Create Smart Offices That Optimize Employee Experience, Safety and Well-Being
The office is not dead but its purpose has shifted. Hybrid work has accelerated the evolution of corporate offices. Digital workplace application leaders can use this guide to create smart offices that are focused on employee well-being, safety and experience.
Overview
Key Findings
Forty percent of workers would prefer to work from a combination of locations, rather than working exclusively at a corporate office or from home. Failure to accommodate worker preferences is a threat to employee productivity and engagement, and could lead to attrition.
Smart offices are in their infancy, but employee expectations and evolving needs for the future workplace will accelerate their growth and adoption.
Traditional corporate offices — especially those that are poorly aligned to employee needs and preferences, that lack adequate focus on well-being, and that have limited collaborative workspaces — will not support the future of work.
Most organizations kick-start their smart office journeys with an integrated workplace management system or a resource scheduling application, further augmented by emerging technologies like IOT, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
Recommendations
Digital workplace application leaders responsible for smart office initiatives must:
Create a smart office team that includes real estate, facilities management, HR and internal communications to understand evolving employee expectations and needs.
Listen to your employees. Establish benchmarks for continuous improvement by conducting surveys, focus groups and interviews that understand and meet evolving hybrid workforce needs.
Reimagine and redesign physical offices by creating purpose-driven workspaces that foster employee collaboration, productivity and well-being in the workplace.
Select workplace applications and relevant technologies that use IoT, AI and machine learning to focus on employee journeys and touchpoints in the office.
Strategic Planning Assumptions
By 2022, adoption rates for seat reservation systems, space utilization tracking and workplace applications are expected to grow by over 150%.
By 2022, more than two-thirds of employees will consider flexible working arrangements to be a differentiator when selecting an employer.
By 2024, 60% of employees will prioritize a wellness-equipped smart office over a home office.
By 2025, 50% of corporate workspaces will be transformed into collaboration zones leveraged by employees as physical water coolers to socialize, collaborate and engage.
Introduction
The future of work is hybrid. Hybrid work offers employees greater flexibility to choose where to work, be it at home, in an office or in another location.
Evidence that employees want more autonomy and flexibility, and that employers are listening, is everywhere:
Employees’ desired flexibility in terms of location (59%) and work hours (64%) has increased.1
24% of CEOs cite workforce-related priorities in their top three for 2021 and 2022.2
69% of employees say that it’s important for employers to care about their well-being.2
Organizations are also rethinking the purpose of the corporate office and how their corporate real estate needs may shift. Seventy-two percent of CFOs anticipate the corporate real estate footprint will decrease in the next two years. Cost savings from decreased office footprint provides the opportunity for organizations to extend purpose- and technology-driven, intelligent experiences in office spaces.
A recent study concluded that 58% of workers have missed their offices substantially because of following elements:
Human socialization (44%)
Professional environments (31%)
Collective face-to-face work (44%)
Ergonomic workstations (21%)
The collective energy of an inclusive and equitable hybrid smart office unites employees in a common purpose and propels them to go the extra mile together.
The critical need for human connection will guide the reinvention of space. Providing space where employees can come together to socialize and collaborate will become the greatest purpose that an office can fulfill. Hybrid work has changed employee expectations of their organizations and workplaces, and workers have never been more in touch with what they want from their jobs. In fact, a recent study concluded that 96% of employees want to improve their work environments with intelligent workplace technology.
Smart offices leverage emerging technologies to help employees work happier, faster, and smarter by focusing the design and provision of the workplace on the employee journey.
The benefits of adopting smart offices include:
Improved employee experience, safety and well-being, which leads to better productivity, happiness and engagement.
Improved organizational brand (which helps to attract and retain talent).
Optimized, real-estate-specific building operations.
Cost savings through better space utilization.
Broader digital workplace strategies and goals.
Analysis
Create a Core Smart Office Team
A successful smart office initiative will be measured not just on the technology it employs, but also on how it meets the evolving needs of your employees, and how it measures successful business outcomes (like improved productivity, attrition/retention rate and reduced real estate operational costs). Digital workplace application leaders cannot create compelling office spaces to improve employee experience, safety and well-being on their own. It’s no longer good enough for IT, HR and RE/FM leaders to work in silos to address employee needs, workspace design and technology. To understand how a smart office can play a crucial role in supporting new ways of working, digital workplace application leaders must secure the participation of key business partners, creating a core cross-functional team that supports smart office efforts.
Digital workplace application leaders must act as technology enablers when assembling a smart office core team that includes key participants from IT, HR, real estate and internal communications. These team members must be conversant with the best practices and guidelines for smart office design to align and integrate with organization wide efforts. Actual responsibility and timelines for implementation of a successful smart office will vary with each function of the core team, however, responsibilities could include:
Human Resources: Listen to (and represent) the voice of the employee. Develop employee engagement initiatives to anchor cultural change. Build policies and practices around real-world usage.
Real Estate/Facilities Management: Discover and define best practices in collaborative workspace design and integrate technology to drive positive employee experience.
Internal Communications: Formulate a communication plan to inform employees of the benefits of the smart workplace, and get them excited about using it.
Digital Workplace Application Leaders: Assist in defining technical requirements and assessing vendor capabilities (through a well-defined RFI process) for smart office technologies.
Listen to the Voice of Your Employees
Employees can be an organization’s greatest champions or most damaging critics, so you must be keenly aware of their perceptions and expectations of the workplace. Application leaders that are responsible for the digital workplace are often challenged to ensure that workplace decisions meet the needs of employees with distinct behaviors and preferences. Also, employee expectations, sentiments and behaviors about the office have significantly evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Voice-of-the-employee solutions help organizations to collect and analyze employee opinions, perceptions and feelings related to their work experience.
Digital workplace application leaders in collaboration with HR leaders can leverage voice of the employee (VoE) solutions to gauge employee sentiments and perceptions. These solutions offer capabilities like engagement surveys, feedback tools, pulse surveys and other data sources to monitor employee sentiment and infer employee preferences, opinions and well-being.
Continuing to listen to this voice, even after your smart office is in place, will allow you to generate continuous feedback and insights. But listening to employees is just one end of the spectrum. Digital workplace application leaders must plan and act on the gathered information to create personalized workplace experiences that keep employees happy and engaged.
The smart office core team can use these employee insights and information to:
Design a workplace tailored to exactly what employees want and need.
Measure whether the smart office initiative has had the desired positive impact on perceptions and feelings.
Discover moments that matter by focusing on key indicators of positive or negative sentiment, especially where many employees align to the same sentiment.
Create workforce segments by using employee data to build and understand differentiated workforce segments. These segments guide considerations to incorporate for workspace experience redesign.
Reimagine and Redesign Physical Office Spaces
In a postpandemic world, traditional office layouts may not be the ideal solution for safety and well-being. Office spaces that are somehow disconnected from the people that use them make it hard for employees to stay emotionally invested, engaged and excited to come to work. We need to create purpose-built smart spaces that cater to different types of activities performed by the employees on a day-to-day basis.
Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, employee expectations of the workplace had already begun to change. There are already new and heightened expectations that organizations will need to understand and address while designing physical offices. Purpose-driven workspaces will have to meet the needs of both collaborative groups and individuals that need to focus on a solo task in peace.
A smart office is not just about technology, it is about taking a “hospitality” approach to the corporate workplace and creating spaces that employees love.
Purpose-driven workspaces allow employees to self-select the space best suited to their work, even as that work shifts.
Digital workplace application leaders must support organizations’ need for a holistic safety strategy that considers everyone’s safety, regardless of age, abilities or health issues. It is important to reduce people’s anxiety about their well-being at work with new safety elements like air quality, density, sanitization, smart cleaning sensors and touchless work environments. Include more and more biophilic design to bring nature into your workplace, as neuroscience tells us that if we are close to nature, we are more focused and productive.
One of the leading technology firms is creating a postpandemic workplace that will accommodate employees who got used to working from home over the past year and don’t want to be in the office all the time anymore. The technology firm is trying new office designs in millions of square feet of space to deliver exceptional employee experience and a sense of security when they come back. To create a consistent hybrid meeting experience, the company is also creating a new meeting room called “Campfire,” where in-person attendees sit in a circle interspersed with impossible-to-ignore, large vertical displays. The displays show the faces of people dialing in virtually, so remote participants get a similar meeting experience to those physically present.
Include a range of ergonomic seating arrangements like seated, stool-height, lounging, perching and standing to enable different kinds of work to happen more effectively. Redesign workspaces to accommodate emerging flexible work patterns like employer office, home office, hybrid and borderless. This prepares offices for resilience and allows them to easily adapt to emerging crises and new ways of working.
Integrate With Technology to Create Employee-Centric Smart Offices
Once you have designed your ideal office space, taking into consideration the voice of the employee and the activities you need to support, you can further ensure successful implementation by adding layers of technology.
To fit these pieces together, the smart office core team must ensure that the right technology fabric is selected to support various kinds of space and activity. Focusing on employee journeys and their touchpoints at the workplace helps identify the use cases and select the right technology and vendors.
Some organizations want to allow employees to schedule a desk using AI-based recommendations, use facial recognition to enter the building, and use wayfinding to find the desk, office or conference room that they reserved. They may also allow them to order lunch or schedule a workout, find other employees, or take a survey. The options are endless, and a majority of implementation time is spent making these decisions, where a focus on the employee journey can provide needed focus. Digital workplace application leaders must understand that a single solution may not meet the needs of all use cases. Instead, focus on integrations between smart office applications and workforce management applications, to render a seamless employee experience.
Seventy percent of organizations start a smart office journey by deploying an integrated workplace management system or a resource scheduling application . These smart office solutions help to continuously improve workplaces and achieve higher space efficiencies leading to reduction in corporate real estate cost. Integrating these with smart facility management applications (like BIM, BAS and BMS) can not only help employees to have a positive experience, but can help organizations optimize real estate building operations.
As the race toward digital business intensifies, digital workplace application leaders can harness various emerging technologies like IoT, AI, AR/VR that will enable workers to work faster and smarter. As organizations continue their smart office journey, you should further enhance employee experience by integrating smart office solutions with cloud office and collaboration tools, and provide workspace personalization capabilities such as temperature, air flow, posture and smart lighting.
