00:00 Shonna Dorsey: Welcome to Tech Talk. A podcast featuring employees and leaders discussing all things tech at Mutual of Omaha.
Join us to learn what tech professionals can gain from a career with us. Let’s talk tech.
00:12 Brian Poppe: Welcome everyone to another edition of Tech Talk. I’m Brian Poppe.
00:16 Shonna Dorsey: And I’m Shonna Dorsey.
00:18 Brian Poppe: Shonna, what’s new this week?
00:21 Shonna Dorsey: It’s Labor Day weekend and I have one 5K run coming up. So, this I believe, will be my 16th now. Going for 22 by the end of 2022. So, I’m getting there.
00:34 Brian Poppe: Yeah. I was about to ask what’s the deal with 22? But I suppose that makes sense. There are 22. You didn’t want to go for 2,022?
00:43 Shonna Dorsey: Yea right no. No, No.
00:44 Brian Poppe: That’s would be like six a day or something?
00:50 Brian Poppe: Joining us today, we’ve got Chief Technology Officer from Mutual of Omaha. We’ve got Tim Darnall with us. Tim, thanks for joining us today.
00:58 Tim Darnall: Yea, hey, my pleasure Brian. Good to see you and Shonna both. Yeah, my pleasure to be here.
01:04 Brian Poppe: Well today Tim, we’re not here to ask you about technology, per se. We know that you’re involved with building of our new secret project that we’ve code named Project Beacon. So, we’ve got a few questions for you. And I suppose the first one is, tell us about Project Beacon and build a little bit of hype.
01:26 Tim Darnall: So, first of all, I don’t know if you know how it got the name “Project Beacon”. One of the things when we started this project, I guess it’s been close to almost a year we’ve been involved, but we named it “beacon” because we wanted it to be an attraction. We wanted it to be where talent is attracted. People look at that and say, “hey, this is a place I’d love to go to.” And so, everything about it, is about attracting people there. Yeah, it’s a great building project. We announced it here just a few months ago, and I get to be a part of the core leadership team on it with Alex Hayes and Shannon Hite. And so, I’m playing the technology role inside the building. So, we are really trying to make the building to be really a “tech forward” type of building.
02:20 Brian Poppe: Yeah, that sounds great. Tell us a little bit more about the location, the structure. Are we talking campus? What’s the new building intended to look like?
02:31 Tim Darnall: Yeah, it’s going to be a tower skyscraper similar to the height of First National, Woodman Tower. And it’s going to be right across the street, actually, between 14th and 15th, just north of Farnam right there in that little square. And it’ll have just a great view of the Gene Leahy Mall, which is to the east. And it will be setting right at the top of that mall. It’s going to be just a beautiful tower. We’re not at liberty yet to say how many floors, they are still architecturally going through that. But it will be a significant tower, one that you’ll be able to see from miles away.
03:10 Brian Poppe: For those of us that aren’t in Omaha, including Shonna, like 14th and 15th street is smack in the middle of downtown. Yeah?
03:18 Tim Darnall: Yeah. And the good news is they’re going to run a streetcar system. That’s going to run right by the building. One of the things we really wanted to do is connect with the community at midtown where we are at today and then Blackstone further west, But, that streetcar system will be the way that we hope will really drive community and drive development in that space as well. So pretty excited about that area. Right in the middle of it.
03:45 Brian Poppe: Yeah, that’s great. I mean, hopefully those folks that don’t live in Omaha will be enticed to come visit us using that Beacon. Right? Like getting drawn to that.
03:56 Shonna Dorsey: Yes. So, Tim, can you tell us about how the new building will accommodate the future of work at Mutual, thinking about our flexible work philosophy and all of that?
04:06 Tim Darnall: Yeah, that’s a great question. We are really embracing the nature of hybrid work. And you know, people ask all the time, they ask Shannon, Alex, or me, are we going to force people back? And the answer is, no. We really want to support that hybrid flex schedule. And we have a saying that says, we want to make the commute worth it for those that live in the area.
We really want to make it an attraction overall. But as far as the building, I think people don’t know this, but our current campus is about a million and five, million and six square feet. Our new building is going to be about 800,000 square feet. So, it’s about half the size and there’s going to be about 2,200 individual workstations and the rest are collab spaces.
04:58 So, it’s going to have something, you know, places for you to go sit at a table, a high-top table with other people, have a cup of coffee and work through it or go sit individually and work through developing stuff, doing something. I was saying in another podcast that I like to work in different places, you know, and I might be working with someone on something in one space, or I might go to an individual workstation and do that.
But we will have chairs that have these things that come over the top and give you a lot of privacy if you really want to get away and just work and focus. So, there’s just going to be these types of spaces all over. It’s just going to be, I think something to get really excited about and how inviting it is to people.
05:39 Brian Poppe: I don’t know about you. I’m like you, Tim, I guess, but this is my third location that I’m working from today. I mean clearly you can see I’m working from home, but I’ve been at three different locations even though I’m at home. So, I totally get you on the different locations for different aspects of work.
06:01 Tim Darnall: I did the same thing, Brian. I took a meeting at home then I came into the office for a meeting this afternoon. I think that schedule isn’t just coming in on a day from 8 to 5. You can have morning meetings and come in the afternoon or head home after your morning meetings. I think schedules can be accommodating for what our future holds for us.
06:29 Brian Poppe: So, speaking of that future, right, how are you getting input and planning on making decisions? We are building a new building that’s like a 40, 50-year commitment, at least. The existing building has been around for a little more than 100 years, I think. So how are you getting input for the next 50 to 100 years?
06:49 Tim Darnall: Yeah, great question. We’ve done a mixture of various interviews of different divisions from within the company. IT was one of those divisions we did an interview with. What do we what to do as a company? We’ve done individual surveys, so we’ve done a collection of things. We have an interior architecture firm named HOK. They are really helping us gather input. And they did something called a macro design, really high end, which is how we’re getting more details, we’re getting closer to some of this. And so, we’re getting with various people, surveying various people. As you can imagine, there’s a lot of input. So how do we want to work in the future?
And there’s some ways that we’re trying to get some consistency on the floors, but then other ways we need to make some special considerations depending on how people work, how important it is, what makes sense.
07:50 Shonna Dorsey: So, what do you think, based on what you know now, I know this could change over time, but what do you think associates will enjoy most about the new building?
08:00 Tim Darnall: You know, that’s a good question. Well, so for our associates coming into our existing building, the comparison of this building to that building I just don’t know how you could compare it, it’s very different. You’re going to have a lot more light. Today, our building is generally set where all the offices are on the outside, we’ll have a lot more light, a lot more flexibility.
Shonna, I was talking about the top floor of our building. We went to Northwestern Mutual here a couple months ago and their top floor was a two-story all glass floor and had a view of Michigan Lake. Obviously, we don’t have Michigan Lake to look at, but we loved that floor so much we wanted to replicate it as best we could.
08:47 And so, you know, you could go out and just experience, the view that you see. You could sit in front of a window and code all day if that’s what you wanted to do, because you’re going to have access to that. And I think what I’ll call the food areas are going to be all sorts of variety of food and different places to sit.
And we’re going to have a really nice fitness center. So that’s another thing that we’ll be having in the building which we don’t have today. And we’re all pretty excited about what the fitness center can offer people. And so, there’s just a lot of amenities there that we’ll have. And we’re really trying to make it all about the employee experience or what we call associates here at Mutual of Omaha and make it easier to onboard, make it easier to go through some of the processes that today seem kind of hard.
09:37 So, we’re really focusing on kind of what I call an outside/in approach. What the associate’s experience as they are coming in, how they’ll use their laptop, where they’re supposed to be located, how they reserve a seat, how they know their friends are in if they want to connect. So, all that type of wayfinding we think will really help as we go forward.
I hope, am I answering your question Shonna?
10:01 Shonna Dorsey: Yeah, you are. I’m just thinking too about associates who don’t live in Nebraska, right? And just an opportunity to collaborate and connect and make it easier in a building that’s more connected, if you will.
10:11 Tim Darnall: So yeah. Thank you for bringing that up. We’re really trying, so we actually went out to Microsoft here just a month or so ago, we use Microsoft teams for many of our, all of our collaboration. We did that conversion during the COVID pandemic. But, but one of the goals we have, and I don’t know if this is achievable with any technology, but one of the goals we have is to try to make it as inclusive for the remote people as it is for people sitting in the office. And that’s something we really want. So, we’re out talking about what’s the future bring that gives that opportunity? How do we develop a culture that does that? I mean, Shonna, you, and Brian you remember before COVID, we would go to a meeting room and you would bring your printed out PowerPoint and sit down and then when COVID hit we reversed that significantly.
I don’t see us walking around with printouts of PowerPoints anymore or whatever, but rather conversing online and collaborating online and we’re really sensitive to that. Matter of fact, I just hired an Employee Experience Architect, we have a whole area around that. And one of their one of their focuses is how do we make the experience as inclusive as possible.
11:26 Brian Poppe: Yeah, love it. Appreciate it. Well, Tim, I know you’re a busy guy. So, appreciate your time today. Again, this has been another episode of Tech Talk. Thanks for joining us, everyone. We will see you again on a future episode, again I’m Brian Poppe.
11:39 Shonna Dorsey: Shonna Dorsey
11:41 Brian Poppe: Thank you, everyone.
11:43 Tim Darnall: Appreciate it.