Momentum and money spur state Departments of Transportation to invest in digital project delivery.
Granular, interoperable, accessible data is the key to unlocking a completely new way of working in transportation.
New interoperability between Civil 3D and AASHTOWare Project is the latest example of Autodesk’s leadership in transportation infrastructure with organizations like AASHTO and Infotech.
Digital transformation has the power to connect data across the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry.
Many of the world’s infrastructure systems were constructed for the population and climate of the mid-20th century and are well past their prime. In the United States, much of our infrastructure dates back to the 1960s and 1970s and was designed and built using what are now outdated design, construction, and project management methods.
To modernize our infrastructure, we must modernize the engineering and construction industry itself with digitized workflows that enable better collaboration and seamless flow of data throughout the project lifecycle. We call this process digital project delivery. We are excited to work with states and the transportation technology ecosystem to make this monumental shift.
Advancing interoperability for better project outcomes
Digital transformation is about to accelerate for the government agencies that design, build, and maintain our nation’s transportation infrastructure through a new joint effort between Autodesk, Infotech, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), and the Montana Department of Transportation (Montana DOT). Initiated by Montana DOT, this collaboration underscores the agency’s commitment to embrace innovative technologies and enhance efficiency in the management and development of transportation systems.
Together, we’re enabling interoperability between Autodesk Civil 3D and AASHTO’s construction contract solution, AASHTOWare Project, with the help of Infotech, the official AASHTOWare Project contractor. The interoperability will enable digital project delivery from design and documentation to estimation and asset management. Departments of Transportation (DOT) across the United States and Ministries of Transportation in Canada will soon have access to it.
“With state transportation agencies in full pursuit of digital transformation, we’re excited to continue our work with Autodesk and provide an interoperable solution to those organizations,” said Chad Schafer, Chief Revenue Officer, Infotech. “This integration will help bridge the gaps in data and workflow between departments to ensure successful digital project delivery.”
Autodesk Civil 3D is civil engineering design software that supports BIM (Building Information Modeling) with integrated features to improve drafting, design, and construction documentation.
The interoperability couldn’t come at a better time. Momentum and money are finally on the side of the state agencies that are responsible for our transportation infrastructure. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will make a once-in-a-generation investment of $350 billion in highway programs through 2026. This includes the largest dedicated bridge investment since the construction of the interstate highway system 67 years ago.
The need for new infrastructure is urgent, with 1 in 5 miles of highways and major roads, and 45,000 bridges in the US alone in poor condition. State DOTs and the industry have more reasons than ever to transform the way transportation infrastructure projects are designed, built, operated, and maintained.
In a significant move, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT), has established the Project Delivery Collaboration Center (PDCC), which is envisioned to be a Project Manager’s portal from project creation through final design, giving them visibility to details including, but not limited to, their project portfolio (two-week look ahead), cost (budget), dashboards and reviews. PennDOT has chosen to use Autodesk Construction Cloud as the primary tool for the PDCC. This decision, made with an agnostic approach, underscores a commitment to ensure compatibility and optimal performance across a broad spectrum of platforms, workflows, and systems.
Making data work for you
Data remains an untapped asset in engineering and construction, with consulting firm FMI reporting 96% of all data captured by the industry goes unused. But that’s about to change. The United States government is calling on state DOTs to use digital technologies such as cloud-based workflows, Building Information Modeling (BIM), GIS mapping systems, rapid construction, and digital project delivery.
States can compete for grants from the Federal Highway Administration’s Advanced Digital Construction Management Systems (ADCMS) Program to invest in technology that boosts productivity, manages complexity and cost, and delivers massive infrastructure projects quickly and safely. This ADCMS program will award $85 million in grants, showing a significant federal commitment to digital transformation.
At Autodesk, we believe that granular, interoperable, and accessible data is the key to unlocking digital transformation and driving a completely new way of working for engineering and construction teams. We simplified data management and collaboration by putting all our engineering and construction data in one location, Autodesk Docs, a common data environment that is open, secure, and accessible. Civil 3D is connected to Docs, supports BIM, and is integrated with GIS.
The new AASHTOWare Project integration closes a workflow gap by enabling state DOTs to take quantities directly from Civil 3D without error-prone and time-consuming manual entry. They can use GIS information in design, push the design information to project execution with AASHTOWare Project, pull actual quantities back to as-builts, and push data back into GIS for asset management.
“Interoperability between Civil 3D and AASHTOWare Project will help us connect our design phase to our field construction operations. It will save time, save costs, and ultimately, enable us to be more accountable to the taxpayers who fund our transportation projects,” said Patrick Lane, Digital Delivery Project Manager for the Montana Department of Transportation.
Granular, interoperable, accessible data is the key to unlocking a completely new way of working in transportation.
Advocating for the future of infrastructure
Autodesk is more than a technology vendor. We’re advocating for digital project delivery at the state and federal level. And we’re supporting states’ efforts to advance digital delivery for transportation projects. For example, the California Department of Transportation, Caltrans, is using Autodesk Connectors for ArcGIS to develop workflows between data sources to improve project delivery, and the agency recently received funding in the first round of FHWA’s ADCMS grants.
We also understand that states urgently need digitally skilled workers to successfully undertake digital transformation. So, we’re helping our partners empower current workers to be confident using the latest tools. And we’re working with DOT leaders and state engineering schools to make sure their graduates are ready for the digital future.
We’re here to help states deliver on this once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform how our nation connects communities and moves goods, people, and services.
Over the last ten years, Autodesk have integrated features into their product lineup to enhance customers’ creativity, automate repetitive tasks, and offer predictive insights through powerful analytics. “In 2024 and beyond, these capabilities will enable design and planning to become more effective, efficient, and better informed,” says Amy Bunszel. “For example, Autodesk Forma’s Rapid Operational Energy Analysis allows designers to understand how factors such as a building’s geometry and wall construction types will affect its predicted energy use–all during early stage design. Autodesk AI technology will help deliver better and more sustainable results for all.”
The expansion of Building Information Modeling (BIM) within construction is intricately connected to the upcoming fusion with AI. Despite its solid presence in design and engineering, BIM’s growing acceptance in construction is pivotal for optimizing AI in the industry. By serving as visual databases, BIM models gather abundant data from various construction phases, fortifying customer datasets and enabling more profound insights through AI.
Predictions for Emerging Tech in 2024
The utilization of emerging technologies like digital twins and virtual reality is gaining momentum in the construction sector. Digital twins are proving increasingly beneficial for owners and facility managers, offering support in areas such as remote asset management, predictive maintenance, and long-term asset planning. In response to the growing need for remote collaboration, Autodesk has introduced Workshop XR, a virtual reality workspace facilitating design reviews and issue identification before construction commences. This shift toward virtual reality explores enjoyable and efficient approaches to work, potentially shaping the future of work.
Construction firms are also exploring operational opportunities post-build, with digital twins providing rich data for informed decision-making by creating a comprehensive record from initial design to the completed structure. Additionally, augmented and virtual reality enhance the early evaluation of architectural outcomes during design reviews.
Read the full article from Autodesk: “2024 trends in the built environment: What to anticipate across AI, sustainability, and labor”, Amy Bunszel & Jim Lynch
As technology advances, architects need to combine technical know-how with high-level problem-solving.
Market pressures, technological advances, and climate change are driving the need for evolving skills in the architecture profession.
Students in architecture programs and junior architects will need to learn strong technology skills, gain an understanding of the history and theory of architecture, and develop high-level critical thinking to succeed.
As part of the job, architects will be called on to address the impacts of a project on its site, on nearby communities, and on global and local ecosystems.
The world is changing, and so are professions. The architecture, engineering, construction, and operations industry (AECO) is facing supply-chain issues, rising costs, labor shortages, and a high demand for buildings and infrastructure—and the architecture profession is evolving to meet these challenges.
But what do these changes look like? Accelerating technology, including machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), is one aspect. Architects are also tasked with addressing their projects’ impact on the climate and communities, as well as how to build space- and resource-efficient structures. An understanding of technology and the ability to problem-solve at a high level will shape the skills architects need to thrive in the future.
Merging technology and critical thinking
Key among architect skills is a solid grasp of new software and tools. However, Phil Bernstein, associate dean and professor adjunct at the Yale University School of Architecture, cautions against putting too much emphasis on specific technical skills. “At Yale, we teach skills in support of training people to think like good architects,” he says, “but we know that a lot of the skills we teach have relatively limited shelf lives.”
This is not new. When Alistair Kell, chief information officer at BDP, graduated from architecture school in 1993, his class was the last that didn’t need to produce a CAD drawing in order to graduate. After graduation, he had to learn how to use AutoCAD, then a prerequisite for getting a job.
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Today’s entrants to the job market are expected to have entirely new skills that are complementary to architecture, Kell says, like being able to use computational design, script and code, and understand data and data structures. But technological advances are already making it easier for architects to work with data without the ability to code. “If I want to write a Python script now, I just ask AI to write it,” Bernstein says.
In addition, many junior architects can easily leverage new tools for the projects they’re working on. “At this point, most students coming out of architecture school are digital natives, so they’re already adept at jumping from one technology platform to the next,” says Amy Perenchio, principal at ZGF Architects.
An ongoing need in architecture education will be fostering higher-level thinking among new architects. “Architecture is a profession where we solve problems, and technology assists in the solving of problems,” Perenchio says. “But critical thinking—in the design sense—is really the baseline skill set that is needed.”
Bernstein mirrors this idea: “What we’re really trying to do is teach these people to be next-generation thinkers about the built environment—what’s important about it and how to create it.”
For Kell, creativity remains a key component of being an architect, one he hopes the profession never loses. “Architects need to be able to leverage technology as a creative tool,” he says, “in the same way they would see a pencil or tracing paper as one of the fundamental aspects of how they express themselves and develop creative solutions.”
Using AI to support innovative design
One set of new tools that will have an outsize impact on the profession is machine learning and AI, though Perenchio says the industry is still in a phase of figuring out how to best bring these tools into practice.
David Beach, associate professor at Drury University, thinks AI will be “incredibly useful” as a technical tool, used to provide checks and balances and reduce the workload associated with modeling or redundant tasks, what Kell refers to as “the drudgery and repetition of what we do.”
Even more impactful, says Beach, will be AI for design creation. Where once it would have taken a team several months to generate 30 or 40 different design options, “now we’re getting that same kind of iterative design idea generation happening in minutes or hours,” he says.
Artificial intelligence can automate repetitive design tasks.
However, to use AI effectively as a design tool, he thinks there is a need “to establish a really strong understanding of precedent, analysis, and conceptual thinking.”
Kell agrees: “It’s not just about the software. The software is fundamental, but it’s the art of the architecture that really matters,” what he sees as “sensibilities around form, our own place, and our own materiality.”
“It’s important not to lose Vitruvius’s principles,” he says, referencing Roman architect Vitruvius’s three qualities necessary for a well-designed building: strength, utility, and beauty. “We can’t let technology drive us to a different outcome. The role of the architect is fundamental to enriching everybody’s lives, rather than simply supporting.”
Considering architecture’s impact on the world
One of the fundamental roles of architecture today is addressing human-driven causes of climate change. Bernstein says this broader approach is evident in how teaching architecture has shifted over the past 20 years from “making beautiful objects to making things in context.”
Design, he says, now involves “trying to understand what the relationship is between the thing that you’re designing and how it affects the larger systems of where it sits—on its site, in its neighborhood, in its city, and in a global ecosystem.”
Kell thinks new tools available to the profession will “help address some of the more fundamental challenges we’re all having, like how you better address climate change within your designs, and how you better calculate and reduce embodied carbon in your designs.”
In fact, addressing climate change is “all about data, and it’s all about digital solutions…that will normalize this for architects and engineers,” he says. “But it’s only going to come about through a greater understanding and adoption of technology.”
Beach also sees a need for architects, as “building experts,” to take on a larger role in adapting a building over its lifespan, based on both how the client is using it and how a changing climate affects a building’s performance.
Architects are increasingly called on to address climate change in their designs, such as using vertical or rooftop gardens to help regulate internal temperature.
In addition, given current supply-chain issues, labor shortages, and rising costs—and the potential for an influx of environmental refugees over the next two decades—he thinks students should learn skills that directly tackle these challenges. These include prefabrication and modular construction, Beach says. “Not that we think this is the future of everything, but we know that our students are going to have to be leaders in this.”
In addition to addressing climate change, Perenchio sees a strong need for finding “ways to engage the community so that marginalized groups can have voices at the table.” This makes it necessary for team members to have “a sense of empathy and emotional intelligence.”
While all architects need to consider the broader impacts of a project, Beach says the burden falls more heavily on the younger generations. “It is their responsibility to figure out how to usher us through these changes that are going to happen,” he says, and “to be responsible stewards of the environment and stewards of our communities.”
The pharmaceutical industry is facing unique circumstances when it comes to managing their workplaces. Not only is pharma one of the few industries with labs in their workplace, but also, the most recent Occupancy Intelligence Index report revealed that the pharmaceutical and life sciences industry has the highest capacity usage of all industries, presenting them with challenges (and opportunities) that greatly differ from other industries that aren’t as far along in their return-to-office and hybrid working journey.
This high workplace utilization is primarily due to the specific nature of pharmaceutical work; operations such as laboratory research, manufacturing, and shipping pharmaceuticals require employees to be physically present in the office. Remote work is simply not feasible for these key functions, leading to consistently high usage and significant growth. This industry’s robustness continues even amidst today’s macroeconomic slowdown, allowing workplace and CRE leaders in the life sciences industry to continue to invest in and focus on workplace development.
Pharma and Life Sciences Workplace Challenges
In pharmaceutical and life sciences workplaces, three key goals stand out for workplace leaders:
Optimizing lab footprint and design
Enhancing space utilization
Ensuring Success of Dynamic Work Models Across Campus
Essential insights for optimizing lab space lies in understanding how many team members are using the space and how often, as well as how frequently the equipment at each workstation is operational. Understanding this is the first step towards making decisions around optimizing the total footprint of the labs, the lab design/layout, energy consumption, and cleaning schedules.
Outside of labs and within office spaces, leaders aim to create environments that foster collaboration. To achieve this, they need to identify the most and least popular areas and determine why certain spaces remain unused. Additionally, they need to determine their ideal space mix and how much space each business unit requires.
Finally, as unassigned seating becomes more and more common, tracking meeting room usage and helping employees locate available workspace across sprawling campuses is crucial for a seamless and productive workplace experience.
With the VergeSense Occupancy Intelligence Platform, workplace leaders can tackle these challenges head-on, armed with data-driven insights to optimize their spaces and improve employee experiences.
Optimizing Lab Footprints and Lab Design
Pharmaceutical and life sciences workplaces are inherently unique as they are one of the few industries with lab spaces, giving workplace leaders new challenges to tackle, especially as special attention is often put on these spaces due to their high cost per square foot.
Many pharma companies are also looking at increasing their lab-to-workspace ratio, which makes it all the more important that lab spaces are highly integrated with the traditional workspaces so employees can have seamless physical connections and sightlines into the labs from individual and collaborative workspaces. Workplace leaders are also deeply considering team adjacency needs when it comes to placing neighborhoods near labs.
Usage Map
Make the necessary lab space adjustments and optimize your real estate spend by understanding, at a glance, how many people are using each of your labs – and how often.
Workplace leaders must first understand the capacity usage (number of people detected across the selected space(s) divided by the total capacity) as well as the time usage (total time the space(s) were in use divided by the total time the space(s) were available) of their labs. Understanding these measures of space efficiency is crucial, because these spaces cost so much money to build, maintain, and clean. It is vital to understand employee usage patterns to determine if more or less of these spaces are needed, or if their designs need to be reconsidered.
Heat Map
Optimize what you’re spending on expensive equipment by understanding when, and how often, that each workstation is really being used.
Because of the expensive nature of buying and maintaining lab equipment, c-suite executives and workplace leaders are increasingly concerned with understanding how often their lab equipment is being used. This can help inform what equipment they should be investing in (or shedding), as well as help them determine which pieces may need maintenance or repair due to frequent use.
Where Usage Maps provide capacity and time usage insights for the overall lab space, Heat Maps allow workplace leaders to easily understand how frequently each individual workstation and piece of equipment is being used. The heat map also allows this information to be distilled quickly, by evaluating the map colors to determine hotspots in seconds.
Here you can see how one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies is using VergeSense within their lab spaces to monitor each workstation as its own space. This allows them to easily understand how frequently each workstation is being used and if it’s properly sized and located.
Optimizing Office Space Design
Pharma is ahead of the curve when it comes to returning to the office because of how much of their employees’ work is centered around being in the office. Because of this, workplace leaders have already started optimizing their designs to foster a collaborative employee experience, but they need help understanding how their design changes are helping their teams operate, where their employees are spending their time, and how much of each space type they need in their new integrated design models. They also want to understand what gaps exist in their current designs.
Usage Map
Make data-driven design changes after identifying which space types and neighborhoods are the most and least popular so your teams can be happy and productive inside and outside of the lab.
One of the top priorities for workplace leaders as they begin optimizing their office space design is understanding which spaces are the most and least popular so they can repurpose unpopular spaces and add more popular spaces as necessary. Without data, this can be entirely subjective, leading to assumption-based decision-making.
With Usage Maps, workplace leaders can identify where employees are spending the most of their time, as well as which spaces are the most/least popular. Workplace leaders can then use this data to evaluate which space types they may need more of to accommodate employee demand and which spaces they should eliminate due to low engagement.
Passive Occupancy Detection
Make design decisions with a true understanding of how your spaces are being used: actively by your team or passively by common objects that indicate a human presence.
Sometimes, popular spaces aren’t in use during uncharacteristic days or times and this can lead to a lot of questions as to why. Gaining a true understanding of how spaces are being used by people and objects can help provide clarity, as many times, popular spaces aren’t in use by employees because objects are reserving the space for someone else.
Only VergeSense offers passive occupancy detection. This innovation identifies common objects that indicate human presence, even when no one is physically there. This type of occupancy constitutes up to 50% of all usage. By leveraging passive occupancy data, workplace leaders can gain deeper insights into how spaces are truly used. This knowledge empowers leaders to understand inefficiencies in how their employees are using the office so they can make necessary changes to the spaces themselves and encourage behavior changes when necessary.
Another global Life Sciences organization leveraged VergeSense and discovered that many spaces were consistently “occupied” by laptops, bags, and clothing – not humans. By gaining a true understanding of their occupancy with Passive Occupancy Detection, a global biotechnology company discovered that they could assign 30% more employees to their existing office footprint and avoid a $13M portfolio expansion.
VergeSense x ChatGPT
Make data-driven decisions faster than ever. Through its natural language interface, VergeSense x ChatGPT becomes your data-science co-pilot that provides insights on the performance of your space designs in minutes.
Data provides the answer to nearly any question workplace leaders may be having; however, analyzing it is easier said than done. Workplace leaders across the globe are looking for an easier way to analyze data to uncover the answers to key design questions like:
What is my ideal space mix?
Which spaces do I need more of?
How much space does each business unit or team need?
Our secure and private integration with ChatGPT allows workplace leaders to ask questions about their occupancy data so they can understand where to go next. ChatGPT will dive into your data to discover your ideal space mix, which spaces you need more of, how much space a business unit or team needs, which spaces are frequently near or at capacity, and anything else you may be wondering about. It amplifies the speed at which workplace leaders can innovate and start using their data to make concrete strategies and decisions without needing to consult a data expert.
Ensuring Success of Dynamic Work Models Across Campus
Pharmaceutical organizations have continued to transition to fully hybrid, dynamic work models, leading to increased adoption of new ways of working, such as unassigned seating and activity-based work. Not only does this impact how workplace leaders are optimizing their spaces, but it also impacts how employees work and interact with spaces. Oftentimes, workplace leaders have to help employees adjust to the new ways of working and change inefficient behaviors.
Space Booking Automation
Automatically release unused bookings and allow other employees to use these spaces, helping to create a frictionless work environment while optimizing your space availability.
Addressing inefficiencies caused by employee behaviors and responses to today’s dynamic work environments often starts with understanding how meeting rooms are being used. When booked meeting rooms are not actually used, but still show as booked in your system, it leaves employees struggling to find open meeting rooms for them to collaborate in.
Ghosted meetings account for 37% of all meetings worldwide, meaning that these meeting spaces are going unused – but they’re available. Even when a space is booked but unused, other employees won’t use it and have to search for unbooked, empty rooms, despite no one actually using the booked space. This causes wasted time and a poor employee experience. This can also skew occupancy data, leading to incorrect conclusions that the spaces are going unused due to planning and design-related factors. VergeSense space booking automation uses occupancy data to automatically release any booked spaces that are ghosted or end early so other employees can use the space, improving employee experience and improving your bottom line by ensuring the square footage you are paying for can be utilized.
Kiosks & Real-Time Availability
Make it easy for employees to find and reserve available spaces to work anywhere on your campus, whether it’s on the same floor or in a different building.
As employees move across your campus, they want to be certain that they will have a space to work at. Walking across a large campus just to struggle to find a place to work is an experience with little to be desired.
Kiosks help employees manage unassigned seating and activity-based work models by giving employees access to real-time availability so they can find the open space they need and providing a larger inventory of space to look for beyond their current floor. Because it is natural employee behavior to remain on one floor throughout the day, kiosks help employees feel comfortable and motivated to switch floors or buildings because they can see that the space they are looking for is actually available somewhere. This reduces the wasted time and friction associated with searching for available spaces manually.
A global pharmaceutical organization relies on VergeSense to better understand how often their lab equipment is being used. As you know, this equipment is incredibly expensive and understanding it’s utilization is critical when assessing the overall efficiency of their lab spaces. VergeSense wired area sensors provided the solution to their dynamic lab by offering poll rates every 30 seconds, ensuring the frequent movement of people between equipment is accurately captured.
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.
Only VergeSense offers passive occupancy detection. This innovation identifies common objects that indicate human presence, even when no one is physically there. This type of occupancy constitutes up to 50% of all usage. By leveraging passive occupancy data, workplace leaders can gain deeper insights into how spaces are truly used. This knowledge empowers leaders to understand inefficiencies in how their employees are using the office so they can make necessary changes to the spaces themselves and encourage behavior changes when necessary.
Our secure and private integration with ChatGPT allows workplace leaders to ask questions about their occupancy data so they can understand where to go next. ChatGPT will dive into your data to discover your ideal space mix, which spaces you need more of, how much space a business unit or team needs, which spaces are frequently near or at capacity, and anything else you may be wondering about. It amplifies the speed at which workplace leaders can innovate and start using their data to make concrete strategies and decisions without needing to consult a data expert.
