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.
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:
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.
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!