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10 minute read
Summary
In this episode, the Collab Collective’s Craig Durr visits Robin’s Boston headquarters to reconnect with Brendan O’Neil, Director of Strategic Partnerships and Alliances. This conversation explores Robin’s shift from desk reservations to a full workplace operations platform and discusses features like visitor check-in, mobile tools, and integrations that simplify hybrid work.
Their discussion covers:
- From Desk Reservations to Workplace Operations: How Robin’s focus expanded to support planning, managing, and using office spaces
- Visitor and Employee Experience: Mobile tools, wayfinding, and contextual workplace communications
- Hardware Partnerships and Integrations: Working with Logitech, Crestron, Neat, and Embrava for best-in-class signage and automation
- Admin Dashboard and Analytics: A one-stop hub for managing space, occupancy, and workflows
- The Rise of Workplace Coordinators: Bridging IT, facilities, and HR to deliver a seamless hybrid experience
Transcript
Craig Durr: Hey, everybody. It’s Craig Durr with the Collab Collective, and where do I find myself? Nowhere other than Boston, Massachusetts. This is home of Boston cream pie, of the Boston Red Sox, of history, of the Freedom Trail, and a lot of great things. But I am not here to talk about that. I actually am here to visit with an old friend and to check in with a company that I did a project with just a few years ago over here at the Intercontinental Hotel, and that's Robin Software.
Now, if you don't know Robin Software, they started at a core as a workplace reservation software, but now they're evolving, and have been evolving to something they want to call workplace operations. Think about not only the information of people checking in and checking out, but keeping things coordinated through workflows that are automated as well as very personalized end user experiences.
And to walk me through it, I'm going to check in with a good friend, Brendan O'Neil, who is the Director of Strategic Partnerships and Alliances. Brendan is just getting back from paternity leave, and I appreciate him taking the time to walk me through this. So join me as I visit with Brendan O'Neil and Robin Software here in Boston, Massachusetts.
Craig Durr: Okay, so staying true to my visit in Boston—I went and got my iced Dunkin Donuts coffee. I rode the T down here. I'm sitting in front of Faneuil Hall, which is a very historic location, but to get into the Robin office, I've got to check in because I'm a visitor. For convenience, Robin has their end user app or websites to allow for visitors to check in. So let's go through that process now to see what that looks like, shall we?
Okay, I've got this email from Brendan. I'm gonna go ahead and click this start to check in. It's gonna take me to the guest powered spot. There's Brendan. I got the address, and today we're gonna meet at one o'clock, and he called me for a VIP visit. Here's some instructions they have for me when I arrive—where to park, how to get there, getting into our space, and so on and so forth. There’s even information about the restaurant, so everything I need is right here. Let me go ahead and do the check in process. Are you ready? That's it. Brendan is going to be notified that I'll be there soon, and he will meet me here shortly. All right, let's head on over to the lobby and find Brendan now.
Brendan O'Neil: Hey, Craig
Craig Durr: Brendan, good to see you.
Brendan O'Neil: Good to see you. Welcome.
Craig Durr: How are you doing?
Brendan O'Neil: I'm doing well.
Craig Durr: This is the new office, right?
Brendan O'Neil: It is. Brand new this year.
Craig Durr: I love it because last time I visited you was on the other side of town, but this is beautiful. And you are just back from paternity.
Brendan O'Neil: I am, yeah.
Craig Durr: Congratulations to you and the family. All right, so I love what we're seeing here because I had a chance to check in on the website, and I want to walk everyone through the visitor experience right now. Is there any more you can show me along those lines?
Brendan O'Neil: Yeah, actually, we have a whole tech wall set up to do just that.
Craig Durr: Just for me? No, you already have that. Let's go.
Brendan O'Neil: It is great because we get to showcase the different phases and elements of the platform. Starting here, this is the Guest Experience. When you're getting checked in, either downstairs in the front lobby or in the office lobby, some of those displays for visitor management is part of the platform now, and we do all the standard stuff, the badge printing, and I really like the check-in experience because once you checked in, I got a notification.
Craig Durr: That's right, exactly. This is where I got my pass printed, but also you told me, the Employee Experience is working with HID and other badging things.
Brendan O'Neil: It is, yeah. So everyone who comes to the office has some form of a Robin experience, so you have the guest up top, and on the bottom, we integrate with all of the badging systems so that we can do a lot of those automated workflows. When an employee comes in for the day, we can check them into their desk. We can do some other automations across things like meeting room check-ins and stuff like that. So all the automation right at the bottom.
Craig Durr: So this is the entry, but you talked about checking at the desk. Now, the core of what you guys started with… it was 2015. It was really just around desk reservations and checking in, and that's still a core idea, but you built so much around that. But right now, this is a wonderful experience. The last time you and I touched base was about three years ago, and I think you guys were just starting to do this overview of the entire office, maybe as a feature set. Tell me about that.
Brendan O'Neil: So we really wanted to focus on building a lot of visibility and kind of a live view of your space to help out employees when it came to understanding people, places, and spaces. And then to help people manage that entire workplace operations experience. So this is a live view of our space right behind this wall. We are here, so you can quickly search and find a teammate if you want to see where someone was working from… to wayfind. A lot of teams look at this as wayfinding. They put these in elevator banks or in front of big neighborhoods inside of their office so that they can give employees an easy way to understand and orient. Let’s look up my teammate, Shane, and see where he's working from today. That's Shane, and it pops up on the map.
Craig Durr: That's perfect. First of all, this is interactive, which I love, which is fantastic. But this is only the front desk. They also have a mobile experience, maybe even like a Slack experience, you told me, right?
Brendan O'Neil: Yeah, so from an end user experience, we're on mobile, so you can do everything, like grab a desk or book a meeting room when you're commuting or from home earlier in the week. You'll get a sense of who else is coming into the office. So you can start to plan. Any office that has some form of flexibility it’s really hard to sync up with who's coming in when, so this adds a lot of that visibility. I can add favorites, so if I have people that I specifically collaborate with more. Honestly, half of my favorites are my lunch buddies. I just want to know that my friends are going to be in the office.
Craig Durr: So you can land and find them. This is cool. Now, your role is strategic partnerships and alliances. You've been really busy, although you've been out of the office six years, and I think this next wall shows you some of the things you've been working on, right?
Brendan O'Neil: Yeah, so when we initially started Robin, it was specializing in a lot of the meeting room management. A lot of that is anchored around things like meeting room displays or other hardware to help give visibility.
Craig Durr: I recognize some of these brands.
Brendan O'Neil: Yeah, there’s Crestron, Neat, Logitech, Apple iPads, and we work on Android tablets as well. And then we have worked with Embrava in the last few years for desk signage. So for signage, that goes at the individual workstation because we basically manage most parts of the office for anyone in office management or office operations, as well as meeting rooms, workstations, things like lockers and parking—those have recently gotten added to the platform. So everything that you would need for your end-to-end workday experience, we cover. But a lot of visibility with some great partners of ours to add best in class displays, visibility, interactions, so you can check in with QR codes and things like that. The LEDs on the side… the bars are actually my favorite, so if you actually look at these phone booths over here, it makes it really easy to see right down below what's free and what's busy, just from the LED bars on the side. These are all Logitech.
Craig Durr: I love this. I didn't want to frame you as being just a hardware guy. You're talking about some really great partnerships, and it comes back to the idea of that mobile app experience, which was something that was really strong. I mean—package deliveries, checking in to see who's in my office or not, communications in the context of space, like I just want to communicate to whoever's in building three on this floor.
Brendan O'Neil: Yeah, actually, that's a great call out for us. Again, if you have an if you're a workplace manager, and you want to send a notification to anybody who's coming into a certain building or floor or maybe calling out that there's an event happening in the space, we have a whole workplace communications part of the platform as well. So you can send the right messaging to the right people, and it doesn't have to all live inside of one big mailing list, right? So you want to have that contextually aware kind of platform, that's where our specialty is. We can again, understand how people plan, manage and use their office—that's the big kind of anchor point for us, and a lot of that has to do with the day to day, but only when it comes to who's actually in that space.
Craig Durr: Now we're looking at the end user experience. There's an admin experience as well, too, right? Let's go take a look at that real quick.
Brendan O'Neil: Sure. So, like, we had talked about—everything that you need to plan, manage, and use your office. This is on the administrative side of things; think workplace operations, a lot of people in IT…
Craig Durr: Time out. That's the second time you used that term, “Workplace Operations.” I'm gonna come back and visit with you about that when we sit down. I like that term. This is a beautiful dashboard, by the way. I'm seeing feedback because you guys have survey information, deliveries, visits. You probably had me show up here as well, too… room displays and even who's in the office right now, right?
Brendan O'Neil: Yeah, this is basically a one stop shop for people that are managing the space day-to-day to get visibility and quick access to the things that they need.
Craig Durr: Speaking of which, why don't we go land in that conference room and we could talk some more, okay?Let's go and do that. Millennium Falcon, right? That’s the theme.
Brendan O'Neil: This is our room. So we're going to grab it right now. We can see that it's open. I like to call this the line of sight problem. That's why we like to light things up nice and green so you know across the office that that room is free. So we're just gonna grab it right here for 30 minutes. It syncs up to our Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar, blocks things off for the timing so there's no double bookings or anything like that.
Craig Durr: All right, Chewbacca. I'll be Han Solo. Let's go.
It's been, what, three years since we sat down was it? Was it three years, or was it longer than that?
Brendan O'Neil: I think it was 22.
Craig Durr: It was. It was a really good research project that we did. So the workflow part, I think you've always leaned in and done really well, where one event triggers another event. It just makes for a seamless end user experience, whether it's a visitor or an employee, right? It's been kind of a hallmark, what you guys have been doing from the beginning.
Brendan O'Neil: Yeah, we always wanted to take that approach of thinking about the end user experience. That could be someone that works at the organization or someone who's just visiting the organization.
Craig Durr: And then you actually were using a phrase outside. I want to revisit this. You called it “Workplace Operations.” That's a new term for me. Why don't you tell me about that?
Brendan O'Neil: Yeah, I think the evolution of how space gets used today… there's been a lot of new technology that has been brought into the office. But that also means now, instead of just having an office manager and a really consistent five days a week, everyone has an assigned seat, the office has gotten far more complex, far more tech-enabled, far more flexible. So all of those different variables mean that you now have people from it, AV, workplace facilities and real estate all kind of collaborating on how the office is run and how it's managed. So we think of it as how you plan, manage, and use your space. And so that Workplace Operations lens is really about, “How do we give our customers the best toolkit to plan, manage, and use overall?” And that just encompasses so many more of these complex workflows and policies and guidelines that get put into place. And it takes a lot to orchestrate, but we're doing our darndest to bring that all into one platform.
Craig Durr: I mean, at the time that you and I did the work, previously, I introduced what I look at and call the 3W framework—the workflows, the workplace, and the workforce—which kind of hit the same key people you just talked about. It hits IT, facilities or real estate, and HR, right? And like I said earlier, I think you've had really good people from a user centric experience point of view, which really made it powerful to what people are calling themselves now, workplace coordinators or workplace managers. It's kind of like they're bridging the end user experience, that admin experience, to how the physical space comes together.
Brendan O'Neil: Yeah, it's expanded beyond what I think the role of the past for an office manager. That may have been the term, but now this workplace coordinator, workplace manager, that's internal events, that's what's happening day-to-day in the office. But even more unique elements from the last five years around things like team onsites, or a lot of internal enablement of specific spaces. So if a team needs to take over a region of an office, or if you want to have a more dynamic space that kind of grows and adapts to how your company is using it, those are all things that are a little bit more than just coordinating. So that's where that workplace management kind of angle has really been taking a strong hold up.
Craig Durr: Okay, all right. Brendan, this is a good update. I appreciate it, and I think this is going to help me kind of wrap up my Boston experience. I had my Dunkin Donuts coffee, I rode the T, I saw the Old State House, and then I also saw Faneuil Hall. Anything else I should do while I'm here in Boston?
Brendan O'Neil: I think, in the spirit of things, it's the 250th anniversary this year of the revolution beginning here in Boston. I think you have to check out the Boston Tea Party Museum because that’s basically where it all started.
Craig Durr: Hey, thank you so much for the update.
Brendan O'Neil: Thanks for coming by.
Craig Durr: And if you guys want to find out more information, please check out Brendan online, or also Robin at robinpower.com. Thank you, everyone. This is Craig Durr from the Collab Collective. Take care.
