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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
