Today’s workplace optimisation is set to get a whole lot smarter, safer, and more productive, through the Internet of Things
Are you too young to recall 1980s Ireland and the damp, dreary workplaces of the day? Where the gloomy office environment matched perfectly with the state of the economy?
Whether you remember it or not, lucky you: you live in a post-Celtic Tiger, post-collapse, post-recovery and now post-Covid Ireland, where the quality of workplaces has changed dramatically.
And buildings are set to become smarter and safer still, to the benefit of the people who manage workplaces, the people who work within them and even the planet itself.
Workplace optimisation – or using data gathered by IoT devices to intelligently manage and use the workspace – is top of mind among facilities managers coping with the paradigm shift to hybrid work.
Workplace utilisation has become less predictable, and attendance is often driven by personal preferences as much as business requirements.
This is causing companies to rethink their workforce strategy, and revamp work practices, for instance, introducing dedicated workstations and collaboration zones, to enhance employees’ experience within the workplace and of course to encourage productivity.
Many facets of office life, and the facilities needed to service them, are being reconsidered in the post-pandemic world of work. Draughty meeting rooms, crowded canteens, toilets, reception areas, postrooms, cleaning stations, storage rooms – the state and utility of all these and more are being analysed to optimise the modern workplace.
Our IoT devices can help. They discreetly and securely measure workplace utilisation using passive infrared (PIR) motion detection, measuring when and for how long each asset is used, and providing stakeholders with easy-to-understand reports and actionable insights.
Installation is quick and easy and can be completed in less than a week. The results are tangible and intangible benefits for all concerned.
Even at peak occupancy, so many workstations in your average building went unoccupied in the pre-pandemic world of work, due to leave or illness. Today, in the new hybrid working environment, it’s even higher.
Office overheads are the second-largest cost for professional services companies, and they are the largest source of their carbon footprint. You don’t have to stretch the imagination to far to see that rationalising workspace is a highly effective way to achieve two desirable business outcomes – cost savings and a reduced carbon footprint.
You can rationalise your workspace in two ways – utilising your space more efficiently when expanding the workforce or reducing your office space through lease renegotiation. Our accurate insights into current usage will help you plan for such decisions, while continuing to optimise into the future. You can build a picture of trends and usage as you optimise your workplace, and then use this data when planning and negotiating a new lease.
This all adds up to a greatly enhanced, efficient and more environmentally friendly office environment – one that’s fit for purpose as hybrid work and ESG come to the fore.
Many employees have embraced the flexibility provided by hotdesking in this new world of work, but it can of course cause stress and anxiety too. Often there’s a perception that there is no workstation available, or it can take time and energy running around a large office building to find one. Having accurate, real-time data on available desk space will solve this problem.
The data can be seamlessly and anonymously linked to the workstation booking systems to provide an enhanced employee experience, and a happy employee is a more productive, more loyal one, too.
Even if you’re not expanding or downsizing, you can still make dramatic improvements to your workplace layout by optimising it using intelligent data reports. Employees are looking for more collaborative workplaces, and less solo desk spaces, on the days they come into work.
You can use our data to inform these workplace redesigns, you can use the data to test ‘staff acceptance’ and you can make changes if you need to.
Our technology can also help your cleaning staff understand which parts of the office have been used on any particular day, prioritising those that have been used by people, and leaving those which were vacant to another day.
This saves their time, and also saves waste of cleaning fluids and materials. Even small changes in behaviour will help reduce damage to the environment – it all adds up in the end.
If this pandemic had occurred in the 1980s, and employees could choose to work from home, they’d never darken the office door again – and who could blame them? But today’s modern workplace can and should be an attractive place to spend at least couple of days each week.
It can be a hotbed of collaboration, ideation and innovation. It can be a magnet for top talent. And a genuine focus on employee wellbeing in the workplace, which can only be enhanced through workplace optimisation, will be a gamechanger in the coming months and years.
Get in touch to know about how you can achieve workplace optimisation or Get a free demo today!