Armed with this knowledge, what steps should you take as a business leader to support the changing workforce and evolving customer demands?
You can start in the office. The ability to track office space utilization metrics is an important piece of the puzzle — allowing you to understand how your office is being used. Perhaps you find that your meeting rooms remain largely unused throughout the day. Or maybe certain desk spaces are no longer being used as your employees travel and work remotely. It's estimated that by 2020, 50 percent of the workforce will be working from non-traditional locations.2 Check out how law firms use meeting room services to optimize workplaces. You can do the same for your office.
Also keep in mind that it's important for employees and visitors who use the office to feel valued and have a space of their own. There are many solutions available today that can help you significantly improve your office spaces by enabling you to:
Let's take a quick look at how these solutions can help you along your digital transformation journey.
As technology changes the way people work, departmental silos — both physically and psychologically — break down. Workers become more collaborative, often working in teams to get things done even when they're separated by distance. Many companies have adopted an agile methodology, allowing for increased collaboration and the ability to innovate faster. To stay competitive, businesses need to adapt their workplaces to foster creativity and allow teams to share ideas more easily and efficiently.
A facilities assessment can help you to understand how your meeting rooms are being used each day — enabling you to make more informed decisions about how to better utilize these spaces. Then you can apply the appropriate workplace technologies to streamline the way you schedule rooms, send invitations and order collaboration solutions — eliminating meeting room chaos and double bookings.
Today, a number of companies are moving away from personal desks and closed-off offices in favor of large, open areas with unassigned seating where people can more easily collaborate. These types of changes also help to save costs by converting assigned workspaces into shared desks and storage. They can also reduce your environmental footprint by reducing the overall size of your office space.
To further enhance these types of workplaces, there are a number of solutions and technologies available that allow you to connect employees in these types of offices with remote workers and customers, including:
There are many more collaborative technologies you can look into to optimize the way employees and customers share information and ideas, and they're always evolving.