4 Ways Companies Are Using Our New Workplace Technology

While there are many factors that impact an employee’s overall experience, technology is one of the most significant. It shapes the way employees interact with each other, with customers and with their physical workplace. One frustrating experience with a conference room speakerphone or displays that doesn’t work can cast a shadow over the entire afternoon.

So, as organizations put greater emphasis on the employee experience, they are taking a fresh look at the workplace technology that contributes to it.

iOFFICE is excited to be at the forefront of workplace technology solutions with our new Hummingbird employee experience app.

This technology supports employees at multiple touchpoints, allowing them to find people and places, reserve space, make service requests, receive mail and more. 

Although it’s one of the newest additions to the app store, a number of organizations are already using this new workplace technology to enhance both the employee experience and productivity. Here are four examples.

How Companies Are Using Hummingbird Workplace Technology

Wayfinding

A global management company prides itself on providing quality of life services to its customers and wants to ensure employees enjoy that same quality of life. One way to do that is to ensure employees can easily find their way around a large campus when they visit other locations.

With more than 13,000 sites and 133,000 employees in the company’s North America division alone, the company needed a better solution for directing both employees and visitors. Hummingbird’s wayfinding solution bridges the gap between floor plans and digital signage. Company leaders can easily update digital signage and kiosks with updated event information and announcements, and employees can use the mobile app to navigate through the space. This workplace technology makes large campuses feel much smaller, especially for those who are unfamiliar with them.

Managing Room Reservation

Many organizations use Outlook or Google Calendar to create meetings. While these tools are helpful, they leave gaps. They don’t allow an employee to actually reserve the space or associated equipment or services. Room reservation software fills these gaps and also provides workplace leaders with visibility into how meeting rooms and other workspaces are actually being used. Hummingbird’s workplace technology gives organizations greater flexibility into how employees find and reserve rooms. They can use a mobile app, kiosk or calendaring system to see which spaces are available, book them and find their way to those spaces.

Several organizations are using Hummingbird along with digital signage integrations to allow employees to see the status of rooms and send updates in real time.

Streamlining Service Requests

Many organizations still use email and Post-Its to manage service requests. This might work fine for a small company, but if yours is large enough to have a facility management team overseeing dozens or even hundreds of buildings, it’s incredibly inefficient.

Not only does this contribute to inbox clutter, it also offers no visibility into what’s been addressed and who is responsible for which task. That’s why more companies are recognizing the value of facility maintenance software as a way to streamline service requests and provide greater transparency around them.

However, without workplace technology that allows employees to easily make service requests, these organizations won’t see the full value of their investment in facility maintenance software. With Hummingbird’s mobile app, employees can submit a service request whenever they need something, wherever they happen to be. Because Hummingbird integrates with the iOFFICE or an organization’s existing IWMS, the service request functionality can connect to floor plans so facilities managers can see where an asset is located.

Mailroom Management and Visitor Management

Managing nearly 70,000 employees is a tall order. Managing the move to a 528,000 square-foot facility—while ensuring employees have the flexibility to move freely from one workspace to another—makes things even more complicated.

When a large healthcare organization made this move, its managers wanted to ensure that employees would have the workplace technology tools they needed to collaborate, communicate and access important information all in one place. They were previously using more than 70 different workplace applications and technologies from a variety of vendors. Aside from complicating the employee experience, this made it difficult to coordinate between their facility management, IT and HR teams.

The organization significantly streamlined its processes to just seven workplace technologies when it made the move to the iOFFICE IWMS. However, it wanted to enhance workplace flexibility even further by putting these tools into the hands of its employees. Hummingbird’s Slack integration helps to manage mailroom management and visitor management, allowing employees to receive instant notifications when employees have mail or visitors.

As more organizations transition to more flexible workplace strategies, such as activity-based working and remote work, they need to give employees the right tools to control the way they work. And with new technology trends emerging every day, it’s an exciting time to be a workplace leader.

To learn more about how iOFFICE Hummingbird works, request a demo.