• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

My TechDecisions

  • Best of Tech Decisions
  • Topics
    • Video
    • Audio
    • Mobility
    • Unified Communications
    • IT Infrastructure
    • Network Security
    • Physical Security
    • Facility
    • Compliance
  • RFP Resources
  • Resources
  • Podcasts
  • Subscribe
  • Project of the Week
  • About Us
    SEARCH
Facility, IT Infrastructure, News, Unified Communications

Inside Cisco’s Revamped and Interconnected New York City Office

Cisco's New York Office was designed with a flexible work model and tech that measures the use of the entire 54,000-square-foot space.

October 25, 2022 Zachary Comeau Leave a Comment

Cisco New York office, hybrid workplace, hybrid meeting
A conference room in Cisco's New York City office. Courtesy/Cisco
Photos & Slideshow
View the slideshow View the slideshow
View Slideshow

Imagine if every piece of technology in the office was feeding IT and facilities managers data on the use of the office, meeting spaces, desks, energy efficiency and other metrics.

For organizations trying to maximize the use of their office and make it easy for hybrid workers to come into the office and collaborate with their team, it would be a godsend. That data would be invaluable as organizations rethink their physical real estate and prioritize efficiency and productivity over the 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. workday.

That’s what the IT and facilities team at Cisco’s Penn 1 Plaza Office are trying to accomplish with a new flexible hybrid work model that prioritizes the employee experience and measures the use of nearly every inch of the 54,000-square-foot space.

Metrics being measured at the IT giant’s New York City office include occupancy and space utilization, indoor air quality, energy usage and 90-plus video endpoints.

Cisco’s Hybrid Work Strategy

According to Bob Cicero, Americas smart building leader at Cisco, the company’s workplace strategy—which itself is a major influencer on the company’s new workplace offerings—represents a major shift in the company’s thinking.

“Our floor plates used to build 30% of ‘We’ space and 70% of ‘Me’ space. “We’re flipping that.”

Rather than individual desks and offices, Cisco’s New York space is full of hot desks, meeting rooms, huddle spaces in a model designed for collaboration and teamwork.

Employees can essentially do their work and collaborate with coworkers and meet with customers or partners virtually at several different areas of the office.

According to Cicero, employees now move to about five or six different seat settings a day, including meeting rooms, huddle rooms, desk and even cafeteria areas with a handful of Webex collaboration endpoints scattered about.

In fact, no employee has an assigned desk. They can book a hot desk if they need a quiet place to put their head down and get to work, but even managers and other leaders don’t have assigned seating.

“There are no offices anymore,” Cicero says. “Everything is 100% flex, so we need to drive that from an enablement standpoint.”

Data drives Cisco’s hybrid work model

Helping to drive this hybrid work strategy is Cisco’s recently released Smart Workspaces, a tool designed to give employees an overview of the office floor plan, ability to see which spaces are occupied or available and book a space for a set amount of time.

Just off  the main cafeteria at the company’s new office in the Big Apple is yet another Webex collaboration display where Cicero demonstrated Smart Workplaces. On the screen was an interactive map that showed each room in the office and its temperature, humidity, air quality and real-time occupancy.

A room colored in red means the space is occupied, an orange room means a meeting is booked for the next time slot and green means the space is available.

In some collaboration areas, the space becomes green for available again if an employee doesn’t physically enter the room in four minutes for the camera to detect their face and inform the system that the meeting is still happening.

“As employees, this is how we work and how we drive our experience,” Cicero says.

Along with each video endpoint reporting back on occupancy metrics, Cisco’s offices leverages Power-over-Ethernet and sensors in every place imaginable—including lights—to provide actionable insights that help maximize the use of the space and keep tabs on energy usage.

Now, the company has about 5,000 data points from which to pull actionable insights and continue to digitize their office space.

“There’s a lot of data nascent in an environment already so how do we use that data from a different lens?” Cicero says.

What Cisco has learned from all that data

With data pouring in from across the company’s flashy New York City Office—which was in the process of getting more energy efficient windows installed in some areas—Cisco can help inform its IT and facilities personnel about how spaces are being used and how those trends are changing in real time.

For example, the company has learned that one meeting type in particular has become very popular. The room is almost set up like a box in a stadium, with a small row of bar-type seats and a handful of other casual seating arrangements.

There is only one such room in New York, but the company is planning to build several more in its Atlanta office, Cicero says.

The company can control everything inside the space, including lighting and energy profiles with automation and granular controls. This automation was on full display when the shades closed automatically in a meeting room when glare from the sun was causing issues with the video quality.

According to Cicero, the data has shown that the hybrid work model is here to stay.

“You need to design [office space] with flex now in mind in terms of how you think about hybrid, from office, from home, from anywhere,” Cicero says.

On any given day, Cisco expects about 10% of its population in a three-state area to come into the office, and about a third of its employees every quarter.

“That’s what we’re seeing from a data standpoint,” Cicero says.

If you enjoyed this article and want to receive more valuable industry content like this, click here to sign up for our digital newsletters!

Tagged With: Cisco, Collaboration, Webex

Related Content:

  • Rearview shot of two young designers giving each other a fist bump in an office, on display is Crestron desk scheduling device Crestron Introduces Desk Q and Desk Touch Scheduling…
  • CI SSI cover Commercial Integrator and Security Sales & Integration Magazines…
  • cyber-attack-skull Spike in Cyberattacks Exposes Vulnerabilities in University Security…
  • OptixAV RMM Solution Solutionz OPTIXAV RMM Platform for AV Environments Now…

Free downloadable guide you may like:

  • Download TechDecisions' Blueprint Series report on Security Awareness now!Blueprint Series: Why Your Security Awareness Program is Probably Falling Short

    Learn about the evolution of phishing attacks and best practices for security awareness programs to ensure your organization is properly prepared to defend against them in this report from TechDecisions' Blueprint Series.

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Get the FREE Tech Decisions eNewsletter

Sign up Today!

Latest Downloads

Download TechDecisions' Blueprint Series report on Security Awareness now!
Blueprint Series: Why Your Security Awareness Program is Probably Falling Short

Learn about the evolution of phishing attacks and best practices for security awareness programs to ensure your organization is properly prepared t...

Workplace Collaboration Tools for Corporate Spaces
Workplace Collaboration Tools for Corporate Spaces

From lobbies and shared spaces to conference rooms and multipurpose facilities, you need high-performing AV technology to effectively share informa...

ChatGPT, generative AI, enterprise, workplace
Blueprint Series: ChatGPT and Generative AI in the Workplace

This latest release of the TechDecisions Blueprint Series explores the new phenomenon of tools such as ChatGPT and how IT leaders should go about d...

View All Downloads

Would you like your latest project featured on TechDecisions as Project of the Week?

Apply Today!
Sharp Microsoft Collaboration HQ Logo

Learn More About the
Windows Collaboration Display

More from Our Sister Publications

Get the latest news about AV integrators and Security installers from our sister publications:

Commercial IntegratorSecurity Sales

AV-iQ

Footer

TechDecisions

  • Home
  • Welcome to TechDecisions
  • Subscribe to the Newsletter
  • Contact Us
  • Advertise with Us
  • Comment Guidelines
  • RSS Feeds
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Linkedin

Free Technology Guides

FREE Downloadable resources from TechDecisions provide timely insight into the issues that IT, A/V, and Security end-users, managers, and decision makers are facing in commercial, corporate, education, institutional, and other vertical markets

View all Guides
TD Project of the Week

Get your latest project featured on TechDecisions Project of the Week. Submit your work once and it will be eligible for all upcoming weeks.

Enter Today!
Emerald Logo
ABOUTCAREERSAUTHORIZED SERVICE PROVIDERSDO NOT SELL MY PERSONAL INFORMATIONTERMS OF USEPRIVACY POLICY

© 2023 Emerald X, LLC. All rights reserved.