One of our clients once outlined their office refit objective in extremely simple terms: we want to do more with less. This might sound like a tall order, but it’s perfectly possible to shrink square footage while positively impacting people, performance and productivity.
The key to achieving the maximum benefit from a minimum area of real estate is to employ the right mixture of technologies, specified and integrated correctly, to ensure the most efficient and effective version of hybrid working. There are a number of aspects which, when combined, can support this strategic priority by enabling a space to work smarter:
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Reimagining workflows – and perhaps even roles and responsibilities – means that hybrid working is more realistic, with no negative impact on productivity and collaboration (in fact, the opposite is more likely to be true, it’s actually possible to make improvements). This means no need for every employee to have a dedicated desk space, and a smaller real estate square footage is feasible.
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Hot desk working is ideal for the hybrid workforce; a well-designed desk booking system makes it easy for staff to book their spots, and coordinate with other members of their team when in-person collaboration is required.
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Similarly, making the process of booking meeting rooms and other co-working spaces as easy as possible will remove speedbumps from the day-to-day and make sure employees spend their time focused on their work objectives and not finding a suitable space to occupy. Having occupancy sensors on all desks, rooms and pods not only ensures this can be done in real time, but the captured data can be used to inform changes to layouts or even to booking processes or policies, to ensure the most efficient use of space and also minimise the frustration (and productivity barrier) of staff being thwarted in their attempts to find a suitable room.
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When it comes to collaboration spaces, it’s important that staff can right-size their choices – it’s not an efficient use of resource to have small groups or single workers booking out larger spaces. The analytics can help ensure that the mix of spaces continues to track need, even if circumstances change.
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High-quality videoconferencing facilities are a must, to ensure that hybrid teams can collaborate and meet wherever the individuals happen to be working – whether that’s a few miles away, or the other side of the world.
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The development of an employee app can not only take care of practicalities such as space booking or absence reporting, it’s also a great way to streamline internal communications and improve staff engagement – which is particularly important if you have any kind of hybrid working policy, to maintain a sense of belonging and to nurture the sort of culture that underpins the organisation’s purpose.
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Managed print services can ensure that both cost and carbon savings are achieved, through printer fleet and print volume reduction and increased automation. Security and efficiency can also be boosted, with the chances of human error reduced.
A smaller space footprint can of course allow real estate overheads to be cut, in addition to any cost reductions around aspects such as print reduction or fewer workstations, while there are also the long-term savings of matching resource to need as exactly as possible, and the zero capital investment option of technology as-a-service to be taken into account. All of this can add up to increased business resilience and competitiveness, in addition to the other benefits of bringing people, data and devices together to increase productivity and unlock talent, and increasing wellbeing through a better working environment and day-to-day experience.
It really is possible to do more with less, provided you take a savvy approach to reimagining the office. To find out more about how we tackle this kind of project, drop our friendly team a line.
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