As the world begins to emerge from remote work and living, big questions remain: “What will social norms look like?” “How will business be transformed?”
In your organizational discussions, your questions may be more specific to your organization: “What space do we need?” “What should our office look like?” “How can we increase and ensure employee productivity?”
Aligning your workplace with business needs is essential to sustaining productivity, creating an engaged workplace culture and optimizing real estate portfolios in 2021 and beyond. Failing to do so may cost your business time and money in the long run.
But, re-designing your space to align with the changing workplace is a major undertaking. From redefining company-wide real estate and people strategies to building adaptive design - it can be overwhelming to understand where to dig in.
Luckily, new solutions have emerged to help businesses understand how and where to start. Workplace lifecycle management technology is a new, essential part of the corporate real estate tech stack. In this post, we'll explore how this solution connects your people to your spaces and unlocks long-term strategy.
At its core, workplace lifecycle management technology is different from other design or real estate tools because it’s focused on both the people and the space. It’s a platform that helps you identify how your people work, plan and design re-entry or changes in your space, all while acting as a digital system of record for your real estate portfolio.
Workplace lifecycle management technology allows enterprise businesses to evolve with their workplace by answering questions such as:
Rather than just focusing on optimizing space and seating, the technology first seeks to uncover what your culture and people need to thrive. With this data, smarter workplaces can be easily designed and constantly iterated upon.
“Lifecycle” is the key word in workplace lifecycle management software. The technology empowers you to uncover and act on the cyclical or iterative patterns and needs of your places and spaces.
First, the technology compiles data on people and place. Utilization data, floorplans, 3D models, organizational groups, and portfolio analytics are then all consolidated into a single system of record.
This gives your team an accurate, comprehensive picture of your business needs when it comes to space utilization and seating, or working and meeting styles.
This picture is also a digital footprint of your real estate portfolio with data feeding into your design and planning efforts to help reduce your real estate footprint.
From this footprint, the platform can map new “use protocols” and designs for your real estate.
With design tools built in, workplace lifecycle management software also enables you to translate that data into an effective, visually stunning workplace redesign. It compiles everything you need from a start-to-finish overhaul of your portfolio that’s grounded in your unique business needs.
After the initial learning and discovery phase, workplace lifecycle management software is available to help you constantly measure, adapt, and iterate — an important part of any tech stack as your team’s definition of work continues to evolve.
With a lack of information and disparate systems, many businesses don’t know how to incorporate necessary changes into the spaces and places they use for work. Workplace lifecycle management software simplifies and provides visibility into these evolving needs.
When you begin with employee needs and map them to your real estate footprint in a systematic, rigorous way, you end up with a highly efficient, streamlined real estate portfolio that evolves with your business.
Workplace lifecycle management software highlights what space is essential, what should evolve, and what your organization has outgrown. This has a significant impact on long-term ROI.
Centering people in your decision-making has other benefits: as employees indicate a clear preference for hybrid models, it’s clear that their needs have changed. Businesses can’t afford to bring employees back en-masse to static offices without considering worker preference and adapting offices for the needs and work styles created by the pandemic. On the other hand, businesses that put thought into crafting a better workplace experience can increase engagement to nurture inspired employees, creating teams that are dramatically more productive than average.
Workplace Lifecycle management platforms fluidly compile data, enabling you to examine real estate decisions at any time. With sensors built into your physical workplace, you get real-time feedback into the effectiveness of your workplace, creating an adaptive model for easy iteration. This means that no matter where your business lands on the stay-go spectrum post-pandemic — and beyond — you can always have a view into the “who” and “how” of your organization.
Workplace lifecycle management software can help your business reenter — and continuously reevaluate — the workplace. With it, you’re empowered to use your data to right-size your real estate portfolio and delight employees in your workplace reentry journey, and beyond.
If you’re interested in learning more about Saltmine, sign up for a demo today.
