00:00 Introduction: 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: All right, welcome everyone to another episode of Tech Talk, a podcast sponsored by Mutual Omaha, where we talk about all things technology. I am Brian Poppe, Senior Vice President of Income and Wealth Planning here at Mutual Omaha, and I'm joined by...
00:26 Maura Ramsey: Hello everybody, welcome. I am your co -host, Maura Ramsey, and I am your newest Information Services Agile Project Manager here at Mutual of Omaha. So, Brian, always great to see you. What's new with you?
00:38 Brian Poppe: Oh boy, there are a few new restaurants that have opened up here in Omaha. There's one that's downtown, which is, it's a new pizza spot called Dolomiti. And the pizza is great, top notch, probably one of my favorite spots here in Omaha. Right around the corner from that place though is one of my second favorite spots in Omaha, Coneflower Ice Cream. I'm not getting paid for any of these name drops, so, either Coneflower or Dolomiti. I will accept free food using you as a platform. So, if anybody sees this, like be sure to get me some free food.
01:13 Maura Ramsey: Okay, I have to agree. I think Coneflower is the best ice cream in Omaha.
01:22 Brian Poppe: It was number one on the U.S’s or Yelp's rating of top ice cream shops in the U.S. So, we can even say it's the best ice cream in the U.S. and we would be accurate.
01:32 Maura Ramsey: Well, another article came out. Have you heard of the restaurant Koji in Omaha? Okay, so I tried that the last time I was at Omaha. It's this new sushi restaurant. And I think it was the Washington Post that said it was some of the best sushi in the country, which is, you know, coming from a landlocked state, kind of surprising. But, based off experience, it was, it was pretty good. So, if you haven't tried it yet, I highly recommend.
2:01 Brian Poppe: Excellent. Excellent. Well, I think we have got three new spots that we can use to move into the open food truck spot for our new building. So, with that, I will introduce our guest for today. This is Tim Darnall, Chief Technology Officer at Mutual Omaha. Tim, how are you?
02:18 Tim Darnall: Great. Well, I am hungry now after listening to you talk about food. But yes, I'm doing well, thank you.
02:25 Brian Poppe: Unfortunately, we are not a food podcast, so we will switch to the topic at hand. Tim's one of the few folks that are working on the new building. So, we brought you in, gosh, about a year ago now. And so now just hoping to get an update. Can you share where we are at in the new building with both the building process and timeline?
02:44 Tim Darnall: Oh, sure, yeah, it's pretty exciting. So, the building is way out of the ground and obviously the foundation and all the things under the ground took a long time, but they're pouring the core, which is where the elevator shafts are. I think they're up to about floor, I want to say 17, 18, so it's moving up. You'll be able to start seeing it on the Omaha skyline here very soon because it's starting to peak above some of the taller buildings downtown. So, it's really exciting.
So, there's two parts to a building. There's the core and shell and then there's the interiors. So, while the core and shell are moving up and building and all that's on track, we're finishing up a lot of the interiors work to get going. Obviously, that's still down the road yet, but the design of the interiors, all of the layouts, all the furniture, all the technology, we're going through all those estimates, getting those back. We're hoping to have those contracts all signed here within the next month or two. And so that we get all that locked in.
03:44 There's just a lot of exciting stuff. There's a lot of time, you know, just going back and forth with design, making sure that things are right and, you know, really thinking through it from an associate perspective and trying to make it, you know, I think I said last time, we want this to be an attraction to have people come in the office. And man, I'm just really excited about it and some of the things that are going to be there. And I’m just happy to be a part of the project. Hopefully, that helps. But yeah, I think the move in day is still 2026, still talking about occupying in 2026. And so, you know, we seem to be on track from that perspective.
04:21 Maura Ramsey: It's so crazy to hear how far along we've already come. I feel like just yesterday the announcement came out and now we're already halfway up the building. And then speaking of some of the design considerations, what are some of the, I guess, thoughts or design elements that have been brought in around associate collaboration in a hybrid world?
04:45 Tim Darnall: Sure, yeah. We spent a lot of time thinking about that and how that you know a lot of our associates are outside of Omaha. You know we hire across the nation pretty much and so we've really built it so that the vast majority of our rooms and our connectivity assumes the hybrid meeting. There's virtually no meeting you'll go to that isn't some hybrid nature so.
All of our rooms, not all of them, there are some quiet rooms on a floor where you don't have technology per se, have a different purpose, but very few of them. And so, we've really thought about trying the best we can to make the hybrid experience. We've had a little bit of empathy on the remote person as well as the person in the building. So, there's going to be things like digital whiteboards hanging in some of the rooms that we'll have that will be interactive. So, you could be up on the board writing and the other person has access and to be able to share that experience. We do that today with some Kludge tools on the desktop, but having those interactions, we have several of our rooms on each floor. I think there's four or five rooms on each floor that are going to have that capability.
So, there's some things that are going on in that space that hopefully will make that hybrid experience much better than it is, you know, even now today. We've done a lot here in the home office, but it's still a lot of older stuff. And I think we're going to end up being in a better place in the new building certainly.
06:13 Brian Poppe: Yes, that sounds great. To your point, one of the great things about working at Mutual Omaha is that hybrid environment. And boy, I'm really glad to hear about the whiteboard improvements because sharing a virtual whiteboard is really hard. So, I'm looking forward to being able to use the whiteboard with both local and remote associates going forward. Tell us a little bit more about the digital employee experience team and how they've helped kind of shape the new building so that all associates are having a good working environment there?
06:44 Tim Darnall: Yeah, it's been a real focus for us. And so, we have, so as you come into the building for the associates that are in the building, we'll actually have, think of it, generally think of it as a tech bar. So, you're going to come up to floor 17 to where we call the Sky Lobby. And there'll be things like you can get coffee, juices, and some other things. I think that's where the pool tables and gaming things are at. And then you're going to have something we call Tech Connect.
We named this area very, very carefully. We want to reshape the way we support our associates from that perspective. Not only the ones that are physically there, but the ones that are remote as well. So, we've hired some folks that really, really focus on that experience and to say, how do we think about, Brian, like onboarding, all the things we get there, and as well as what new capabilities we roll out, how we roll out those capabilities.
07:39 Tim Darnall: This Tech Connect space has a place where you can walk up and get help. It's got the vending machine for folks who are there, but across the hallway, it's got a place where we can do, you know, education sessions, hackathons, or anything like that. And it's really, I'm really, really excited about it. I think I said this even last time, that's really something that I haven't seen us do before. So, we're trying to have that space there and really try to reshape again, the entire way we support our associates and get better at that.
And so, it's not only just the on-premises stuff, it's actually both. We're trying to equalize that as best we can across there. So, the digital experience group is really saying, how do we think outside in and how do we understand the experiences so that we can reshape them? The other part about that is, how do I get around the things? So, there's an application that we're looking at to where everything in the building I need to do is on an app. I don't have to go to five different places to get things. And so, we're talking about consolidating all of that into an app. And so that we make that whole experience for associates better. So, there's a lot going on in that space and really moving to, like I said, revamp that whole experience.
08:52 Maura Ramsey: It's so great to hear how much consideration has gone in equally to all types of associates that we'll have. It's just going to make everyone, whether me in Chicago, Brian in Omaha, that much more excited to be a part of it. And when the door is finally open, I’m definitely coming to Omaha to see it in real time.
I am curious from your perspective, what are some of the coolest or what are some of your favorite amenities or features that will be in the building?
09:24 Tim Darnall: You know, I really think the amenities we're going to have they start in the lower floors. So, the first fifteen floors are parking garage, right? So, you get in the parking garage. You'll go up to floor seventeen. Seventeen as I mentioned has a lot of those, you know, things around them, coffee, juice, the Tech Connect place. To go down to eat is floor sixteen. You'd be downstairs and as you go up to eighteen, there's your gym. There's going to be a gym and the spa, you know, a whole workout area.
Nineteen and twenty are our conference areas. So, we have larger conference rooms in these spaces. Alex and I are going to pair up and have what we call a concierge service that can help people set up meetings, today we don't have that. You are all running around with different rooms that have different types of technologies. So now that we'll have very similar types of things, and we have a very flexible style. So, we'll be able to configure those things. But probably one of the favorite spaces and obviously this won't be in January, but maybe in the nicer months is the Terraces.
10:24 Tim Darnall: And so, on 16, 17, and 18, there are Terraces. And so, sixteen will be the eating area, and so that will have the largest terrace that actually faces west, but it wraps around the north and south of the building. And so, we just had the College of World Series, and I got up on the building when it was about fourteen stories tall, it's taller now. You could almost see down into the stadium, wouldn't be fun to be up there and kind of see what's going on there. And 17's got a little bit smaller space and eighteen has an area up there I think is 17 or 18 has a place where like the yoga mats and things you could do outside.
Obviously, that is in the summertime, but I think that's going to be a wonderful place The other place that I think I'm going to love being is what we call Floor 44. It is the beacon. That floor is designed to be two stories high and the views from that floor are going to be amazing That's where when our board comes to town that we have board meetings in that floor. We have a board room and that type of thing. But it is not shut down for the associates. We want to make sure that that it’s open. So we have just the views up there in the seat, you know, how you'll be able to see it as another if you just want to get off by yourself a bit and go work and sit you know, sit and do whatever kind of alone work you need. I just think those amenity floors are going to be just great places to be, you know, not to mention just the normal workspaces.
11:50 Tim Darnall: It's hard for me to pick one Maura. I think we've been working on this for so long. There's a lot of good places going to be in there.
11:57 Maura Ramsey: Yeah, I could definitely, even you just listing them all, I don't know which one I'm most excited about, but I'm always excited for some outdoor space, good views. So, the terraces, I'm looking forward to getting to experience those. Maybe even during the College World Series. Get my views.
12:15 Tim Darnall: Yes, there we go. It'd be kind of fun, wouldn't it?
12:20 Brian Poppe: Well, Tim, thanks for joining us today. I appreciate the update. I'm super excited to see that new building and can't wait to be one of the first folks in there in 2026.
12:31 Tim Darnall: Same here. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.
12:36 Brian Poppe: Good to see you again, Maura. Thanks everyone for joining us.