How Smart Could Your Office Be?

They say you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone; in many respects, that can now be said about the office, with up to 80% of office workers missing human interaction with colleagues.

Pandemic-induced working from home may have pushed us further from our offices physically, but it has also brought offices sharply into focus. It’s wrong to suggest offices were an afterthought pre-Covid-19, but undoubtedly, the pandemic has accelerated many of the trends we were seeing around work and the workspaces we used. Supporting hybrid working models is important for organisations, but the office is not dead.

So, places that provide productive, collaborative, and impressive in-building experiences are key. As organisations plan their return to offices, they need to ensure they utilise spaces that make this possible. Offices that do make this possible leverage technology effectively. This blog takes a quick look at what technology is making offices smarter than ever and creating impressive in-building experiences.

Frictionless experiences: Digital infrastructure is key

You can’t construct a building without a foundation; it’s the exact same premise for designing smarter places to work. Fantastic in-building experiences can’t exist without a digital infrastructure that combines robust connectivity, collaboration tools and enterprise-grade security.

Digital infrastructure has the power to create a fully connected space: think doors, sensors, screens and printers all connected, with the sole purpose of making your teams’ lives easier. An often-overlooked element of digital infrastructure is the ability to create private networks. This prevents bandwidth hogs from impacting everyone else’s experience and heightens security, too.

From a company’s perspective, this should make the space easier to manage (as there is far less to worry about or manage yourself) and from a user’s perspective, it leads to more productive, frictionless experiences.

When moving around a building, touchless experiences are powerful. Businesses should be able to interact with physical space in a contactless and secure way throughout the building.

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The power to self-serve

The best experiences are frictionless, so offices should make it easy for employees to self-serve where possible. For example, when it comes to meeting room booking, businesses should have the power to do this from their mobile device, without the need to walk to a reception and book through somebody sat at a desk. This can be delivered through mobile apps and web portals.

The smartest space providers are applying their digital infrastructure across their locations; this means that for businesses running a dispersed workforce, their experience is the same regardless of the office they visit.

For users of the space, this makes it easier to collaborate with colleagues and can provide them with various spaces to work from that may give them the option to be closer to specific clients. From a company’s perspective, giving staff the power to self-serve boosts productivity and limits the need to invest more heavily in overheads to run a space.

Touchless interactions with your surroundings

When moving around a building, touchless experiences are powerful, not only for efficiency but also for cleanliness. Businesses should be able to interact with physical space in a contactless and secure way throughout the building; interacting with surroundings in this way makes for truly smart experiences.

We’re not just talking about access to the building or meeting rooms though; touchless interactions can also mean booking and paying for meeting rooms or private offices, buying a coffee or beer at the on-site bar, tapping to open or secure lockers or safely collecting paper from a printer. The goal with touchless experiences is to make the office both a productive and safe place for employees.

Data on space usage

Smart spaces should also arm you with data that helps shed light on when and how a space is being used. Data on footfall, bandwidth consumption and meeting room usage provides insight that gives companies a sense of how space is performing and will lead to ideas on how to improve it.

The result for companies utilising the space is the ability to make informed decisions about how to adapt space in-line with shifting requirements, whilst the result for the person using the space is better in-building experiences. For example, you may discover that certain meeting spaces are constantly under-utilised, so to maximise the effectiveness of the space you have, you may want to adapt what that area is used for (more desk space, a collaborative space or a quiet working area).

Bringing a building to life with flex

Offices that deliver against modern requirements will combine enterprise-grade digital infrastructure (connectivity, collaboration and security) with self-serve and touchless capabilities. They’ll also hold the ability to track everything that’s going on in the space, from bandwidth usage through to the number of desks available so that informed decisions can be made about how to evolve the space.

Landlords and space providers know that real estate is changing and those who adapt by creating flexible space that delivers amazing in-building experiences for businesses will thrive.

This article was written by essensys. If you’re a landlord or space provider determined to meet the needs of post-pandemic tenants, essensys provides the technology that enables you to do so. Find out more here.