Smart Office Revolution

Smart Offices are connected workplaces which use the Internet of Things to automate processes and streamline tasks. The term Smart Office was coined...

Smart Office Revolution

How the IoT will reshape your people, processes and technology

What is a Smart Office?

Smart Offices are connected workplaces which use the Internet of Things to automate processes and streamline tasks.

The term Smart Office was coined around the mid-2010s. However, our offices have been getting smarter since the 1990s.

This began with the introduction of desktops, laptops and the internet. Over the 2000s, these technologies became more sophisticated, broadband was introduced as well as mobile phones and basic cloud computing.

Over the past decade, bandwidth speeds have skyrocketed. At the same time, increased storage and computing power has made it possible for us to automate and analyse processes like never before. As a result, the internet has become integral to just about every workplace process.

What are the benefits of a smart office?

There are all kinds of benefits, but they can be reduced down to three core things:

Productivity - by automating repetitive tasks
Experience - by streamlining tasks such as room booking and providing more control over lighting and temperature
Utilisation - by providing data on how much your desks and meeting rooms are really being used

5 ways Smart Offices enhance the employee experience

#1 - Visitor management

The success of a meeting isn’t just down to what happens in the room. It takes into account the whole experience. Struggling to find a parking space, drawn-out security checks at reception and not being able find your way around. All of these can undermine the experience, which impacts how we feel about the meeting.

One of the key features of Smart Office technology is joining up previously separate systems and processes to create better experiences. The meeting invite can include a car parking space number, security credentials can be shared in advance and wayfinding screens can show visitors where they need to be. From arrival, to checking in at reception, to finding the room, the experience is planned out in advance, creating minimal friction on the day.

#2 - Wayfinding

Remote working may be on the rise but offices are also getting larger. In fact, over the past twenty years Silicon Valley’s ‘corporate campuses’ have created workplaces the scale of which has never been seen before. Apple’s 2.8 million square foot Apple Park, the 3.1 million square foot Googleplex and Microsoft’s eight million square foot Redmond Campus are a few examples.

Coupled with scale, our offices are becoming more multi-faceted. In the past, most offices comprised of a reception area, banks of desks and a few meeting rooms. This made them quite easy to navigate. Now they can include breakout areas, auditoriums, cafeterias, social spaces, gyms, locker rooms and storage for bikes or other transport.

For visitors, remote workers and new employees, this can be a real problem. Using modern wayfinding screens, employees can search for rooms, meetings that are happening and even employees. The screens can also show available rooms and let you book them.

#3 - Light and temperature controls

In a 2017 survey that asked employees to choose the Smart Office features they think would be most useful, the most popular were environmental. Specifically:

Self-adjusting lighting and window shades
The ability to personalise heat and light settings for one’s immediate space, and have those settings follow you around the building
Circadian lighting systems that mimic natural daylight
Heat and lighting systems that adjust automatically according to weather and occupancy

Most of us will have sat in a meeting room which has the heating on in July. Or been given a desk beside a window which causes direct sunlight to bounce off our screens and into our eyes at certain times of day. Naturally, staff want to be comfortable and have some control over their environment. But they also want the environment to manage itself, to a certain extent. Smart Offices do just this by allowing facilities teams to define and automate processes such as lighting intensity or temperature control.

#4 - Wellbeing

A study earlier this year found that two-thirds of UK workers are working up to six additional hours per week. One in five reported putting in 10 additional hours per week. While this may sound like child’s play compared to Jack Ma’s ‘996’ work week - referring to working from 9am to 9pm six days a week - or Elon Musk’s 120-hour work week, overwork has been proven to negatively impact productivity. And lead to higher rates of staff turnover.

Some of the environmental features listed above, such as increasing the amount of natural light at certain times of day, can help staff feel less frazzled. Another is the ability to track employees’ movement around the office and notify them if they have gone too long without a break, food or water. However, managers should implement such technology carefully. According to one survey, 57% of employees felt that tracking their movement around the office was unacceptable.

#5 - Desk and room availability

Small daily frustrations can have a big impact on our wellbeing. Finding available desks and meeting rooms is one such frustration. In fact, according to one study, booking meeting rooms is the biggest frustration of our working day.

Cloud-based room booking software like Condeco integrates with platforms like Office365 to make desk and room booking simple. On top of scheduling meetings or reserving desks, panels can be fitted to the wall outside meeting rooms showing to show passers-by what’s going on inside and when it’s ending.

Data can also be gathered on meeting room and desk utilisation, giving decision-makers insight into whether they need more space, peak times of the week and which facilities are going under-utilised.

4 space utilisation metrics to track and improve with occupancy sensors

Every aspect of business - from the workplace, to the technology we use, to the way we manage staff, to the sales & marketing process - is being optimised through the use of data. By analysing historical data we’re able to see what worked and what didn’t. And do more of the former and less of the latter.

Organisations’ physical office space is often its second largest investment after staff. If you want to maximise the value of that investment, you need hard data on how it’s being used.

After all, as they say, if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

Are occupancy sensors hard to install and use?

Previously, gathering workplace data was a mostly qualitative process, involving surveying staff and gathering first-hand insights. When occupancy sensors were used, they were a temporary, specialist solution bought in by outside consultants and removed at the end of the project.

Ricoh have made occupancy sensors easy to install without any prior training. The units are small, unobtrusive and can be fixed to most surfaces using peel-and-apply sticky pads. The data is then pulled into live dashboards for easy interpretation. What used to be a costly, specialist service is now accessible to almost all organisations.

With that in mind, here are four key workplace metrics to track and improve using occupancy sensors.

Meeting room occupancy

This is the most common one - and for good reason.

Remote and flexible working may be on the rise but face-to-face meetings are still the best way to solve problems and tackle creative challenges. It’s crucial for businesses to create spaces which facilitate these tasks.

Analysing meeting room occupancy can tell you, objectively, whether the number of meeting rooms you have is enough for your workforce. But it can also tell you which of those meeting rooms are the busiest. And, by association, which meeting rooms need some attention.
If your occupancy rate is typically +70%, but one of your meeting rooms is languishing around 35%, clearly there are issues with that space that need to be resolved.

Desk occupancy

The combination of hot-desking and remote working have made the concept of desk occupancy more fluid. Some days the office will be busy, some days less so.

It’s important to track desk occupancy and understand the rhythm of remote and in-office working. After all, no one wants to come into the office only to find out that all the desks are full and they’d have been better off at home.

Bookings vs reality

As I’ve already said, just because a meeting has been booked, doesn’t mean it’s definitely going to happen. Things change. That’s just a fact-of-life.

In an ideal world, the room booking will be cancelled and the room freed up for someone else. But it doesn’t always happen that way. Tracking no-shows allows you to track wasted meeting room time. It can also highlight repeat offenders who may need a friendly reminder to cancel their bookings when they cancel their meetings, and improve overall etiquette of space.

It’s also important to track the length of time that has been booked compared with the actual length of the meeting. If people are in the habit of booking 30-minute or one-hour meetings and only sticking around for 10 minutes, that’s an issue.

Peak utilisation by week or month

Finally, keeping track of your peak times can help you manage staff expectations and encourage teams to schedule your meetings for less busy periods where possible.

The ideal is to spread your meetings out to create a solid baseline of occupancy across the week, instead of peak periods which then drop away to nothing.

Jargon buster: what does intelligent automation in the workplace really mean?

Intelligent automation is a key feature of the Smart Office concept. By automating simple tasks, workloads are reduced and staff are able to focus on more complex, creative or rewarding work.

Descriptions of intelligent automation and robotic process automation (RPA) can easily become quite jargon-heavy. And there’s no use replacing one piece of jargon with another.

Often, the easiest way to explain something is to show it in action:

A service centre team has to record specific transactions in a compliance system that is delivered as a browser-based app. Unfortunately, there is no integration between the team’s systems and the browser-based app
Company policy is to record the transaction in the compliance app straight after the transactions are completed in order for the systems to stay in sync. The rep who made the transaction is responsible for updating the compliance app
There are 22 reps in the team, completing 25 transactions per day, taking 4 minutes each time. Across the entire team, this results in roughly 183 hours of work a week
Removing this manual task would save the equivalent of 5 full-time employees’ salaries per year

How would intelligent automation solve this problem?

An hourly report would be scheduled, exporting data from the team’s systems into a generic Excel format
A programme running on a server works through the Excel file and for each row, logs into the compliance application and enters the data into the compliance system
A second ‘process integrity’ programme cross-references the compliance data with the team’s system to make sure there are no errors
A simple dashboard is configured with email alerts ensuring the compliance application has been updated according to fixed parameters

183 hours per week have been handed back to the service centre team. The technical risk is low as the desktop team’s applications are not affected and the project scope is modest.

The Future of the Smart Office

The Smart Office trend is really only just beginning. Over the next few years, these innovations will be replaced by more sophisticated solutions. Such as on-site 3D printing for rapid prototyping, voice activated devices and even quantum computing, which will allow us to process quantities of data which would take years with today’s technology in a matter of seconds.

If you have any questions about Ricoh’s Smart Office services, you can get in touch with our team via ukinfo@ricoh.co.uk.

About Ricoh

Ricoh is empowering digital workplaces using innovative technologies and services enabling individuals to work smarter. For more than 80 years, Ricoh has been driving innovation and is a leading provider of document management solutions, IT services, commercial and industrial printing, digital cameras, and industrial systems.

Headquartered in Tokyo, Ricoh Group operates in approximately 200 countries and regions. In the financial year ended March 2019, Ricoh Group had worldwide sales of 2,013 billion yen (approx. 18.1 billion USD).

For further information, please visit http://ricoh.co.uk

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