4 Crucial Technologies You Badly Need To Make Hybrid Work Sustainable
And why Artificial Intelligence is the ultimate enabler
It is no news that Facility and Human Resources decision makers are having a tough time. They both want people to get back to the office for different reasons:
- Human Resource Managers, especially the ones working for companies accustomed to operating at the office, need to foster a healthy culture while making sure new hires understand “where they are” and get up to speed as fast as possible. Instead, with an endemically distributed workforce, the beloved organizational identity was broken up into pockets of cohesive clusters (usually teams) that branched off their own culture and workflows, often in conflicts with one another. New hires, interacting solely with their team, don’t “breathe” the office air and do not establish cross-pollinating relationships with professionals working in other functions.
How can we foster the desired organizational culture?
How can we make sure new hires are properly trained and establish fruitful relationships?
- Facility Managers face a couple of tricky catch-22 situations.
1. C-level directives try to force people to go back to the office, but employees keep staying home because the “Return on Commute (RoC)” for them is too low.
How can office critical mass be achieved and lead to a self-sustained repopulation?
2. In order to make the office more appealing and lure people in, Facility Managers have to invest in workplace technologies; however, with most people not going to the office, Finance is pushing to get rid of buildings to save huge costs, thus making it hard to justify the uncertain return on the investment in workplace technologies.
If we buy workplace management technologies, will people go back to the office?
What is the right formula that allows employers to invest or divest with confidence, while making hybrid work sustainable?
If you, like me and many reputable analysts, believe that:
- The effects of the 2020 pandemic are irreversible
- Hybrid work is here to stay in the long run
- There will never be any “100% at the office” arrangement
Then, you need to make sure a new sustainable balance is achieved, allowing your workforce to be productive at home, at the office, and anywhere in between, no matter where people or organizations choose to spend most of their time.
Your sustainable hybrid work solution must deliver the following:
- Equality. No matter what someone’s preferred work location is, every employee should feel they have the same opportunities, and no one is penalized.
- Consistency. Same collaboration experience everywhere, with minor adaptations to best leverage physical spaces.
- Security. No matter where someone is working, access to secure resources must be guaranteed, while minimizing the barriers to access for the employees.
- Actionable workplace intelligence. Making decisions to downsize the real estate portfolio, save a ton of money, and gain an edge against your competition, is made possible by very accurate, complete and reliable workplace utilization data.
- Measurable value. This is particularly true for the employee. If the solution delivers tangible measurable value, especially in terms of time savings, then users have great incentives to adopt it, thus generating the workplace data needed to make decisions, and reducing the time needed to reach sustainability. Plus, measurable benefits make the business case crisp and credible, which results in a larger consensus across the functions involved in the decision to adopt the solution.
- Serendipity. Traditionally, the majority of cross-pollination of ideas, as well as relationship building, took shape at the watercooler, coffee machine or other shared office spaces; then, it vanished during lockdown times and it is still missing in action. Your sustainable workplace solution must feature “engineered serendipity” that would fill the communication gaps, especially the ones among different teams and business functions.
Hang tight, because we are about to isolate the 4 most important components to look for in a solution that will make hybrid work a sustainable reality.
1. Collaboration Platform
I know… nothing new here. Nevertheless, you need a way to tie everything together in a cohesive manner. The more employees rely on virtual collaboration tools for everything, the more consistent the overall experience. This means people will perceive collaboration to be more “fair”, without a clear advantage for employees working at the office.
This is particularly true when the collaboration platform interacts seamlessly with the office collaboration devices, from phones to digital whiteboards. For example, all content generated during an in person meeting can be immediately made available in digital form in the collaboration channels, by leveraging on a digital whiteboard integrated with collaboration tools.
From the security perspective, centralizing the interactions that matter and their related content into one platform, may feel like putting all eggs in one basket. However, if the platform security is top-notch, then the risks are low and the benefits of not having to chase security holes across multiple tools lowers the IT operational cost.
Needless to say, the same collaboration experience everywhere partially contributes to the overall equality of the solution.
2. Sensors Everywhere
Making the decision to reduce the office footprint and improve the layout is a daunting task. In fact, after many years of available workplace solutions, not many enterprises have taken the risk to implement workplace transformation policies at full scale.
However, what would reduce the risks of making such decisions?
Reliable insights based on comprehensive data, of course!
Here is what to collect and rely upon.
Check-ins/outs
You want to have a clear idea of the overall presence in a building throughout the day. Every door should feature a way to register employee and visitor entrances.
With that info, you are able to accurately know how far you are from your maximum occupancy, and develop an overall idea of the occupancy trends.
Physical presence sensors for desks and rooms
Imagine you put a reliable precise presence sensor under every single desk, as well as deploy devices able to accurately count the number or people using any type of room, at any given time.
Resource occupancy gives you detailed data that allows you to figure out:
- Number of desks you really need
- How many rooms of a certain size you need (room mix)
- What spaces aren’t utilized (so that you can investigate why)
With that information you are able to reduce the office footprint by eliminating desks, rooms, shared spaces, without affecting the overall workforce productivity.
This is powerful stuff, but you must cover 100% of the resources, or you will always have doubts and you’ll be conservative with your cuts, not realizing the full potential savings.
Heatmap
How do employees use the spaces?
Tracking presence across the entire floor plan has the advantage of showing where people tend to concentrate or where people don’t go, independently from the fact they are or not at their desk.
Once you have a reliable heatmap of your floor plans over time, you can make the informed decision of repurposing/redesigning, or getting rid of, particularly underutilized areas.
Necessary but not sufficient
Until you have a complete picture of how your workplace is utilized over a large-enough period of time, you won’t be confident enough to get rid of buildings or a subset of them.
The key question is:
Does the short-term investment to acquire and deploy pervasive workplace sensing technologies enable a footprint reduction that guarantees a large-enough/likely-enough Return on Investment (RoI)?
The sensors alone are not enough to realize the RoI. But they are the ultimate enabler for the decision to maximize the reduction of your office spaces with high confidence.
3. Workplace Management System
Once you sense the physical space, you have to bring data together and make sense of it. A Workplace Management System (WMS) does that for you, generating a higher level of actionable intelligence.
In addition to generating actionable occupancy trends that enable tough footprint reductions, WMSs are a source of precious workforce insights, generated by combining physical occupancy with voluntary bookings and interactions through collaboration technologies.
These are very few examples of the myriad of questions WMSs are able to answer:
- How many employees book a desk and don’t go to the office?
- How many employees or guests occupy desks without making any reservation?
- How many employees book a desk, but then spend most of their time working in other kinds of office spaces?
- How many people book rooms for in person meetings, and then they don’t show up?
Please, note that, for the purpose of this article, we are narrowing the scope of the WMS to its mere contribution to reducing the office footprint. However, you should keep in mind that the value of a WMS goes far beyond that, especially when you consider its impact on building operating costs.
4. Digital Serendipity
As you might have noticed, so far, we have talked about technologies that have been around for a while. If such technologies alone were enough to make hybrid work sustainable, we would be seeing many more happy people, both at home and at their crowded offices. However, that isn’t the case. We need a fourth technology that enables sustainability across all spaces.
In particular, you need to provide new employee experiences to tie home, office and other locations together in a coherent manner, lowering the bar for people to seamlessly transition across workplaces.
Hybrid Work Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides the digital serendipity needed to fill the current communication gaps and overcome the hardest hybrid work problems, thus clearing the path to sustainability.
You might be asking yourself: “ok, these are all high-level words, but what does digital serendipity do for me, concretely?”
Here are some examples that will satisfy your curiosity and will explain the reasons behind the previous statements.
Solving today’s hidden trade-off
According to an extensive study carried out by Reclaim.ai, since the beginning of the 2020 pandemic, the average employee is working 7 extra hours/week. At the same time, the amount of extra time spent in meetings rose by 7.3 hours/week. I bet you noticed that it’s almost the same amount of time, which means extra meetings scheduled to compensate for lack of watercooler and, in general, in-person conversations directly result in unpaid overtime, worsening people’s work-life balance.
People’s busy calendar is the culprit that created this adverse effect. In fact, today, companies like Shopify are making the unprecedented decision of working asynchronously, rather than spending time in meetings.
However, you will agree with me that communicating synchronously allows people to cover more ground in less time: it’s the best way to achieve consensus and move the needle. The problem is that, in the last 15 years, we made it extremely hard to have a live conversation (yes, I am talking about scheduling calls and meetings, yuk!).
Our current collaboration technologies generate a trade-off between productivity and cohesive culture, which is something we didn’t have 20 years ago, when we could make a call with high probability someone answered. This meant faster decisions and better relationships, at the same time.
How can we be more productive while promoting a cohesive culture?
Digital Serendipity solves the trade-off, today.
Imagine you tell the AI you need to talk to someone about a certain topic for an indicative amount of time; then, you go back to do what you need to do. When it’s the right moment for both you and the other person, you get connected magically, no matter where you are, through the best possible communication channel. This is a game changer, because you get to talk to people without:
- Scheduling — we all know how painful that is.
- Texting back and forth to coordinate availability — I bet you spent your fair share of time and attention staring at an open chat window waiting for someone’s answer that doesn’t come.
- Calling unsuccessfully — we all know how unlikely it is for a busy person to answer your impromptu call.
- Leaving and/or listening to voicemail — we all wish that incoming caller doesn’t leave a message.. don’t we?
At home
How do we eliminate the work from home overtime and achieve a better work-life harmony?
As a start, you can adopt Digital Serendipity and eliminate your scheduled 1:1 meetings, which are roughly 40% of the total meetings in everyone’s calendar; as a consequence, you can expect a much higher productivity and better work-life balance. As a matter of fact, 40% less scheduled meetings compensates for the extra meeting time we have mentioned at the beginning of this section. Please, note this takes into account 1:1 meetings only, so there is much more potential value to be captured.
At the office
A recent Microsoft Research told us that the main reason why hybrid workers don’t go back to the office is not finding people they need to work or hangout with.
Since job #1 is giving employees good reasons to go back to the office, the #1 most effective solution is telling them when the people they need will be at the office, with precision and certainty.
Unfortunately, the current collaboration workflows and legacy tools do not allow to easily deliver those actionable information.
Imagine you really need to talk to Anna to close a deal by tomorrow evening and you don’t know where she is (very common nowadays).
What do you do?
Since it’s urgent, you call her and she doesn’t answer.
Next step, you text her “do you mind if I schedule a meeting for tomorrow morning?” and wait for an answer that will take some time.
She agrees, so you go on your calendaring app and find out her morning looks solid-busy. You go back to your 1:1 chat with her and exchange more messages to negotiate a slot for you. At that point, Anna has to look at her calendar and needs to move something to make room for you.
It’s your lucky day, she agrees (again) and gives you a time slot for your meeting; now, it’s your turn to invest (or waste?) time to schedule a virtual 1:1 meeting — the current standard way of talking.
Tomorrow, the time comes and you both join the meeting. When Anna shows up on video, you recognize her background. She is, like you, at the office in a non-bookable huddle room!
Since she is not too far away, you decide to join her in person; hence, you get off the virtual meeting, pack your stuff, walk to her room, unpack and get settled…
What just happened?
The lack of presence information subtracted time from your meeting. How unproductive is it?
What could you do differently?
You could certainly keep doing the meeting virtually, in 2 different huddle rooms at the same office, possibly preventing someone else from using your room for his/her meeting… How crazy and unproductive is that?
Have you recognized the trade-off in action at the office?
You either choose:
- Shorter meeting, in person
You reduce your productivity to join Anna in her huddle room, but now you can better bond with her
Or
- Longer meeting, virtually
you maximize the time you spend with Anna, but you use a resource someone else could have benefited from, and you are contributing to shaping a culture that allows that kind of waste. Other people seeing you from the glassdoor, while talking on a video device to someone at the same office, associate your face with bad feelings, and this contributes to increasing friction and distance among employees.
Let’s replay the same scenario featuring digital serendipity. Imagine there’s an AI integrated with the WMS that knows both you and Anna are at the office, and that you need to talk to her.
When the time to talk comes, the AI tells you both that the serendipitous impromptu meeting can happen in person at the most appropriate office space, conveniently in between your current indoor locations.
Think about it. We injected a very actionable information at the right point of the process, and delivered more value to both users, making the office more valuable for all parties involved — including the person who could have used your huddle room in case you decided to talk to Anna virtually.
We just minimized the trade-off.
As a Facility or HR Manager, this means you are more confident that adopting hybrid work, and consequently reducing the office footprint, will have a less adverse impact on culture and productivity.
Anywhere in between home and office
Imagine being a traveling salesman who is always chasing customers, coworkers and partners for most of the day, while on the go. Communication must be extremely hard. Every time you need to talk to a busy person you try to call in vain, leave voicemails, message repeatedly to find a time to sync, or worse, you have to open your laptop, find connectivity and schedule a meeting.
All the time wasted performing mundane tasks could be employed in more productive ways. Don’t you agree?
A digital serendipity solution that works across user devices democratizes the fruition of in-person conversations, by allowing anyone to express their need to talk to someone and get connected through the best possible communication channel in common, without waste of precious time.
No matter where you are, the experience is always the same, as well as the time you need to spend to get to a live conversation: just a few seconds to make your desire to talk explicit with the AI.
From home to office
Last but not least, Digital Serendipity allows you to lure people back to the office.
Imagine you tell the hybrid work AI that you need to talk to Anna next week for 20 min about a marketing campaign you are both designing. She gets notified and agrees. At this point, the AI, integrated with the WMS, discovers that Anna reserved a desk for Tuesday next week and suggests you to book a desk in the same neighborhood, so that your meeting can happen in person.
We just gave you a good reason to go to the office next week, in a serendipitous way.
Here’s another use case. You need to talk to Anna, Anna needs to talk to Boris, Boris needs to talk to Christian, Christian needs to talk to you and Anna. You form a cluster of people who need to talk to each other next week, and the AI can suggest to all of you to go to the office on the same day, facilitating the booking of all the resources needed.
What’s next?
Whether you are a Facility, IT, HR or Line of Business Manager, chances are you have already talked to several vendors in the Collaboration, Workplace Management and Sensors industries. However, given the emerging nature of Digital Serendipity, I bet you haven’t even heard about it.
That is why, as the next step, I encourage you to familiarize yourself with hybrid work AI solutions, because they are a game-changing innovation that will make hybrid work an equal and sustainable reality, and have the potential to give you an edge against your competition.
