Smart Office software applications have become popular in driving employee engagement and performance in the new millennial-packed workplace. In this white paper, we will highlight the three fundamental technology components that are critical in integrating multiple smart office applications for the best workplace efficiency and employee experience.
Having a nameplate at your office door today is like using a mainframe computer in a backroom instead of mobile apps. In a modern workplace, everything and everyone is mobile, and not the least the millennial generation workforce. The corporate office design is adapting to this cultural change, accordingly, with flex-desking, activity-based working, and agile office programs.
According to the industry research, by Herman Miller Corp, seventy percent of US office workers today work in open-plan offices. And that seems to be working, as according to the same research, nine out of ten of the highest performing workplaces today are using open plans. But the technology used in many of these modern offices is still stagnant and can barely support the new generation of flexible workers.
When the first wave of smart office technologies came, some 5-10 years ago, it started by mainly supporting CRE managers’ space planning needs, with design tools, occupancy sensor data, and office utilization reports. The purpose was to assist managers in managing life in the new open office, with the best workspace efficiency and employee/desk ratios.
In the last couple of years, however, the corporate leaders have realized that, while the new well-optimized flexible office design may have been the best solution for the optimal CRE space utilization, the surprising side effect was – unhappy workers.
Stressing Life in Agile Office
Office worker’s daily journey at work today may include questions like these:
“Where can I find a free work desk today? Is the one on the 2nd floor available now?”
“Where is the available meeting room for us right now? Which one is nearest to me?”
“I agreed to meet with Jane and Bob, but where are they? They do not have assigned desks anymore.”
“I need to use a quiet room/phone booth, but which one is now available and where?”
“In our five-building campus, my next meeting is in the ‘Compass’ meeting room – but where is it?”
“How can I help our guests and visitors to find today’s event location in building 15?”
All these extra questions and steps fuel the employee frustration and negative work experience.
Radical Shift in Management Thinking
In this new hyper-mobile environment, it's no surprise that employee engagement and experience have emerged as a top priority for most of the corporate managers. It has become evident that the human experience is directly connected to human performance - happy employees improve customer satisfaction and produce better financial results.
According to JLL global Research team's survey with CRE executives last year, employee experience has already replaced the financial performance as the #1 priority for CRE teams. It also reports that 70% of employees say that happiness at work is the best ingredient for unique work experience.
Nonetheless, while most executives now understand that employee engagement directly affects an organization's financial health and profitability, still just 34% of American workers are engaged by their jobs, according to Gallup 2018 survey, and 14% describe themselves as "actively disengaged."
This gap, between the management understanding and the reality back in the office, is driving the shift in the next generation smart office technology solutions. Management analytics and planning tools are not enough anymore. New solutions are needed for employees themselves, to assist during their workday, for the best possible workplace performance and experience.
The war for talent, for millennials particularly, also supports this trend. Millennials, who already represent 50% of today's workforce, expect excellent work experience, an engaging environment, and helpful mobile technology. According to Future Workforce Study by Dell/Intel, 42% of millennials would quit their job without the right technology, and 82% believe that workplace technology would influence them when deciding to accept a new job.
Popular Smart Office Apps Today
Here are some of the new smart office applications, that are already helping workplace productivity and boosting positive employee experience:
Workspace Booking – for reserving workspace, desk or room, on mobile phone
Wayfinding - for finding a way to a workspace, colleague, or our lunchtime yoga class!
Employee feedback – for making managers aware of workplace experience and issues
Workspace analytics - for office space planning and layout recommendations
In this white paper, we argue that to support these next-gen applications, to achieve the two essential goals – improving the workspace efficiency AND workforce experience - there must be interoperability between all these functionalities, to work jointly as one solution. We further claim that three critical technology components will act as the glue in orchestrating all these applications to work together – as a best practice smart office platform.
#1 – Indoor Positioning System (IPS) and Wayfinding solutions
In the past, most offices comprised of a lobby area, desks cubicles, private offices, and a few meeting rooms. It was quite easy to navigate. Now, in the new agile environment, the workspace can include breakout areas, collaborative space, quiet rooms, focus rooms, phone booths, auditoriums, cafeterias, social spaces, gyms, locker rooms, bike storage. Multiply all that with 10s of buildings in large corporation campuses, that are more like small towns than offices, and this maze becomes a significant challenge for not only to visitors but also for always-mobile employees. It does not help that there are no assigned desks anymore i.e., known locations of colleagues.
In that challenge, IPS, as the “indoor GPS,” is here to help. It keeps the smartphone and its users always connected to the accurate location on the office floor plan. It can pinpoint the location of mobile people, workspaces, and other points of interest and help to automate many smart-office functions such as wayfinding, room booking, and workspace analytics.
Is it Wayfinding or Indoor Positioning?
Often Wayfinding and IPS are considered the same thing, but that is not entirely accurate. You can compare this to your mobile Google navigation experience. You can think IPS as the “GPS chip” inside the phone, producing the right location or the “blue dot,” while Wayfinding is the turn-by-turn directions and guidance on the map between the point A and B.
Can Wayfinding be used without IPS? Yes, sure, for example, by using a digital mobile map that the user must advance while walking and while hoping to know her current location. On the other hand, when searching for a colleague by name, have the app pointing to the floor plan location of the assigned desk of such an employee (that is if she happens to be there right then) — or just using physical signage on hallways to guide visitors to named locations.
But, just like with Google navigation, if your phone automatically knows its location indoors, with IPS, the contextual challenge and extra searching effort is eliminated.
Sometimes location technology such as IPS is seen as a potential privacy risk. Increasingly, the average user-perception is that IPS benefits outweigh its potential security risks – as long it can be turned off when needed. Therefore, the best practice implementation gives users an option to opt-in / opt-out, and to turn off the IPS for those times when sharing location is not desired. Even with this, for the best employee adoption of the technology, we cannot emphasize enough the importance of pre-deployment communication and education. For example, during the launch, what has worked well for us is using physical roll-up posters in the lobby and entrance areas for promoting the purpose and benefits of new employee applications.
The Best Practice IPS for Smart Office
Now, there are different IPS technology solutions available on the market, since its first appearance some 20 years ago. One often-used method is to have the smartphone to relay on Wi-Fi access points as “indoor satellites.” There are challenges and lots of work with Wi-Fi. The network requires calibration effort; its accuracy cannot always put you in the right room or to get it accepted from the corporate IT department. To share the Wi-Fi network with IPS is not easy, and receiving better accuracy, more access points must be added for the denser network, which may become expensive, especially considering enterprise-grade Wi-Fi access points.
The most hassle-free IPS solution today, with an optimal accuracy for Smart Office applications, is to use BLE beacons, that can be easily attached around the building. With best BLE solutions, it’s no more complicated than installing smoke-detectors in pre-defined, numbered locations, without any new mapping or calibration. Smartphone apps then use these beacons as a “location fix” when they pass by.
With all this, here at Steerpath, we are very much convinced that in 2020 the best-practice smart office solutions can significantly benefit from leveraging the IPS technology.
#2 – Occupancy sensors
In the first wave of smart office tech, occupancy sensors were mainly used for collecting the office occupancy data for space planning purposes, for improving the workspace utilization and efficiency. With new applications, the use of occupancy data is expanding for providing the real-time availability status of each work desk and a meeting room. By together with IPS, it is helping employees in finding and booking available workspace and accomplishing the daily work with a better experience.
Occupancy sensors are still an important data source for workspace analytics. In a large corporate campus, the management needs to gain visibility into how exactly all different office areas are being used. According to industry research, on average, 40% traditional corporate office space sits idle, under-utilized. That’s wasting CRE budgets on space!
The data from occupancy sensors tell managers where the empty office space is, or where workspace capacity is maxed-out and provides actionable insights for layout changes. Best solutions even come with AI-supported predictive recommendations, about how to change the workspace layout, when anticipating the future growth or decline of the employee count.
Occupancy sensors, occupancy data, and detailed analytics have, therefore, become table stakes for any smart office and certainly deserve to be called as one of the must-have data tools for a smart office in 2020.
#3 – Digital facility maps/floor plans
None of this mobile office tech would work optimally without a digital mapping system, as a contextual background for all workspace, people, and asset-related information. However, not all digital mapping technologies are created equal, so the buyer should pay attention to it.
It’s relatively easy to get “a digital map” representing floor plans in every building and floor, by saving CAD pictures to JPG. But if that map is just a static digital image, which is not up to date with the latest facility CAD drawings and other office information, then much of the potential value is lost, and maintenance problems will emerge.
The best practice solution today is to have a digital mapping system closer to a “digital twin” concept. The digital twin is a digital representation of the real facility data and workplace. It’s an interactive user-editable web document so that you can add and remove points of interest, for search and find, change the naming and category of the workspaces and rooms, and have it connected to the IoT sensor data and CAD drawings. This way, any facility renovation or new construction is easy to update, and your digital-twin stays intact – representing the actual reality.
Putting this all together
After all these details, the story of Smart Office apps and enabling technologies may sound overly complicated. After all, the focus should be on employee experience, not on IT. One key takeaway for business buyers is to search for modular solutions that are already integrated as a commercial solution. Otherwise, you may be looking at a complex IT systems integration project with a big budget and lengthy project plans with multiple stakeholders. There are solutions on the market, such as Steerpath, that are “configurable,” without requiring “customization.”
When you take a deeper dive into the system architecture of such an integrated solution, as pictured in the table below, you can see that, while under the hood, it may look complicated, all these functions are, and should be, interconnected.
