going to come from new creative ideas, new ways of doing things that ultimately will make things better not only for. Those employees, but ultimately better for your customers, right? Because ultimately that's what they want to do. They want to serve that aim. So allowing that to happen, and then also looking at all of your business applications that you have and starting the journey of analysis to determine whether or not some of those maybe could be moved to something like the power platform, a no-code low-code solution, ultimately one of the aims. There is there's probably a couple of aims one would be better integration within your overall office environment, but then also reducing costs overall. So instead of managing a behemoth custom app that you built 10years ago in the same way that you've always done it, can this be re imagined in a no-code low-code way that ultimately reduces costs?

[00:32:12] Mitch Herrema: Integrations have come a long way instead of investing in a massive thing that does everything. If you have tools that individually do things well, maybe you can just connect them together and raise them both and not have to migrate from one to the other. I think we can just close out all right. So those are our three areas of modern workplace that we like to talk about. Quick recap, they are communication, collaboration and business apps.That is a little bit of a summary of each of the areas in modern workplace that we focus on here at bulb and we plan to talk about more of these in depth in the future and different topics within each of these. So we look forward to those and thanks for the chat today you guys.

[00:33:01] Mike Bodell: Yeah, not a problem. Thanks Mitch, for being our guide.

[00:33:08] Mitch Herrema: Thanks for joining us today. If you haven't already, subscribe to our show on your favorite podcasting app. So you'll always be up to date on the most recent episodes. This podcast is hosted by the team members of bulb Digital, special thanks to Eric Veeneman for our music tracks. If you have any questions for us, head to makeotherssuccessful.com and you can get in touch with us there. You'll also find a lot of insightful blogs and videos to help you modernize your workplace. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time.