Ensure Your Team Consistently Meets Their Space Needs

by Gillian Tolentino | Nov 24, 2023 | Facilities Management

In today’s increasingly dynamic work environment, individuals and teams are constantly moving around the office to find spaces that fit their specific and ever-changing needs. As organizations embrace flexible work arrangements and adopt agile practices, the traditional concept of a dedicated desk or office has evolved to be more fluid and dynamic.

However, with this newfound flexibility comes the challenge of ensuring that team members can consistently find and use spaces that meet their needs. The availability and accessibility of workspaces significantly impact productivity, collaboration, and employee satisfaction, making it a key focus of workplace leaders across the globe.

Space planning and availability foundations

Space planning and availability are two considerations at the forefront of ensuring your teams have space to work. Space planning is key to making sure your workplace has the right kinds of spaces that are meeting your employees’ needs, while space availability ensures that they are actually able to use them.

Space planning strikes a delicate balance between accommodating diverse work styles, maintaining cost-efficiency, and maximizing the utilization of physical resources. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to what the right space mix looks like or what the universal seating ratio is and planning is even impacted by your employees’ own subjective preferences, meaning workplace leaders must have a deep understanding of the specific needs and preferences of their employees to create effective spaces.

Workplace leaders must also navigate the intricacies of space availability to ensure that their spaces can actually be used. This often involves implementing room and desk booking systems to identify utilization patterns in bookable spaces and even auto-releasing spaces that are ghosted. Space availability works to understand why spaces are getting booked but unused while trying to ensure that those abandoned spaces can be used by others.

Shifting your strategy

Shifting your workplace strategy requires embracing a new mindset that values agility and change. Workplace leaders must be willing to move beyond the traditional and static workplace concept to develop a more fluid and flexible approach. By embracing flexible spaces, having a healthy space mix, and experimenting, organizations can create a workplace that is tailored to the specific needs and preferences of their employees, while ensuring there is enough space for teams to work as they need to.

Embrace flexible spaces

As organizations continue to evolve in response to rapidly changing work environments, one strategy that has emerged as a powerful means of ensuring workspace availability and accessibility is the adoption of flexible spaces. By incorporating flexible space types such as hot-desking and activity-based work zones into their workplace design, companies can not only support a diverse range of work styles, but also make more efficient use of their physical space.

Hot desking allows employees to work at any available desk or workstation on a first-come, first-served basis, rather than having a dedicated, personal workspace. This practice enables companies to better adapt to fluctuating needs, as team members can find a spot to work ad-hoc without creating dedicated workstations, which become a bottleneck as more employees work in-office only a few days per week. Additionally, hot desking encourages cross-departmental collaboration, as employees have the opportunity to engage with colleagues from various teams as they move throughout the space.

Activity-based work zones are another common solution for ensuring that teams have the space they need to work effectively. These spaces cater to specific types of tasks or work styles, such as quiet rooms for focused, individual work, collaboration areas for group activities or brainstorming sessions, and break-out spots intended for informal conversations or relaxation. By offering diverse, dedicated zones, employees can quickly and easily identify the most suitable space for their current task.

While there is more to creating flexible spaces than just implementing hot desking and activity-based spaces, these two are means of beginning your journey into a more flexible and dynamic workplace that can adapt to meet your employees needs.

Have a healthy space mix

A healthy mix of space types helps make the workplace effective for all different work styles, tasks, and employee preferences, allowing individuals and teams to seamlessly move between spaces based to fit their specific needs of that moment. While there is not one correct way to mix various space types, some of the most common space types we see in innovative workplaces include:

Hot desks: Hot desks are shared workstations that are not assigned to a specific individual. Employees can use any available desk on a first-come, first-served basis.

Conference rooms: These are meeting spaces equipped with a large table, chairs, and audiovisual equipment for conducting formal discussions, presentations, and meetings.

Huddle rooms: Huddle rooms are small meeting spaces designed for quick team meetings, brainstorming sessions, or private conversations. They typically accommodate a small number of people.

Breakout areas: These are informal spaces where employees can relax, socialize, or have casual meetings. They often include comfortable seating, tables, and recreational amenities like game tables or lounge areas.

Brainstorming areas: These spaces are specifically designed to facilitate team collaboration and often feature whiteboards, projectors, or interactive displays to encourage brainstorming and idea sharing.

Cafeterias and pantries: These spaces are dedicated to dining and refreshments, providing a place for employees to eat, socialize, and recharge during breaks.

Phone booths: Phone booths are small, soundproofed rooms or enclosures that offer privacy for making phone calls or participating in virtual meetings without disturbing others.

Innovation labs: These specialized spaces are designed to foster creativity and innovation, often equipped with tools, technologies, and resources for experimentation and prototyping.

By providing a diverse range of spaces that accommodate the unique requirements of their teams, workplace leaders can help ensure that employees have access to the most suitable work environments for their needs. This, in turn, leads to greater usage of available spaces, resulting in a more effective and efficient workplace that supports the needs of an organization as a whole.

Experiment with new space types

An innovative approach to ensuring that teams have the space they need to work effectively is embarking on a journey of experimentation. Adapting and introducing new space types can provide fresh solutions that cater to the evolving needs of an organization, ultimately leading to greater employee satisfaction and productivity. Some of the most common and effective changes we are hearing companies experiment with across the globe include:

Modular furniture: This flexibility empowers employees to modify their workspaces to suit their individual or team requirements and encourages them to take ownership of their environment. By fostering a sense of autonomy and adapting spaces to fit diverse work styles, organizations can create more responsive and dynamic workplaces that are suited to an ever-changing workforce

Pop-up collaboration spaces: Create temporary project or brainstorming areas using portable whiteboards, movable seating, and screens. This enables teams to gather quickly and collaborate effectively without having to search for available meeting rooms.

Reservable focus booths: Introduce private, soundproof booths that can be reserved for individual employees who need a quiet and distraction-free environment to work on tasks that require deep concentration.

Shared amenities zones: Establish multipurpose areas that serve as a combination of lounge, café, and recreational space. This communal zone can foster informal interactions, promote relaxation, and offer an alternative setting for impromptu meetings or remote work.

Quiet zones or “libraries”: Establish designated quiet areas where employees can work undisturbed and free from auditory distractions. These spaces could be specifically designed and equipped with acoustical treatments or partitions to minimize noise levels and maintain a peaceful atmosphere.

Wellness or mindfulness spaces: Create dedicated spaces for relaxation, stress relief, or meditation, equipped with soothing lighting, comfortable seating, and features that encourage reflection and rejuvenation.

Personal storage solutions: Offer employees flexible personal storage options, such as lockers or mobile pedestals. This caters to those who work in a hot-desking environment, allowing staff to keep personal items secure and readily accessible without having to carry them around the office all day. Storage solutions like this also prevent employees from passively occupying spaces, allowing others to use them when people are not present.

Utilizing property technology

Proptech is another key element to ensuring your teams have space to work. By leveraging automation and data, technology enables workplace leaders to move beyond hunches and intuition to make evidence-based decisions about how their spaces need to be optimized to ensure the best experience for all. Solutions such as room and desk booking software, occupancy sensors, and occupancy intelligence platforms, like VergeSense, help workplace leaders across the globe solve for space planning and availability challenges.

Auto-release unused bookings

One of the key challenges in creating an agile and flexible work environment is ensuring that bookable spaces are available when teams need them. While room and desk booking systems help streamline the traditional approach of manually managing room reservations and desk assignments, alone they cannot solve for ghosted meetings, which affect over ⅓ of booked meetings.

By integrating desk and room booking systems with occupancy sensors, organizations can implement automation tools that can significantly enhance space availability. VergeSense allows for the auto-releasing of unused bookings after a set amount of time automatically.

Auto-releasing unused bookings helps to reduce wasted resources and minimize the number of unused spaces throughout the workplace. This can lead to significant cost savings, especially for enterprises with multiple locations. By freeing up valuable space for other teams to use, auto-releasing unused bookings improves overall space availability and accessibility, which can ultimately enhance employee experience as well.

Finally, by leveraging technology to automate the process, workplace leaders can gain valuable insights into how different spaces are being used and what adjustments may be necessary to optimize their utilization. This can help inform decisions around future space planning and design, ultimately leading to a more efficient, effective, and engaging work environment for everyone.

Evaluate capacity usage

Evaluating capacity usage, a metric measured by VergeSense occupancy sensors, offers insights into how effectively a space is being used, providing critical information on whether space constraints are hindering employee productivity.

Capacity usage is calculated by dividing people count by the capacity of the space, and it provides an indication of the percentage of the space that is in use. For example, if a conference room has a capacity of 10 people and is occupied by an average of 5 people, its capacity usage would be 50%.

Using capacity usage as a key metric can help workplace leaders identify which areas of their workplace are underutilized, providing an opportunity to optimize and maximize these spaces. It can also help determine whether the root cause of employees not having space to work is a lack of square footage or a matter of spaces not suiting employees’ needs.

Evaluate time usage

Time usage, another powerful metric, helps organizations understand how often their spaces are being used so they can gain insights into what makes a space effective or not.

Time usage is measures the amount of time a space was used compared to the total amount of available time, providing a clear indication of how much time employees are spending in various spaces throughout the workplace. For example, if a conference room was used for 7 hours during the 10 hours it was available, its time usage would be 70%.

Time usage offers critical insights to workplace leaders, helping them determine whether the root cause of employees not having space to work is rooted in spaces that don’t suit employee needs, or simply that there is too much or too little of a particular kind of space. With this data, organizations can make data-driven decisions around space planning and design, ensuring that they create an environment that truly meets the needs and preferences of their workforce.

Solving for space planning and availability

Ensuring that your team always has space to work is a complex challenge that workplace leaders face in today’s ever-changing work environment. It requires striking a balance between accommodating diverse workstyles, maintaining cost-efficiency, and maximizing the usage of spaces. However, by embracing a dynamic workplace strategy and utilizing technology, organizations can adapt to changing workforce needs and create a workplace that is tailored to their employees.

Enhancing Workplace Flexibility in the Health Care Industry

by Gillian Tolentino | Nov 15, 2023 | Facilities Management

Young pharmaceutic seller explaining something to doctor in a hospital.

In the dynamic landscape of the healthcare industry, fostering workplace flexibility is paramount to meet the diverse needs of both healthcare professionals and the organizations they serve. Here, we delve into five key strategies aimed at creating a more adaptable and responsive healthcare workplace.

Flexible Scheduling Options:

Flexible scheduling lies at the core of workplace adaptability in the health care sector. Compressed workweeks, allowing professionals to condense their standard hours into fewer days, provide extended weekends or additional days off. Part-time schedules cater to those seeking a balance between personal and professional commitments, while job-sharing arrangements enable collaborative responsibility sharing among employees.

Telecommuting and Remote Work Opportunities:

The integration of telecommuting and remote work options introduces a new dimension to workplace flexibility. Administrative roles, such as billing and scheduling, can be seamlessly executed from home, enhancing work-life balance. Additionally, telehealth services offer healthcare practitioners the chance to provide remote care, expanding the reach of services and granting professionals the flexibility to work beyond traditional clinical settings.

Cross-Training and Skill Diversification:

Investing in cross-training initiatives is crucial for building a versatile healthcare workforce. Comprehensive training programs empower professionals to develop skills beyond their primary roles, fostering personal and professional growth. Skill-based task delegation ensures that multiple team members are adept at handling essential responsibilities, promoting resilience during times of increased workload or unexpected absences.

Flexible Leave Policies:

Leave policies play a pivotal role in employee well-being. Unlimited paid time off (PTO) alleviates the stress of limited leave, allowing healthcare professionals to prioritize their well-being and attend to personal matters. Furthermore, flexible use of accrued leave, such as half-day increments or intermittent days off, empowers staff to tailor their time away from work to suit individual needs, contributing to a healthier work-life integration.

Technology Integration for Workflow Efficiency:

Embracing technological advancements enhances workflow efficiency, a critical component of workplace flexibility. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) streamline data management, enabling professionals to access patient information securely from various locations. Telemedicine platforms facilitate remote care delivery, expanding access to services and supporting a more flexible approach to healthcare. Collaboration platforms, fostering effective communication and coordination, enhance connectivity among healthcare teams, regardless of their physical location.

In conclusion, creating workplace flexibility in the health care industry is a multifaceted endeavor that involves reimagining scheduling practices, embracing remote work options, investing in skill development, refining leave policies, and leveraging technology. By implementing these strategies, healthcare organizations can cultivate environments that empower their workforce, enhance job satisfaction, and ultimately improve the delivery of patient care.

Let Robotech CAD Solutions help you find your solution for workplace flexibility. Send a message to info@robotechcad.com or call us at 201-792-6300.

3 Methods to Bring Your Workers Back into the Office

by Gillian Tolentino | Nov 7, 2023 | Facilities Management

As the world continues to recover from the effects of the pandemic, organizations are struggling to bring employees back into the office. Remote work has become the norm for many, and it is no secret that many employees do not want to give up the level of flexibility that working remotely has provided them. So, how can workplace leaders encourage these employees to return to the workplace? The answer lies in consistent, data-driven optimization of your portfolio.

To help you strategize your next workplace initiatives, we will explore three expert-curated strategies to get people back into the office and create a more dynamic, collaborative, and effective workplace.

1. Force high usage by shutting down areas

With global occupancy rates hovering around 12%, it continues to be difficult to uncover how employees want to work. Though this strategy will not directly lead to more employees returning to office, forcing high usage through strategic area shutdowns and consolidation is the foundation of building an office that employees will want to return to. By temporarily shutting down specific spaces, floors, or even entire buildings, you will create higher usage rates in the remaining areas that will uncover more pronounced insights into employee preferences, behaviors, and patterns.

A neighborhood or team-specific approach can be highly effective in this context. By assigning specific days for different teams or departments to work in the consolidated office, organizations can encourage team collaboration and foster a sense of belonging while creating a deeper understanding of occupancy patterns and trends, especially those from team to team.

To explore this strategy, you need to first determine what areas of your workplace you should shut down. Utilize the following steps as a good foundation for how you can make this decision with intent:

1. Define your objectives: Clearly articulate the goals you aim to achieve through this experiment. Are you looking to swap unused space types for new ones? Do you want to realize the impact of design on space usage? Identifying your objectives will help guide your decision-making process.
2. Analyze your occupancy data: If you have an existing means of data for your workplace, such as an Occupancy Intelligence Platform, utilize its data to analyze occupancy patterns. Look for trends such as underutilized floors and space types. Also, keep in mind your build’s total capacity usage to help determine how many spaces you can reasonably shut down without causing overcrowding.
3. Prioritize based on potential ROI: Rank the floors and spaces you want to remain open based on their potential for generating pronounced insights. As general guidance, closing down an equal balance of popular and unpopular spaces can give you a better idea of how employees would behave in a smaller office space. Closing down the most unpopular spaces can create more pronounced insights as to what popular spaces employees enjoy the most and why they are so greatly enjoyed.

By experimenting with workplace availability and analyzing the resulting data, organizations can better understand how to optimize their office space for employee preferences and productivity.

2. Prioritize optimizing for collaboration, design,  and well-being

Organizations must focus on creating office experiences that make commuting worthwhile. To achieve this, prioritize optimizing collaborative spaces, as collaboration is one of the primary motivators for employees to work in-office and it helps enhance company culture. Design is also regarded as one of the most inspiring factors for employees to make the commute.

Though it may not directly correlate to more employees coming into the office, well-being must be at the forefront of your strategy too, as transitioning from remote to hybrid/in-person work can be difficult for employees. By offering spaces that focus on wellness, organizations have the opportunity to build an empathetic work culture through the built workplace.

Optimize for collaboration

• Provide a diverse range of collaborative spaces: Offer a mix of open and private collaborative areas, meeting rooms, and huddle spaces to address various collaboration styles.
• Equip spaces with advanced collaboration tools: Incorporate technology-enabled solutions in collaborative spaces, such as interactive whiteboards, video conferencing systems, and space availability kiosks.
• Encourage team bonding and informal interactions: Create comfortable social spaces, such as lounges and cafes, to promote spontaneous conversations and team-building activities away from the traditional office setting.

Optimize for design

• Create inspiring and visually appealing workspaces: Incorporate natural lighting, modular furniture, and unique decor to create a beautiful and inspiring in-office experience.
• Reflect company culture and values through design: Use design elements that align with the organization’s values and culture, such as branding, colors, and themed spaces, to inspire pride in employees and reinforce a sense of identity.
• Implement sustainable design elements: Integrate natural elements, such as plants, greenery walls, natural materials, and water features, to enhance employee well-being and create an office space that is environmentally friendly.

Optimize for well-being

• Focus on employee comfort: Invest in ergonomic furniture, standing workstations, and adjustable temperature/lighting controls to provide employees with comfortable, customizable environments.
• Provide health-oriented spaces and initiatives: Offer on-site wellness programs and facilities, such as gyms, yoga rooms, meditation spaces, mother’s rooms, nap pods, and quiet spaces to promote employee physical and mental well-being while in the office.
• Encourage movement: Design the office layout to promote movement, such as strategically located break rooms and social areas, to stimulate circulation and prevent sedentariness.

Regularly seek employee feedback and continuously adapt and adjust to evolving employee needs. Open lines of communication and a willingness to improve the office environment can foster a strong sense of belonging and commitment among employees.

3. Utilize artificial intelligence (AI)

In today’s fast-paced and ever-changing world, harnessing the power of artificial intelligence has given businesses additional tools to help them stay ahead of the curve. AI has proven to be a game-changer, revolutionizing work processes and enabling faster, easier, and more confident decision-making. From writing emails to coding and writing spreadsheet formulas, AI streamlines tasks across all job functions and industries.

The use of AI in the workplace industry can help further transform the decision-making process from being assumptions-based and time-consuming, to being data-driven and fast-paced. Just recently, VergeSense announced their collaboration with ChatGPT to leverage AI in analyzing workplace occupancy data, resulting in quicker and more confident decision-making without needing to manually analyze data.

By utilizing AI in your workplace to streamline data analysis and decision-making, you can better adapt to every-changing employee needs and build a workplace built on your workforce’s actual behaviors.

Create data-driven results

As the post-pandemic workplace continues to evolve, organizations have a unique opportunity to reshape their office spaces by building strategy and decisions around employee experience. By experimenting with workplace availability, optimizing spaces for the ideal in-office experience, and utilizing AI for data-driven decision making, organizations can create a greater demand for in-office work and foster a more dynamic, collaborative, and innovative working environment.