What is a Smart Office? Is Smart Office a Right Fit for you?

What is a smart office?

A smart office or an intelligent office molds itself according to employee needs and make the workspace more productive, collaborative, and agile. And if you believe data, Statista predicts that global smart office market is projected to hit 58 billion U.S. dollars by 2025.

Smart offices are equipped with beacons, sensors and mobile apps that help their employees to perform mundane, unimportant tasks faster and in a structured manner, so that they have more time to spare on growing businesses and innovating.

Let’s take an example:

You walk into your office and take a look at a workplace application that helps you visualize an interactive floorplan to see which desks are occupied, what locker spaces are available (floor wise), and which meeting rooms are occupied, and until when. You make your seating arrangement, accordingly, use the locker and then schedule a meeting in the meeting room as per your convenience. Isn’t that wonderful?

Leveraging technology not only helps people plan their workday better but also facilitates interaction, team collaboration, and convenience while bringing down operating costs.

“Technology will play a huge role into making better buildings. Based on the data we collectfrom all the different systems including lockers, we can understand how a building is being used and how we can improve the user experience.”

-Erik Ubels, CTO EDGE Technologies

Why transform your workplace into a dynamic workplace?

For starters, the concept of smart office solutions encourages innovation, creativity, and boosts productivity – it lets employees focus on what really matters! Let’s take a broad look at what you gain out of transforming your traditional workplace into an intelligent workplace:

Improve Collaboration: Smart workplaces have a variety of space options where employees can interact over a quick cup of coffee and brainstorm. With the help of an app, they can book a meeting room for impromptu interaction and form a ground for innovation.
Increases Productivity: With smart office solutions, HR managers don’t need to worry about locker assignment, or replacing lost keycards, or visibility and scheduling of meeting rooms. Rather, they can focus on what’s important and make their day a little less stressful.
Better use of office space: According to a report by Verdantix, 36% of offices plan to invest in space utilization analytics in 2021. Smart workplaces give a lot of visibility into what types of space one has, how space is used, how often it is used, and what types of employees are using it. This data helps better allocate and manage spaces in the future.
Sustainability: Smart office solutions help reduce offices’ ecological footprint, reduce energy usage, and minimize unsorted waste, thus saving on waste costs.
Attract and retain talent: 64% of employees believe their organization risks falling behind if new workplace technology isn’t integrated. Eighty-one percent believe that the available technology would factor into their decision on whether to take a job in the first place. By providing employees with advanced technology and modern office solutions, they provide an experience that helps in attraction and retaining talent.

Is a smart office the right fit for you?

Now that you know what smart offices have to offer, let’s take a look at the bigger picture – whether this concept that everyone hails work for your office or not?

Start by understanding what your current office situation is, what your employees are happy with and what they seem to struggle with. Then you can run stats on your office space utilization and see what needs to improve. Look at what menial activities keep your employees busy and what smart solutions can help enhance productivity.

This research should give you valid data that then helps you understand whether transitioning to a smart office will be valuable to you or not.

Keep in mind, every office doesn’t need to adopt all sorts of smart technology. Run your findings through other people in the office to ensure you don’t overdo things and at the same time address everyone’s needs.

For example: You find out productivity is being harmed because the employees have to keep rescheduling their meetings because of the unavailability of meeting rooms. You can have an app that helps them find and book a meeting room in advance and lets other employees have full visibility of it.

Or, you see a lot of time is spent on locker asset management (allocating lockers, issuing new keys, releasing lockers, etc.), you can think of smart locker management solutions that will help automate the entire process. Also, smart lockers help continuously optimize storage space by providing insights into how storage is utilized.

Transforming towards a smart office

The best part of transforming into a dynamic workplace is you’ll have an office that is backed by data. You can make a comparison between what office used to be before these solutions and what office looks like after you adopt them. So, data helps you quantify the numbers and helps you make the smart office even smarter.

Can you imagine working without a smart office key card or coffee machine or email now? No, right! A few more years and people will say the same about smart solutions – about smart conference room apps and smart locker solutions!

The modern work environment is ever evolving and leveraging these emerging technologies will help make work life easier, smarter, and more productive, and at the same thing help bringing the need for office space down up to 30%. Though this article has just scratched the surface of intelligent workspaces, if you are looking for exhausting details into how dynamic transformation of your office will help change the way you work, speak to our experts now!