Joey Wahler (Host): We're joined by a man whose vast expertise includes workplace strategies and transformation. Today, we'll discuss the future of work in healthcare in 2025 and beyond with our guest, Peter Miscovich, Executive Managing Director and Global Future of Work Leader for JLL. Before we begin, we'd like to recognize JLL, one of ACHE's premier corporate partners. Our premier corporate partners support ACHE's vision and mission to advance healthcare leadership excellence.

Welcome to the Healthcare Executive Podcast, where we bring you insightful commentary and developments in healthcare leadership. To learn more, visit ACHE.org. Thanks for joining us. I'm Joey Wahler.

Hi there, Peter. Welcome.

Peter Miscovich: Great to be with you today.

Host: Thanks so much for the time. So first let's start by defining what we're talking about when we say the future of work in healthcare. Can you share a bit about the future of work and why it matters so much in healthcare?

Peter Miscovich: Yes, thank you. Well, I've been involved in the future of work for over 25 years. At JLL, I lead our global future of work advisory practice, and as a longtime practitioner of workplace transformation, future of work strategies and solutions; we saw 25 years ago that the future of work was emerging in industries such as telecom and technology, and we worked with many of the leading professional services firms, including the likes of Accenture and PWC, large telecoms, such as AT&T and large banks such as Citibank.

And then as time progressed, as we got into the 2010 - 2015 timeframe, we saw that the future of work began to matter more and more across industries, including the healthcare industry. And as a future of work practitioner, I've transformed over 1. 5 billion, and that's billion with a B, square feet of commercial and corporate real estate.

I've also been involved in the development of 50 Fortune 100 headquarters, including several large healthcare headquarter locations. And so, what we saw in the mid In 2010 - 15, and then certainly by 2020, the future of work in terms of a healthcare priority began to emerge due to the challenges of operational cost, operational excellence, the talent shortages that began emerging in healthcare, and so we began working with several major healthcare clients and their executive leadership teams in redefining their future of work, future of workplace, and their real estate strategies, and so today we're certainly glad to share with you some of those learnings.

We appreciate the partnership with ACHE, and we presented some of these learnings at the ACHE conference this past March, and then also on another webinar. So today, we're glad to elaborate on the leading practices around the future of work for healthcare, which we believe, over the next five to seven to ten years, will be a top priority for healthcare executives.

Host: Absolutely. So how about the concept of human centric workplace design? You mentioned you've been behind transforming 1.5 billion square feet over the years, which is quite an impressive number to say the least. So how is all that specifically relevant when we talk about human centric workplace design to the healthcare workforce of the future and to healthcare workplace settings?

Peter Miscovich: To give the audience a little bit of a historical perspective; for the last 50 to 70 years, workplace design and office design was very location centric and very office centric. And when we mean office centricity, location was a stable pillar, which all work was designed around. People went to offices in a location five days a week, distributed work, even 25 years ago, with the birth of the internet was just emerging. And office centric workplace design provided very consistent work experiences. It enabled in-person collaboration and visibility based management.

And that was all fine and good until about 2005, 2007 with the emergence of the iPhone, mobile telephony, 4G wireless networks, the cloud. And then we fast forward to 2020 and now 2024; leading organizations are moving from office centric and location centric workplace design to human centric workplace design. And human centric work design is really focused around designing work around the individual. So it has a much more humanistic approach, looking at flexible work experiences for the individual, enabling digital workplace collaboration and purposeful digital workplace collaboration.

And then a very important key element here, it also drives empathy based management. And for the healthcare sector in particular, workers are very drawn to mission and purpose, and so we see human centric design over the next 5 to 10 years being the key driver for all healthcare and multiple industry sector workplace transformation efforts.

And human centricity has some very core values around empathy, core values around individual needs and allowing people to do their best work, to perform their best work with all the enablement that the organization can provide. So it's a very interesting inflection point in transition and, as horrific as the pandemic was, especially for the healthcare sector, the pandemic was an amazing accelerant towards human centricity, and to focus upon individual needs and human centricity as a core principle for healthcare leadership teams moving forward as we look at the next generation workforce in healthcare.

Host: Gotcha. When you talk about that human touch, so to speak, how can healthcare organizations create high performance workplaces that boost morale, improve culture, optimize costs and increase productivity?

Peter Miscovich: I think as we look at high performing workplace, we need to think about the high performing workforce. And we look to enable our client organizations and client workforce organizational cohorts towards thriving human performance. And when we talk about thriving, how do we allow and support wellness and wellbeing in the workplace, purposeful presence, greater life work integration, greater human experience and socialization capabilities? We're also very focused on, empathy based management and giving people a real purpose in terms of why they work and where they work. And all of this leads to a high performance workforce that is enabled by a high performance workplace.

And that high performance workforce is also enabled by technology around empathy based leading practices in terms of management, and especially for the next generation workforce, mental wellness, physical wellness, health and well being all come together as part of the value proposal of the high value workplace performance for the healthcare organization of the future. So it's a very humanistic approach when we speak about high performance workplaces, and it includes both organizational constructs, technology support, workplace design, and change management, and other leadership supporting mechanisms to ensure that people can truly thrive in their workplace and wherever they may be working on any given day, week, or month.

Host: And of course, Peter, as you know, as well as anyone nowadays, flexible and hybrid work models are trending more than ever. How do you envision the role of them to support future healthcare administration talent and operational strategies?

Peter Miscovich: Referring back to the previous conversation around the history of work and the history of workplace transformation, we think about the pandemic as a accelerant and inflection point. For many years, most health care organizations had one to one seating across their administrative footprints.

So the allocation would be one seat for one person, five days a week, coming into a central administrative office location. What the pandemic did for many of our healthcare clients, it really accelerated hybrid and distributed work patterns. And it was actually a huge wake up call that many organizations now could work in a more distributed manner with technology platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom and Cisco Webex. And the ability for distributed teams to work in a more flexible and hybridized manner was proven during the two to three years of the pandemic. As we're coming out of the pandemic now, we're working with several large and medium healthcare organizations to actualize the next evolution of their hybrid and flexible work strategies, and to look at various business groups and workforce cohorts as to who can work more flexibly.

Is it two days a week? Is it four days a week? Is it three days a month? We're finding that there's a great appetite and aptitude and capability within the healthcare administrative workforce to embrace new, flexible, and hybrid forms of working, and I'll just share a quick case study of one client where the employee Pulse surveys and the employee satisfaction rates have gone up by more than 80 percent for one client organization as a result of offering flexible and hybrid work options.

And so we're seeing as the need for new talent, the replenishment of talent across various healthcare organizations; flexible and hybrid work models can serve to support new talent strategies within the healthcare sector and to enable your existing talent, again, to do their best work, to thrive, and to be fully engaged with the organization in a very positive manner in terms of that employee value proposal.

Host: So, what strategies can healthcare organizations employ to optimize their real estate portfolios while simultaneously investing in workplace improvements?

Peter Miscovich: So, as we think about various locations across a large or medium or small healthcare administrative real estate portfolio, and as we enable more flexible hybrid work strategies and solutions; we find that there's an optimization opportunity. And we find with many of our healthcare clients and other clients, that optimization can be as much as 30 to 50 percent of optimizing and consolidating to fewer, higher quality locations across a given administrative, operational, healthcare portfolio.

And so as we look to optimize, we're able to save significant dollars. And we find with all of our leading health care clients, operational and occupancy cost savings are a key priority. I will share with the audience that we've been able to save for several of our health care clients anywhere from 30% up to 70 percent in annual operating costs across their real estate portfolios by employing these future of work, flexible and hybrid workplace solutions.

And in the process, we've been able to take those savings and give them back to the patient and member networks, which is also so important to mission and to the critical mission of most healthcare organizations, or the savings can be reinvested into improving the existing sites and the existing workplace environments to be more high performing with better conferencing facilities, better amenities, better technology, and again, it becomes a very virtuous cycle where if you're able to improve the existing sites within a given real estate portfolio, then you're able to create that thriving employee value proposal that we just discussed earlier.

So we believe real estate in terms of healthcare operational strategy, and future work strategy has a significant role to play. And as JLL, we're a leader in many sectors, including health care, in developing and deploying these strategies and solutions.

Host: Couple of other things, Peter. First, how about the importance of leadership, sponsorship, change management, and also communication in implementing future of work strategies in healthcare.

Peter Miscovich: Executive leadership is really key for all of this to manifest and to be successful. And I will share with you, with several of our key healthcare clients, we are working with the CHRO, with the CFO, in some cases, a regular cadence of meetings with the CEO and all of the executive business leadership teams and executive leaders to fully embrace an integrated future of work strategy.

And that includes often interviewing executives, gaining their insights and perspectives. We also do extensive diagnosis of the various workers across an administrative portfolio, and workforce to understand how people are working. And so for instance, a group that is based in Chicago versus Atlanta versus New York versus Southern California, or Colorado; they may all have different needs in terms of their day to day and week to week work styles and work behaviors.

And so we work with the executive leadership teams of these various groups across businesses and across geographies to fully understand how are people working and how can we enable groups of folks within these businesses, within healthcare, to do their best work. And this requires very strong leadership engagement from the top leaders down through the various middle managers, and then very strong communications and change management to explain why we're orchestrating the various strategies and solutions that are being put forward, and then helping employees adapt to these new strategies.

And what was fascinating about the pandemic, here again, over 3 billion people went remote and hybrid in a matter of three to four weeks, and that was sort of a forced intervention as a result of the horrific COVID pandemic event. But subsequent to that now, we really need to think about how do we enable flexible work and hybrid work with the right technologies to improve things like employee meetings, how do we communicate to our employees to make sure they're getting the most from both the workplace technologies and work design elements that we provide, and how do we ensure we're continuously refreshing these various elements as healthcare organizations make their journey.

And I'll just close on this question by addressing the great opportunity to save significant operational dollars, to reinvest those dollars with leadership, to support executive teams and employees across healthcare organizations to work better and to work smarter and to be more engaged and to drive better results for patients and members and for their organizational value.

So, we believe it's a win-win-win opportunity when all of this is aligned in the right manner.

Host: And then in summary, Peter, as we look ahead to 2025 and beyond, how do you see the healthcare administrative workplace evolving, particularly in terms of culture, community, and employee needs?

Peter Miscovich: We're doing a number of large scale engagements right now for multiple clients, including healthcare clients for 2027 and 2030. And in looking ahead, we have six key priorities that we're focused upon with many of these organizations, including the healthcare administrative space. We're looking at flexible, high quality environments and buildings and locations for future either talent issues or customer issues and drivers.

So number one is flexible, high quality workspace. The second being, we're focused on enabling these human centric workplace experiences and making sure that's an Evergreen approach so that the experience that the worker will have in 2027 or 2030 is superior to the experience today in 2024 going into 2025.

We're also very much focused on talent upskilling and looking at new tech talent. We're seeing artificial intelligence and the enablement of AI across the healthcare sector. So talent, magnetic locations and strategies and talent upskilling is also a priority. And then the matter of AI investment and AI skills and technologies across those talent cohorts, we're also looking at for 2027, 2030, certainly.

And then the final two would be resiliency in terms of resilience and sustainable workplace environments and strategies to ensure that climate change risk is managed given the heat risk, the hurricane risk, the flood risk. Resilient sustainability is another key driver as a must have. And then finally, we're enabling hybrid work for 2027 and beyond to ensure the workforce has all of that flexibility to enable high performance, to get great engagement, to attract the next generation of workers, which are so critical to the healthcare industry.

And if you will manage, both from a talent and operating cost perspective, to the best outcomes for the organizations for the long term. And so those would be some very key priorities for 2025, 2027 and beyond. And, the more progressed organizations in healthcare we're finding have great appetite and interest in pursuing these next generation strategies and solutions, and we feel very strongly about partnering and co-creating with our clients and with organizations such as ACHE in these leading practices.

Host: Folks, we trust you're now more familiar with the future of work in health care. Peter Miscovich, thanks so much again.

Peter Miscovich: Thank you, Joey, and our heartfelt thanks to ACHE.  

Host:  I'm, Absolutely, as always, and to stay updated with more perspectives on the future of health care leadership, speaking of which, visit healthcareexecutive.org. Please subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss our next conversation. I'm Joey Wahler. Until next time, stay informed and empowered.