Sustainable Horizons: Navigating the Eco-Friendly Future of Digital Workspaces

Tanya Bose (Host)

Hello everyone.

On today's session on Ask Me Anything, we have our Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Vikas Saxena. We received a heartwarming number of questions, but we selected a few which we thought would benefit the community.

Vikas Saxena (CEO, Caleedo – Digitizing Possibilities)

Hi. Good evening, everybody. I think it was really overwhelming to receive so many questions from people who've taken out their time to read through.

And as my colleague just stated, what we've done is we've picked a few select we've co joined some of those questions to make it more relevant to our audience and the industry at large.

Tanya Bose (Host)

The first question that we have is, how do you see the workplace evolving? Would you enlighten us on the new trends or changes in the built environment and workplaces?

Mr. Vikas Saxena (CEO, Caleedo – Digitizing Possibilities)

If you look at the way the buildings and the work spaces have evolved in India or globally and if we go back 50- 60 years, the whole focus while we used to construct facilities or buildings was on the structural side of the building.

There was a lot of emphasis around the structure. Then came the aesthetics where the organization started spending a lot of money, a lot of focus was on bringing in aesthetic, both externally and inside the office spaces. Later, came the ergonomics era, where the focus was on ensuring that the occupants had a lot of support in terms of their seatings and in terms of the way they would work in. I think the pandemic has played the role of a catalyst. Now, there is a lot of focus in bringing in the emotional side of the employees inside the work spaces.

So, I think there's been a lot of focus trying to figure out how the work spaces could be made better, more productive, and healthier to positively impact the emotions of the occupants. And I believe that pandemic really changed the whole dynamics, both in terms of the ask from the occupants as the occupants wanted to remain safe.

I think the advent of technology and the adaptation of digital technology also played a role. There are a lot of advancements that happened during last 3-5 years and the whole focus has shifted towards bringing in piece of environment, bringing in piece of digitization in workspaces and buildings.

Also, there are a lot of biophilic facilities that are being constructed now. There are a lot of facilities which use the power of digital technologies, including IoT to eliminate a lot of wastages and digitize processes to ease work.

All of this is focused towards the occupants. Earlier any emerging trend would start with the West and then countries in the East, including India, would catch up at a later stage.

Now, I think the trends are is getting adapted and incepted across the globe at the same time. That's where it is.

Tanya Bose (Host)

The second question that we have today is what strategies and initiatives can workplace leaders adopt to ensure a healthy and productive workplace for their workforce?

Mr. Vikas Saxena (CEO, Caleedo – Digitizing Possibilities)

I believe the work environment itself has changed. If you were to look at an organization, the way the organizations work today has moved from a very formal work culture to a hybrid-informal work culture.

Secondly, of course, I think there is no more departmentalization or functional distinctions in the organizations. I think there are much more leaner and seamless organizations which exist today, which means that there's a lot of concurrent exchange of work methodology that is happening across organizations between various functions.

Earlier one would see that, there were organizations where you would have an HR working in isolation from an admin, who is working in isolation from an FM, FM working in isolation from IT.

With digitization this is gone, and we can cut across all the functions, all the departments.

The leaders today have a very strategic advantage. It's easier for them to latch onto the wave and to easily bring in the requisite changes through the technology media. Whether that is got to do with providing healthier work conditions to their occupants or whether it's about providing productive conditions to their employees, I think that's become easier.

For example, if you look at the way the work was done earlier typically in any organization, it will typically follow an assembly line process as one would witness in a shop floor. It would move from one department to the other.

And there were definitive wait times in between each process, each function, each department. But with technology cutting across all these departments, the connectivity and the communication has become seamless and almost real time.

So, there are a lot of interdependencies, which were earlier the deterrents in free flow of the workflow culture and were leading to a lot of wastage of productive time and space. I think that is what eliminated so that's one advantage. Second, I believe that there has been a lot of progress on the development with regards to a lot of sensing technologies.

A lot of processes have been automated and there is a lot of disruption, happening in conventional processes, the way these processes are executed. It's an age of disruption. There are smarter ways of doing the same things in a much more efficient and less cost.

That's where the advantages are for the current leaders. The erstwhile roles were defined as a facility manager, or housekeeping manager, but today, I think the roles are themselves getting redefined as workplace managers. There is a lot of focus on inclusiveness rather than just keeping it limited to the services (hard or soft).

Technology is also helping in bridging the gap between ?people, their behaviour and their emotions. That's where the leaders can take a lot of benefit. And then of course, a lot of global standards and access to those standards helps the organization scale up to a benchmark. It's not that they need to reinvent themselves or do something different than what is existing globally and locally.

I think that has become a big advantage.

Tanya Bose (Host)

Thank you for that. Our next question is, in your view, how does a workplace experience benefit an organization?

Mr. Vikas Saxena (CEO, Caleedo – Digitizing Possibilities)

I would simply put it that if I personally had to work in an office which had a lot of noise around me or which had a lot of bad air, it would make me feel very uncomfortable. If I had to struggle which has been the case in most of the offices about 15-20 years ago. We had to really struggle to figure out where one would sit or how one would welcome their guests inside the facility, I would make me feel a bit irritated, with where I belong, and to some extent I would lose the sense of belongingness.

There have been a lot of market research and studies have been done around these parameters on how the occupants and the employees get impacted. There is a lot of data available through a lot of market surveys, which clearly indicate that there is a significant drop in people's willingness to stay with the organization longer.

If they do not find their workplaces healthy and productive or they find a lot of bureaucracy in the way the systems treat them, not the people treat them, but the systems treat them, there will be a direct impact with regards to attritions. Today, any organization is perceived as a brand from a point - how holistic they are in terms of their approach, both internal and external.

I believe there are a lot of direct impact, and then there are a lot of indirect impacts as well. Attrition and higher turnovers are direct impact that a lot of such organizations see, there are a lot of indirect impacts as well, where the sick buildings syndrome have been known to impact the productivity of people, where the outputs of such organizations have been negatively impacted.

These are the impacts and I believe there are no two ways about it.

Tanya Bose (Host)

I feel a lot of people would be enlightened by this answer. Our next question is, in the past, we have seen a great enthusiasm and deliberation on workplace digitization, but on ground, how do you see this evolving and how business leaders would play a role in this?

Mr. Vikas Saxena (CEO, Caleedo – Digitizing Possibilities)

Workplace Digitalization has been going on for a long time. When I entered the industry, there was, the era was of automation. I entered in the early 90s, when the automation had just creeped into the country. Automation was primarily focused around energy savings.

That was the whole concept of why automation was brought in. But then the reality is that the automation was limited by both two factors - A, the willingness to adapt, and B, the prohibitive cost around it.

What has changed over the years is that the automation has moved from execution level of energy savings to a level where it is fundamentally impacting the organizational delivery of business values.

It has gone much beyond the dollar saving itself. So, it has got a lot of intangible and tangible benefits around it. And I think what has helped in this is that the enhancement that has happened on the technological side including the IT services that have cut across all the other MEP services and most of the equipment available today can be seamlessly monitored over the internet. The advent on the cloud architectures has also helped in ensuring that the technology is available across to anyone and everyone.

It's no more limited to the MEP equipment that we would typically try and target through automation. It's gone really deep rooted into the process side of each and every aspect of a facility.

MEP and soft services do continue to remain the mainstay. I think what has also happened is that earlier we would typically end up doing a ROI which was based on the tangible values where you would have a dollar figure.

This kind of ROI, today, has moved to a lot of intelligence in terms of the output and data that comes out, which can be utilized to take very informed decisions.

And last but not least, the reason why the technology has become more adapted is because it's become more affordable.

Those are the points where I think it has changed.

As far as the landscape is considered, I think that globally, due to the pandemic, from a technological side what happened is that since people were pushed back to work out of their homes the only resolution that they had out of the situation was to leverage more digital technology and remote connectivity. The only positive impact of the pandemic was that the adaptation of technology; it acted as a catalyst.

The acceptance went high. The ingress of technology went much deeper than what was before COVID. What is also happening now is that there is a lot of intelligence that is evolving. We've moved beyond even the monitoring aspect.

We are talking about artificial intelligence, generative AI, machine learning, and deep learning. That is where we will reap the real benefits of the digital solutions not only becoming predictive in terms of what needs to be done but it will also become more suggestive which I believe was not the case earlier.

The solutions would typically cut off at a particular level. And from there on, I think there were all manual intervention which was required to make it impactful. I think that all has changed.

Tanya Bose (Host)

Okay, so we have the last question here for today's session. What is your take on India's evolving landscape of healthy and sustainable buildings?

Mr. Vikas Saxena (CEO, Caleedo – Digitizing Possibilities)

There was a time when India used to lag behind in adoption of these technologies, but I think now that's no more the case. I think India is equally evolved. I would say in some cases, compared to some parts of the world, we are actually ahead in some aspects.

We are also contributing globally to a lot of new technologies that are evolving today. It is evolving much quicker than it used to be in past. The other reality is that we do have a lot of brownfield space available within the country which has been bereft of such technologies in the past.

Millions of sq. ft. spaces which still needs to be covered.

The cultural side also plays a very important role in terms of how it gets adapted and utilized. Adaptation is one part of it, which means that, you've already got the technology in, but if it doesn't get utilized, it becomes obsolete.

Also, from a user POV, if the technology that you have is the smartest, but if you do not have smart people to handle these smart technologies, it's going to be of no effective use. But again, I believe there has been a lot of enhancement in the citizens becoming more digital-savvy.

We all are today connected over social media and almost all of us have access to smartphones. The penetration of wireless phones is going to be about 89 percent in another 3-4 years, across a huge population of about 1.45 billion people.

That's a huge number. And when we look at the way the digital currency has taken over the transactions in India, I believe that gives a lot of confidence that the people in India are ready to accept and adapt to the technology that is being into.

From that point, the Indian landscape is ready. As I said earlier, there is a lot of landscape that still needs to be done with because that's been there for a long time and then, there is a cultural aspect to it. I believe what is also helping today is the government.

There is a lot of regulatory compliances that are being brought in within India to ensure that there is a lot of ESG compliances now. That also is helping to some extent in ensuring that a lot of these practices do get driven within the facilities that are available.

And then the governments have gone and committed to net zero carbons. There are a lot of promising things that are happening.

Tanya Bose (Host)

Well, thank you so much, sir, for sharing your views with us today. That's it for today's session on Ask Me Anything. We'll be back another day with another topic and with our views on that topic. Thank you so much.

Mr. Vikas Saxena (CEO, Caleedo – Digitizing Possibilities)

Thank you.