Activity-based working- an FM perspective

After two years of home office, companies are struggling to get employees to come back to the office. Afraid of missing out on good ideas that come out of spontaneous meetings, many companies redesign their premises to facilitate such serendipity when employees arrive at the office. Moreover, they fear that the longer employees stay at home, the further they distance themselves from the company culture.

?So the question is: how can companies make the office experience so great for employees that they enjoy coming back to the office more often?

You can change or adjust many aspects related to an office. Still, the facility and real estate managers need to test and understand which elements bring the best possible result for a great people experience?

You can indeed conduct regular polls and send out questionnaires. However, these are unreliable, provide only a snapshot of the moment, and have too few data points to make educated decisions on investments and change direction. Here is where sensors, digital twins, and smart workplace apps come into the game. The digitalization of office promises to provide the transparency required for this purpose.

1. Space optimization: the first thought on the financial level at the introduction of home office was that we no longer need much office space. We could reduce cost by reducing the number of desks and reducing the size of the rented space. But as the pandemic continues, companies are more worried that people working from home lose the cultural and corporate ties to the company. So employers are changing their mindset, and instead of reducing the rented space, converting the freed space to club-like experience areas, making the office more attractive. In this sense, reducing the rented space and saving costs are further pushed out.
2. Evaluating new furniture and design: Turning a traditional office into a clubhouse feeling environment requires changing architecture, design, and contemporary furniture. It sounds reasonable to start the change as a pilot in one of your offices or specific floors in your building and apply the new ideas. Let then various departments test the area in 2-3 months to understand how people use the new design, which architectural elements and furniture are valuable in practice and used more frequently by people.

Using occupancy sensors in areas and at furniture allows you to evaluate the their usage in real time and provide you an unbiased transparency your need to make the right choice for investment in furniture and design in escale-out phase.

3. Adjusting activity-based working Zone in real-time and on-demand: the great advantage of using a smart workplace app in managing your Hybrid process is its ability to act as a communication platform. In this sense, you do not need to anticipate the behavior of your people. For example, you do not need to know exactly how much space you need in advance of which type of work zone. As long as you have a flexible furniture and design concept, you could allocate and adjust the zones on the digital twin of your offices incorporated in the app. As you evaluate the occupancy of various zones on the app, you have the educated data-based insights to adjust the zones as you go. Today's focus Zone could be tomorrow's Networking area if you need them. And since you can communicate it via digital twin in the app by defining the Zones, the behavior rules by Zone go with it.

4. Get real-time feedback from people: getting regular feedback, especially in the Pilot and evaluation phase, is critical to focus on relevant topics that affect the people's experience in the office. Indeed, collecting regular polls is an approach, but more effectively is a real-time and continuous feedback tool, allowing the people to give their feedback anonymously at the time point of experience. Here again, a smart workplace app supporting this feature is of immense help for HR, FM, and real estate responsible to collect, categorize and evaluate the data for improvement. In addition, tools with graphical heat maps allow you to recognize critical spaces to focus your attention.

5. Cleaning on Demand: With hygiene on top of everyone's mind visiting the office, assuring a clean workplace, and communicating it to the people is a priority in the NEW NORMAL approach. Again sensors and a smart workplace app enable you to provide that transparency to the people. Besides, the data allows your cleaning service provider to create custom cleaning plans based on usage, focus on areas that are used, and where not to waste time—changing from a fixed planed-based cleaning to a demand-based cleaning.

As you see above, in a digital twin implementation of cleaning status, color coding and heat maps are excellent guides to grasp the situation in the blink of an eye. Here in this example, the lighter the color, the less it is used at a specific period. White means that no one used that desk or room, no need to spend time cleaning. On the other hand, the dark red signals intensive use; it is worth spending more time cleaning it. The status of the desks and rooms can then be reset by cleaning people on a digital twin or automatically during the night, reflecting only the usage of the past working day.

6. Air quality and cognitive performance: well being in office is only dependent on what

you do, where you do it, and with whom, but also on Temperature, Humidity, and specially on Co2 and Organic compound evels. typical complains: too hot, too cold, head aches, lack of concentration, t redness, just to name few. To address the air quality challenges, we need first to measure them. Air quality devices comparing of major sensors around Temeprature, Humidity, Co2, volatile organic compound (contributing to bad smell) are becoming more mature and re good starting point. They became also popular in the pandemic, since the level of Co2 is a good hint of need for f esh air. Taking these data as basis to control your HVAC system is a different animal. Topic of a separate blog :-)

7. Data visualization: di italizing your office with sensors and creating a digital twin are the first steps towards making data-based and educated decisions. As the number of data sour es grows, the urge for more transparency and keeping an overview becomes more pressing. I see two trends; one is pushing collected ata from all data providers into cloud visualization tools, e.g., Microsoft Power BI, to create flexible dashboards. It is exciting to analyze deeper data and combine data from various data sources. But it requires IT support to set it up and maintain it. Another way of approaching this challenge is using the graphical presentation of data, e.g., heat maps on a digital twin of the building. This approach has the advantage of ad-hoc and real-time reporting. Hence, it is suitable especially for not-so IT-Savvy FM managers. The drawback is the limitation to standard reports. In this sense, you need both approaches for different purposes.

I see digitalization, at last, is arriving into offices and are there to stay. The sooner the enterprises embrace the idea; the more significant is the effect to provide their people more fantastic people experience and make them happier. Happy people are more passionate about their jobs, often come to the office to interact, and build stronger bonds with the company. Task fulfilled.