What The F* is Happening to The Office?

About What The F* is Happening to The Office?

What the F* is Happening to the Office? The workplace is being reinvented—and we're talking to the people leading the charge. From architects to real estate strategists, tech innovators to culture experts, this podcast dives into the seismic shifts reshaping where and how we work. If you’re building, designing, managing, or just trying to make sense of the new office landscape, this is your front-row seat to the ideas, experiments, and people redefining the future of work.

Publisher

Work Design

Category

arts

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

8 Jul 2025

Latest episode

27 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

33 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   27 Oct 2026

   Work Doesn’t Just Happen in the Office - and the Office Has to Be OK With That | Becca Landwehr.

   Work happens on the Metro, at the kitchen table after the kids are in bed, and on a Teams call squeezed between a doctor’s appointment and school pickup. The office was built for nine-to-five at an assigned desk, and most of us don’t work that way anymore. As my guest Becca Landwehr puts it, the office has to be okay with that.Becca Landwehr is a strategic planner and workplace strategist, trained in both communication and interior design, and she’s worked on both the design firm and owner side. What I appreciated most is how pragmatic she is. She isn’t anti-office, but she’s not pretending virtual work is going away either. Her first question about any space is simple: does it actually work for the people using it?We talk about a company with assigned desks nobody uses, plus return-to-office mandates, why core hours and anchor days beat “thou shalt come in,” what to measure beyond badge swipes, and the simple exercise she’d hand any leader facing a lease decision this year.Subscribe for new episodes with the experts shaping the future of work.Leave a comment! Where does most of your work happen these days, and does your office offer the flexibility for it?Subscribe to Work Design for more on the trends shaping where and how we work.https://workdesign.beehiiv.com/Connect with Becca Landwehr on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/beccalandwehr/

2. 

   1 Oct 2026

   The Workplace Supply Chain: The Hidden Business Behind Every Office | with Beth Goff McMillian

   Everyone's fighting about where people work. Almost nobody's asking the question that actually matters: why would anyone want to come in at all?In this episode of What the F* is Happening to the Office?, Bob Fox sits down with Beth Goff-McMillan, CEO of SKG, one of the largest woman-owned businesses in Texas, and founder of FOLIO, to go past the return-to-office debate and into the business that actually supplies the modern workplace.Beth will tell you a five-day mandate can't fix collaboration, engagement, or culture if the workplace itself never evolved. Getting people back, she argues, isn't a real estate problem, it's a human problem. We dig into how COVID and hybrid work rewired her entire industry: why office furniture became a commodity, why the buying process went transactional, how the floor plate flipped from 80% desks to 60% shared space. We also get into the workplace supply chain, the 50-point audit she ran on 450 manufacturers, how AI is adding jobs instead of cutting them, and the metrics she uses to tell you whether an office is working now that square-footage-per-person is dead.

3. 

   21 Sept 2026

   Engagement Does Not Drive Revenue - So What Does? | Dr. Yasmeen J. Coning

   Happy employees don't necessarily produce better business results. In this episode of What the F* is Happening to the Office?, Bob Fox talks with Dr. Yasmeem Coning, founder of Ember, about why engagement, the metric most companies lean on, may be too sentiment-driven to actually predict revenue, retention, or performance. The real driver, she argues, is something deeper: collective organizational identification, or how strongly people connect their work to their own self-concept.Yasmeem breaks down the science behind identification, how it differs from engagement, and how Ember's Workplace Identification Score (WIS) is helping leaders design offices, operating models, and hybrid work patterns around actual human behavior instead of guesswork. As Yasmeem puts it: "Workforce is the new workplace."If you're rethinking how culture, strategy, and space planning connect to business outcomes, this conversation will change how you measure success.In this episode:- Why employee happiness and engagement don't reliably translate into better business outcomes- How collective organizational identification connects work to self-conceptEngagement as sentiment vs. identification as a stable behavioral signal- How strategy, culture, and identification work together as a stackEmber's six core factors: Core Identity, Connected Leadership, Collective Drive, Aligned, Ambition, Future Affinity, Market Gravity- The Workplace Identification Score (WIS) and how it informs workplace design- How workplace data shapes collaboration areas, innovation spaces, and office consolidation- Why identity-based measurement can support diversity by recognizing the whole person- The first question every headquarters planning team should ask

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.