By Ian Ellison, Workplace Geeks

Listen to episode four now: What is the future of high-performing places? 

In this second series of The Mitie Podcast, we’ve taken listeners into working environments that most people rarely get to experience.

We began with Boulby Underground Laboratory, where exceptional people enable world-leading science deep beneath the North York Moors. We went behind the scenes at Mitie’s Intelligence Security Operations Centre to understand how private and public sector collaboration keeps communities safer. And with Lloyds Banking Group, we looked at how wider social and technological change shapes multi-generational workplaces.

In each episode we’ve looked at high performance from a different angle. And in this final episode, we draw those threads together and ask one final question: What is the future of high-performing places?

Performance under pressure

To get us started, Chris headed to London Heathrow, an airport that needs little introduction. More than 80 million travellers pass through Heathrow every year. It forms part of the UK’s critical national infrastructure, under intense regulatory scrutiny, with no margin for error.

Listening back, what struck me wasn’t the scale. It was the discipline. Across the airport, around 70,000 statutory inspections take place each year, alongside roughly 130,000 planned maintenance activities. Most of this work takes place within a narrow overnight window, after the final flight and before the first departure of the morning. There is always a live runway. There is rarely slack in the system.

Here, high performance isn’t about sparkle. It’s about reliability. Nick Eckert, Heathrow’s Head of Engineering, and Chris Watts, Mitie’s Head of Hard Services on the Heathrow contract, describe an operation that feels less like an airport and more like a micro-city. Precise maintenance of assets, so they’re always available. Careful coordination of work with multiple stakeholders. The cost of failure isn’t an abstract concept and mistakes can rapidly compound.

Increasingly, this coordination is informed by data. Condition-based maintenance replaces calendar-based scheduling. Vibration monitoring predicts when bearings in the machinery or equipment are likely to fail. Sensors trigger system alerts prompting engineers to intervene at the right moment. Cleaning robots handle routine work so human teams can focus on more complex tasks.

All of these approaches maximise uptime through the intelligent use of resources. Resilience at the airport is effectively engineered via a multitude of smart solutions. It’s a truly high-performing place.

From uptime to innovation

But not every high-performing place looks like Heathrow. In most organisations performance isn’t measured by aircraft departures or inspection counts. Instead, success is dependent on ideas, learning and innovation. The risks might be less immediate, but they’re no less real.

To explore this side of performance, I spoke with urbanist and futurist Greg Lindsay. Greg challenges the assumption that workplaces are simply vehicles for productivity. Cities, he argues, compress people together in space and time, allowing new ideas to emerge. The same principle applies to organisations.

Performance is not just about executing strategy. It is about enabling serendipity – the kind of insight that appears when people and ideas intersect in unforeseen ways. Most organisations, Greg explains, are structured around linear processes to achieve predefined outcomes. But breakthroughs rarely follow neat plans. They emerge when tacit knowledge surfaces in the right context. And as Michael Polanyi famously put it, “We know more than we can tell.”

In this sense, high-performing places are environments that help unlock that knowledge. They allow people to move between focused work and collaborative exchange. They support different tempos. They create conditions to promote ideation and can adapt quickly when needed.

Humans and agents

The complication is that increasingly, knowledge work is no longer exclusively human. Greg speaks about “self-driving organisations” as analogous to self-driving cars. AI agents can already perform discrete tasks, synthesise information and support decision-making. And in future, “digital twins” of employees – AI models built from someone’s accumulated knowledge, outputs and working style – may conceivably extend an individual’s contribution beyond their own physical presence.

This raises practical questions. If AI agents can operate continuously in the background, while humans collaborate to shape direction and judgement, what is the function of place in a human-digital hybrid system?

The answer is not that physical space disappears. If anything, its role becomes clearer. Spaces remain where people assemble in real time to interpret, decide and connect. Agentic systems may process information at scale, but humans still carry responsibility, context and moral judgement. The future of high-performing places, then, is unlikely to be purely automated or purely human. As things currently stand, it looks set to be a carefully coordinated blend.

Responsibility as infrastructure

Such coordination brings us to an issue that underpins the future of work – digital ethics. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should! Gareth Rees, Mitie’s Director of Enterprise Technology, describes how the organisation began formalising its approach to AI governance as early as 2023. Before generative AI became a boardroom talking point, Mitie established a cross-functional AI ethics board of more than twenty colleagues and issued their responsible and ethical use of AI policy.

This group includes legal, marketing, IT, product and communications representation. The aim isn’t to slow innovation, but to ensure it’s governed inclusively and transparently. Mitie has chosen to align itself with the EU AI Act, even in the absence of equivalent UK legislation, applying a risk-based approach to deployment.

So while words like governance, accountability and human judgement can sound abstract, in practice, they determine whether people trust the systems they are asked to use. In a world where workplaces increasingly blend sensor data, automation, AI agents and human decision-making, digital ethics become part of operational resilience. Without trust, performance degrades. It is as foundational as the maintenance regimes at Heathrow.

High-performing places? They’re multi-faceted…

Across this series, a pattern has emerged. At Boulby Underground Laboratory, we saw how exceptional people sustain complex scientific work. At the ISOC, we saw how intelligence and collaboration underpin safer environments. In multigenerational workplaces, we explored how attention, wellbeing and purpose shape human capability. At Heathrow, we witnessed performance engineered under pressure.

The future of high-performing places is not about a single metric. It is about how people, systems and technology interact over time. Some environments demand mechanical reliability. Others demand mental flexibility. Increasingly, many demand both.

The organisations set to thrive will be those that integrate data without losing judgement, automate without eroding trust, and design spaces that both enable focused work and foster collective insight.

High performance in the years ahead will not simply mean being efficient or innovative. It will mean being capable and responsible at the same time, in a world where humans and intelligent systems work side by side. Achieving both, together, will define the organisations that endure.