Have you experienced double-booked rooms? What about conflicting information from your personal calendar and the room’s calendar? Do you and colleagues fight over meeting spaces? If so, chances are your company uses a solution with a booking database that fails to sync with the calendaring server. These add-on calendar solutions create major headaches for companies and their employees.
Instead, a range of smart workplace technologies are emerging that tightly integrate with common calendaring servers, and won’t use a separate database that can fall out of sync. A tight integration, or one that works directly with the calendaring server, will remove the hassle of double bookings and discrepancies. It’s a much-needed improvement for a truly seamless workplace experience.
Why is it so uncommon that workgroups use a right-sized room? Too often, large rooms are occupied by a small handful of people, and small rooms are filled to the brim. Part of the solution might be people counting, which many companies have been turning towards recently. People counting helps companies understand what rooms are misused and gives them the data to optimize spaces.
Around the corner is a more proactive, and privacy-friendly approach to room matching. Instead of diagnosing the problem after the fact, new smart office technologies are moving towards a gentle nudge. Through a variety of work interfaces, employees can receive discreet reminders and helpful suggestions to make using the right type of room effortless.
Companies are increasingly concerned about the total employee experience. It’s essential to retain and attract new talent today. What has entered the conversation—and will only become more ubiquitous in 2024—is monitoring and improving indoor climate. It’s no secret that a poor indoor climate has a negative impact on your wellbeing. Let alone your work.
A stuffy room or a chilly office aren’t only inconveniences. They weigh down employee wellbeing and negatively impact the overall office mood. Supreme indoor climate quality gives employees a place where they can thrive both professionally and health-wise. We believe proactive ways of empowering people with this indoor climate data, such as notifications and nudges of poor air quality, will come out on top.
For the past couple years, hybrid work has made a lot of noise. But what will make it sing? If the pandemic ushered in the era of hybrid, we are entering the era of defining good hybrid practices. And to do that, companies will be forced to figure out why they choose hybrid at all.
To us, rigid, office-exclusive workdays cut off schedules and hamper creativity. With flexible, human-centered workdays, you instead embrace the fact that there are a wide variety of workstyles and types of work. Hybrid working lets employees perform focused work at home and teamwork at the office. That’s why the office is quickly turning into a cornerstone for company culture, socialization, and mentorship. We think the future lies in smart office technology that embraces human-centered design and which gives employees and teams the power to make better choices together.
Artificial Intelligence is increasingly being incorporated into work tools to enhance productivity. From text writing to automated task management to AI-driven insights about work patterns, these tools aim to make work smarter and more efficient. But AI is gaining another use when it comes to smart office design: employee assistance.
How can Artificial Intelligence help employees use their office better? In a variety of ways. For one, it is easy to forget the burden of large office campuses on new employees, cross-team employees, and guests. Through virtual assistance, this challenge may disappear completely. Or take the case of finding an ideal place to work for you or your team. With AI support, employees could offload these daily chores and focus on what truly matters.
