The Mitie Podcast: From Heathrow’s uptime to the next era of performance

Series 2, Episode 4: What is the future of high-performing places?

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Chris: Welcome once again to the High-Performing Places podcast from Mitie, hosted by us, the Workplace Geeks. My name’s Chris Moriarty.

Ian: And I’m Ian Ellison.

Chris: And we’re back for our fourth and final episode of this second series, where we’ve been exploring what makes a place truly high-performing.

Ian: First, I ventured deep into a working mine near Teesside, to visit Boulby Underground Laboratory, as we learnt about how exceptional people support high-performing places.

Chris: Then I went behind the scenes of Mitie’s Intelligence Security Operations Centre in Northampton, to discover what makes the places that we live and work in safer.

Ian: Then, we examined generational theory and what it means for attracting and supporting multigenerational talent, in a world where attention is a key commodity.

Chris:  So, if you haven’t listened to all of these yet, you probably should, then this episode will make a touch more sense. So go on then, press pause, off you pop…

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Chris: All up to date? Fantastic. Because what we need to do now is bring all of those ideas together and take stock, to help us answer one final question – what is the future of high-performing places?

Which means it’s time to talk technology and whether a world where our colleagues are a mix of humans and AI agents is science fiction, or soon to be science fact – and if so, how this might affect the future of work.

Ian: But before we get into that, Chris got the chance to go behind the scenes at London Heathrow Airport, to learn how Mitie and Heathrow Airport Limited work together, to ensure that  international passengers can come and go, day in, day out, 365 days a year.

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Chris [Moriarty]: Heathrow Airport doesn’t need much of an introduction. It’s  Europe’s busiest airport and one of the world’s most significant aviation hubs.

Each year it handles more than 80 million passengers, linking the UK to hundreds of destinations across six continents. It’s also a major economic engine, supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs directly and through tourism and trade, contributing billions to the UK economy.

For travellers, it is a gateway to the world. For the local and national economy, it’s critical infrastructure. And behind the flights and terminals is a vast, complex set of services working around the clock to keep the airport running.

Ian:  It sounds like this is a place where any failures can create a cascade of serious consequences?

Chris [Moriarty]: Well, put it this way Ian – if you want to understand performance under pressure and constraints, Heathrow is a good place to start. So let’s meet Nick and Chris.

Nick: I’m Nick Eckert. I’m Head of Engineering for Terminals 1, 2, 3, and Specialist Systems at Heathrow Airport Limited. And I’m responsible for ensuring all of those assets that fall under me are ready and available for when they are needed.

Chris: My name is Chris Watts. I’m the Head of Hard Services for Mitie on the Heathrow contract, and I’m responsible for delivery of our engineering operations across Heathrow Airport.

Chris [Moriarty]: We are gonna go for a little tour. Where are you gonna take us first, Nick?

Nick: We’re gonna have a little walk around Terminal Three, landside. And then we’re going to take the passenger subway over the Terminal Two.

Chris [Moriarty]: So the first thing that strikes you is the sheer scale of the operation, and the site it sits on.

Nick: When we try to explain what engineering is around Heathrow, if you actually picked Heathrow up and turned it upside down and shook off all the aircraft and the passengers and bits turned it back up again, we’re responsible for everything else.

Chris: It’s just on such a huge, complex scale.

Chris [Moriarty]: It is indeed like a micro-city. And one that operates 24 hours a day, every day, under intense regulatory scrutiny.

Nick: Now this is actually the arrivals area for Terminal Three.

Chris [Moriarty]: So what are the kind of, what are the kind of maintenance headache in the, this sort of public facing side of a terminal?

Nick: I think the general maintenance headache that we’ve got across the whole of Heathrow is just getting access to our assets.

Chris [Moriarty]: Right.

Nick: It starts to put into perspective some of the statutory inspections that we carry out. Across Heathrow, we carry out 70,000 of those, every year, and plan maintenance activities around 130,000 in total. So that’s the scale of the challenge that we have.

Ian: Let me just do a quick bit of maths here. That’s an average of over 190 inspections, and over 350 maintenance activities every 24 hours?

Chris [Moriarty]: Actually, it’s not even every 24 hours. It’s an even tighter window than that. Listen to this:

Nick: Because we’re such a busy airport, we have very limited opportunity out of operating hours to do our maintenance activities.

Chris [Moriarty]: And what’s that window at?

Nick: After last flight. So, you’re looking at about half 10, 11 o’clock at night with a hard stop, really about half past three, four o’clock in the morning.

Chris: There’s a lot of preparation that goes in prior to that last flight, that green light, to start the maintenance.

And there’s so many stakeholders that you have to check with and ensure that there’s a resilience in place. ‘Cause if you take something down, you’ve gotta make sure it comes back up again.

I get a plan a year in advance of what we’ve got scheduled for the following year. And when it gets issued to us, it’s usually three months in advance.

There’s so many complexities. If there’s anything linked to runways, we’ve gotta make sure that we get the rotations. ‘Cause even though there’s no flights at night at the airport, there’s always a live runway. And it has to be available 24 hours a day.

Ian: Wow. That must be some coordinated operation.

Chris [Moriarty]: Right. Now, we were there during the day. And I kind of wish we’d arranged to visit at 10pm. Because I’ve got this picture of squads of Mitie staff hidden just out of sight, their kit all ready, calm, collected, primed to spring into action. This is how Chris described that late-night transformation.

Chris: You can go through the terminal, you go through the departure lounge, and all the retail units are closed and there’s no passengers around anymore. And you think, oh, this is a bit weird.

But then you get the cleaners coming out, deep cleaning. They’ve got the ride on machines. You’ve got the engineers going around. Everyone, yeah, everyone comes out of the woodwork at that point.

Ian: So it sounds like at Heathrow, high-performance doesn’t mean flashy innovation. It means reliability, anticipation and absolute coordination.

Chris [Moriarty]: Absolutely, and none of this happens by accident. It’s engineered. And increasingly, it’s informed by data.

Chris: We’ve seen with, failures in any industry, one of the first things that’ll look at when they’re doing the root cause analysis is what’s the maintenance history? Bring up the previous records. Especially with statutory compliance…

Nick: I think it begs the question about what you want to do going forward, and how you want to use data and technology to help inform you on condition-based maintenance planning and that’s where we are looking at the moment.

Ian: So, for those who don’t live and breathe maintenance like us FMs, let me just offer a quick explainer. ‘Reactive maintenance’ is when you have to scramble to fix something broken. ‘Planned preventative maintenance’ is where you service your equipment on a schedule to try and avoid breakdowns. And ‘condition-based maintenance’ is where you service your kit based not on a fixed schedule, but on how much use it’s had.

Chris [Moriarty]: So, thinking about my own car. Reactive is sorting a breakdown or a new fault. Planned is when I get it serviced every year. And condition-based is when my clever car tells me I need to have it serviced sooner because I’ve been driving differently?

Ian: Exactly that, nice analogy. So, Chris here explains how you can use bearing vibration data to move from planned to an increasingly sophisticated condition-based approach, where you can even set limits to trigger alerts on your maintenance platform – your ‘computer aided facilities management’ system, or CAFM for short.

Chris: Instead of the maintenance strategy of, on a calendar cycle, replacing the bearings on the rotating machinery, we started undertaking vibration analysis, which gives us the condition of the bearings and the rotating equipment so we can understand, what the condition of that is without having to take anything apart.

We’re now trying to develop that with remote continuous vibration monitoring. So, you can just stick a transducer on the side of a rotating piece of machinery, and you can set alert levels on the platforms.

You can set your alarm levels so that you can then plan your maintenance intervention on it. I think the next step from that is to take the human element out of that. You connect it to your CAFM. And it pings and tells you when to raise a fault.

Ian: I remember about a decade ago, the increasing hype about the automation of FM and the impact that IoT, the Internet of Things – or sensor enabled connected devices, in other words – was going to have on our built environment. So, it sounds like what we’ve got here at Heathrow is actually a great hype-free use case, where IoT plus AI enables better decision making?

Chris [Moriarty]: Absolutely. All in service of maximum uptime balanced against the most efficient maintenance regime, which ultimately equates to less downtime, more flights and happier travellers.

Nick: So, it’s not necessarily a cost saving initiative. It’s all about preventing those unwanted interventions, going forward.

Ian: Ok. Very good. But I want to just check something else. Am I right in saying that Heathrow is home to some of those cleaning robots that you got so excited about in series one, when we visited Mitie’s cleaning innovation centre in Birmingham?

Chris [Moriarty]: Ooooooooh yes!

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Chris [Moriarty]: ‘I’m busy cleaning’. I remember them from series one.

Chris: Yeah. It’s one of our autonomous fleets. We recently renewed the fleet, so these are all much newer robots out now.

Chris [Moriarty]: How many have you got?

Chris: 32, across the airport. We have these out during the day. They’re brilliant.

Nick: Hugely popular with passengers.

Chris: I enjoy coming in and seeing the passengers – and there’s another one at the other end of arrivals – and the amount of times I’ve seen people with their phone following it along and having a video call, [saying] ‘look at this!’

It’s great that it’s out during the day and it’s doing little pickups, but you can see here actually the reflection on the floor and that sheen.

Chris [Moriarty]: Yeah.

Chris: Because we’ve got a bigger fleet of robots that come out at night when all the passengers are gone, we’re getting that constant deep cleaning. And it means we can get one of the robots to complete a large area and do a really good job. And then that releases the cleaners that would’ve had to cover that space and they can go and focus on the smaller areas or the more complex places.

Nick Eckert: It really helps with passenger immediate perception of what’s clean. ‘Cause it just shines.

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Ian: Ahhhh. Bless. Shiny insta-friendly robots. How lovely.

Chris: Don’t you be so judgy, Mr Ellison. They’re great for PR, but as you just heard, they share the workload more effectively, so Mitie’s human crew can crack on and do the more complicated stuff. In other words, data and automation here don’t replace people. They help people be in the right place, doing the right work, at the right time.

Ian: Noted. But stepping back a bit, Heathrow exists for a very specific purpose – it’s a hub for the international movement of people and goods. Not every workplace is trying to optimise for reliability at this sort of scale.

So let’s change tack. What happens when performance isn’t about keeping a huge, complicated system up and running, but is more about learning, creativity and change? So to explore this facet of the future of work, I arranged a call with Greg Lindsay. Chris, you’re going to need to pay attention for this bit.

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Greg: I’m Greg Lindsay. I am a non-resident senior fellow at MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and several other places as well.

Future of work has been an ongoing interest of mine for nearly 15 years, particularly with the intersection of workplaces and the city, and rethinking the boundaries between the office as a pure container for work and the more broader urban ecosystem.

Ian: Greg is an urbanist and a futurist. He’s also won the American TV show ‘Jeopardy!’ twice, and – it says this on his website – is the only human to go undefeated against IBM’s Watson, IBM’s own AI platform that analyses large volumes of data, answers questions and generates insights from it. I just thought you should know that. Talking to him is a bit like getting on a rollercoaster and holding on tight.

Greg: What are cities ultimately? They are places where we compress people together in space and time for good things to happen. Whether that’s new ideas, innovation, whether that is growth and wages. Cities exist ultimately of places of trade and exchange and where work happens.

For me, the highest performing workplaces are places that will allow people hopefully to reach their full potential. But then there is this broader question of, what is a high-performing workplace? What is performance even mean?

Ian: See what I mean, Chris?

Chris: Yep. Consider my circuits fried already. I bet you loved it as well. So that’s all well and good, but what does he have to say about the future of places then, and with his specific lens, workplaces?

Greg: I’m particularly interested in workplaces that don’t simply become containers for work, where work gets done, but lend themselves to more variable outcomes.

Places that open themselves up as receptive to new ideas are to me the highest performing places, and those are not ones where you simply put on headphones and blinders and focus on your face down work. It’s a question of, how do you bring in new ideas? How do you communicate and collaborate at times? And then at other times you focus on work.

It’s not just a question of technology. It’s not just a question of luxury. In terms of a workplace, it’s a question of, what are you actually trying to achieve and how can you enable people? That’s the first question to start with. What is work? How does work span physical space and virtual space? How do we think holistically about how work gets done and how people can pivot from one mode of working to another? I just think we’re still stuck in a lot of these linear processes.

Ian: So if I was going to summarise this, I’d say Greg was talking about the tension between ‘productivity’ – getting stuff done, and ‘innovation’ – making things better.

Greg: To me there’s a continuum between strategy and serendipity. And so, most organisations are obsessed with strategy. We have this idea, we’re going to execute upon it. We want a workspace and a process that supports the execution of this idea.

But there’s so many examples where it’s the ability to learn on the ground and to adapt into it and to quickly change direction where you’re going. And so I would argue the highest performing spaces are those where people are able to quickly assemble ideas, to make connections within their organisations and outside of them to gather those facts and go there.

And so again, it’s not just about a private office or a huddle room or collaboration space, but it’s this broader support ecosystem of space and technology and organisation that allows you to quickly arrive at the answers you’re trying to find and supports you around these things.

Ian: Greg was over in the UK last year, talking about self-driving organisations – an analogy that references self-driving cars.

Greg: The real question is what is the future of organisations and what does that even mean? And realigning human tasks. And with the rise of AI and the whole discussion around agentic AI and this idea of agents and digital twins of people…

Ian: Another quick explainer – you might have heard the phrase ‘digital twin’ in relation to buildings, where a detailed digital model of a real facility or city is created to simulate scenarios and test outcomes. A digital twin of a person applies the same idea to knowledge work: an AI system trained on someone’s documents, decisions, and patterns to replicate aspects of their expertise or communication style. So, Zoom’s CEO Eric Yuan has even spoken about building a digital twin of himself that could attend meetings or help make decisions on his behalf.

Back to Greg:

Greg: … we get to the notion, which we’ve discussed before, of self-driving organisations. What if I, as an individual, wanna start something and now – I don’t need to hire anybody. Perhaps I just spin up a hundred, a thousand agents that are able to do and form tasks for me. So, what do you need a workspace for then? Or what is it for? And I think there’s a lot of questions around this, about what is all this for?

And I would argue that spaces will be where you bring people together in space and time to allow this compression of ideas and sharing. And then you’re going to have agentic workflows happening in the background. And you have 24/7 deep time of all sorts of AI agents happening here, where you have human leadership, together working in the physical space, in human time there.

They might think deeper in time where if you once worked for the firm, you always will work for the firm either because we’ll bring you back as a human, or maybe we have a digital twin of you that we created based on your time here. It’s gonna get a little bit weird, to say the least.

Chris: So, in short, Greg’s saying that the future of work will likely involve humans, AI agents and digital twins of humans who may not even work for an organisation any more, but whose knowledge and contribution may actively live on beyond their time at the organisation?

Ian: He absolutely is. And this will all have an impact on high-performing spaces and places.

Greg: We learned from the pandemic and the push to mostly remote, that you could have different organisational tempos, boundaries, compositions and things. And those will require different real estate strategies and different place strategies.

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Chris: So, let’s take stock quickly. I learnt at Heathrow that the future of that particular high-performing place was all about enhancing complex service provision through advanced data and technology, ensuring the most efficient service uptime.

Ian: And I learnt from my discussion with Greg, that future organisations will need to blend human and agentic digital performance as they seek to unlock and harness the tacit knowledge that will enable better overall performance.

Chris: So, a business like Mitie needs to embrace both of these perspectives, and everything in between, for all their different services and clients, right?

Ian: Absolutely. Which means it also needs to be at the forefront of how we think about AI from an ethical perspective. Time for one last guest.

Gareth: My name’s Gareth Rees. I’m the Director of Enterprise Technology here at Mitie, which is a very broad role that sees me dealing with everything from the very start of a business idea and how it’s conceptualised through to the delivery of that solution, and how our overarching enterprise strategy for technology enables our business to achieve their long-term goal.

Chris: Gareth is one of those rare breed of IT folk who not only know their onions back to front and inside out, but are extremely good at explaining them in laymen’s terms too.

Gareth: So, part of my role is advising and guiding our senior executives around technology and the future of technology. We’re advising and guiding the marketing team on the future of technologies. And that, coupled with our general value propositions around how we build and maintain great spaces, the two naturally marry together.

When we talk about the future of high-performing places, we’re actually really talking about how kind of people, data and technology work together. To create environments that sort of think and adapt and improve continuously. AI and IoT and automation are sort of giving us the ability to sense what’s happening in a space and make decisions in real time, and that helps us respond better before issues really arise.

And obviously technology on its own doesn’t make a place high-performing. It’s about how we use it responsibly with fairness and transparency and kind of, human judgment right in the centre of that. And I think that balance between intelligence and accountability is sort of what will define the next generation of smart places.

Ian: This sort of language – words like responsibility, fairness, transparency and human judgement – feel really important right now, as we see debates about the timeline for AGI – artificial general intelligence, a sophisticated form of AI that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks at a level comparable to a human – rumble along in the media.

But of course, actions speak louder than words, so how has Mitie formalised an approach to address what you might call ‘ethical AI’, both in terms of governance and deployment?

Gareth: We really started our AI governance and assurance journey back in November of 2023 when we were just starting to think about, is Microsoft Copilot a good solution for Mitie? And do we think it’ll add value to our organisation? Even though we could see the potential of it, we were immediately drawn to the potential risks.

How does this work? How do we protect ourselves? How do we indemnify the company against things that might be generated? And that sort of led us, quite quickly, to think about ‘how do we use all technologies that have AI features in a responsible way?’. And back in December ‘23, we issued our first draft of our responsible and ethical use of AI policy. So, whilst generative AI and AI in general is becoming much more ‘trendy’ and people are talking about it more now, we really began our journey to prepare for this back in 2023.

So, I often feel that we were ready and waiting. We were HD ready, almost, for AI to boom. Because we’d already started to think about, how do we use this in a very responsible and ethical way.

Chris: And I guess it also helps if you can phone some helpful friends, right?

Gareth: We’ve got a very good, strong relationship with Microsoft as a technology partner, and have a great relationship with their Chief Digital Officer.

So, rather than reinventing the wheel, standing on the shoulders of other giants, how do we adopt and take the best practices from the people that have gone before us?

And we’ve really been just evolving from there. I established the AI ethics board quite soon after that and we took a multidisciplinary, diverse viewpoints approach to that. You know, that board is more than twenty colleagues strong, and it contains representation from the whole breadth of Mitie. So everything from, legal, employment law, corporate law, marketing is in there, sales are in there. Obviously, some IT folk are in there. We have to think about how the systems are secured and used along with everything from products, teams and internal communications.

‘Cause, policy is good and great, but actually if much like AI systems, if it’s built on bias viewpoints, on narrow viewpoints, actually, you get very narrow outcomes, and we wanted to make sure that when we think about the responsible governance of AI at Mitie, actually it’s a very inclusive concept.

We’ve chosen to hold ourselves, even in the absence of UK legislation, to the EU AI Act, which is a fairly high bar. So, we’re pursuing this innovative approach to selecting use cases, but a very risk-based approach to securing and governing the responsible use of that technology.

I hope for the sector that this is being done elsewhere, although I don’t see it widely being talked about, if I’m completely honest.

Ian: What’s at the heart of Gareth’s thinking is using technology responsibly, ethically, to help people focus more on the human side of service delivery. And it kind of underpins how Gareth sees the future of high-performing workplaces, writ large. I really like the ambition and potential alive in his ideas. Listen to this:

Gareth: I have this slightly utopian and lofty view of the future where we have autonomous self-regulating, self-healing spaces.

Where traditionally you may have had a lot of human colleagues that are really doing things that just are the hygiene factors of a space. Maybe keeping the space cool, keeping the space warm, ensuring that we understand when a space has been used and should be cleaned. Actually, I think we can supercharge our human colleagues with better intelligence and allow the people that we do have in those buildings to be able to work in a much more data driven and intelligence driven way.

So I think as a user of the space part of this mission is about creating delightful and engaging spaces. And part of that for me is just that the space is able to adapt and react to the way it’s being used. So, I think the kind of, the vision of the future is that people will see the space as a bit of an autonomous organism that wraps around them and helps them to deliver their best work.

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Chris: Well Ian, I think it’s time to take stock. As we said at the start of the episode, we need to bring all of the ideas from the series together, to help us answer one final question – what is the future of high-performing places?

Ian: Looking back across the series, I think you can see a pattern emerge. In the first episode we saw how exceptional people create a virtuous circle, then learnt how individual commitment can become collective strength, benefiting wider communities.

Chris: At the ISOC, we learned that safety and security are inseparable, and that collaboration across public and private sectors is no longer optional. It’s a business imperative.

Ian: And in multigenerational workplaces, we saw that designing for “generations” misses the point. High-performing places focus on universal human needs, while recognising different perspectives and experiences.

Chris: So across everything we’ve explored, including in this final episode, high performance isn’t about a single metric. It’s about how people, technology and systems interact over time to facilitate better business decisions.

Ian: Which actually resonates very well with something Greg said towards the end of our discussion, so he can have the very last word of series two. He’s referring, by the way, to Michael Polanyi’s famous quote “we know more than we can tell” from his 1966 book, The Tacit Dimension.

Greg: If there’s a foundational idea for me, it’s Polanyi’s quote about tacit knowledge. We have all of this task knowledge in us that is nearly impossible to get out, or only comes out under the right circumstances.

I feel so much of knowledge work, or at least so much of innovation discourse, is the equivalent of trying to spin tumblers on a lock. You do not know the combination that will unlock these things. We pretend with strategy and productivity, and we pretend these metrics matter, but the breakthroughs, the game changers, these things are ultimately the product of tacit knowledge and no one really knows how to produce it.

So again, what are people for? They are to unlock that tacit knowledge in their own heads and from others. And to do that, you have to be in novel combinations of places with novel combinations of people. And that will require a whole different form of thinking about performance and place and about where they can be in this.

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Chris:  So there we are. Thank you to everyone who’s listened and thank you to everyone who’s contributed.

If you’ve enjoyed the show, please rate and review it, and please share with others. It really helps spread the word.

Ian: Now, many generous folks have been involved in the making of this second series, and we want to say thank you to them all. In particular, David Crackles, who was our dialogue editor for the project, and Claire Johnson from Mitie, the most efficient and patient podcast project manager I’ve encountered.

Ian: Thank you also to the following guests: In episode one, thanks to Johnny Gutteridge, Becca Meehan, Toby Cuniffe, Kyeisha Adams, Sam Berry, Helen Longfils and Sarah Kerridge.

Chris: In episode two, thanks to Emma Kay, Jason Towse, Barrie Millet, Scott Wesley, Samantha Norman, Danny Pitt and Paul Furnell.

Ian: In episode three, thanks to Dr Paul Redmond, Ann-Marie Aguilar, Elizabeth Linden, Sarah Tait, Sue Hyun and Leagh Cater.

Chris: And finally in episode four, thanks to Greg Lindsay, Nick Eckhert, Chris Watts and Gareth Rees.

Ian:  The Mitie Podcast is a Workplace Geeks production for Mitie, by us, Ian Ellison and Chris Moriarty. You can find the regular show, Workplace Geeks, wherever you get your podcasts.

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[BLOOPER]

Chris Moriarty: The threat of major terrorist attacks since the noughties, coupled with the ongoing, you… [bleep]

It is a 10 o’clock test. It’s a minute late. Right. Where was I?