iXMS Workplace Technology Assessment
How Mature Is Your Digital Workplace?
Gartner predicts that over the next several years, the greatest competitive advantage for a third of organizations will come from their ability to creatively exploit emerging technologies.
That means the success of your digital workplace depends on your ability to connect people, technology, and data.
How well is your technology infrastructure equipped to do this? Do you have the tools you need to effectively manage your office space, collaborate, and plan for the continuous next?
Traditional integrated workplace management systems have focused primarily on maintaining buildings. But if the past year has taught us anything, it’s that the workplace is much more than the physical office environment.
Our 5-minute workplace technology assessment will gauge your company’s maturity in five key areas of what we call the integrated experience management system (iXMS).
Here’s a closer look at each category and why it’s critical to your future workplace.
Space management
Considering real estate is the second-largest expense for most organizations, good space management is fundamental to controlling costs. In a September CBRE Future of the Office survey, 60% of corporate real estate leaders said they were aggressively pursuing “contraction, consolidation, or exit plans” since the COVID-19 pandemic. Fifty-two percent said they had paused relocation plans, and 74% had paused expansion plans.
As we all consider how to move forward, it’s clear that a flexible approach to office space offers promise.
56% of real estate leaders plan to use more flexible office space to reduce costs and risks.
(CBRE Future of Office Survey)
To take advantage of these opportunities, you need a sophisticated space management system that allows you to monitor real-time occupancy and demand for office space. And as capacity changes, you also need to be able to manage flexible seating arrangements.
Employee experience
After working remotely for most of the past year, many of your employees are eager to return to the office — but not to business as usual. It’s not their empty desk they’ve been missing, but the opportunities for face-to-face meetings and socializing with their coworkers.
In a recent Gensler survey, 74% of employees said people are what they miss most about the office. Fifty-five percent said it’s harder to collaborate with others at home. And the majority, 70%, want to spend most of their week in the office when it’s safe to reopen.
However, their excitement over seeing their colleagues will soon wear off if they return to an office environment that offers little more than a place to sit.
For them, an exceptional employee experience means more flexibility to choose when and where they work. It means having a variety of spaces available, including quiet spaces to concentrate, collaborative meeting rooms and huddle areas, and places where they can go to relax and recharge. They want it to include the latest technology and amenities that support their physical and mental wellbeing. And they want a simple, intuitive user experience.
To meet these new expectations, analysts predict the workplace will need to become more of a destination. In a modern digital workplace, technology is frictionless. Employees use interactive wayfinding and digital signage on mobile devices to find and reserve a room, request service, and more.
By eliminating the logistical hurdles that can slow them down — such as spending 15 minutes searching for an available room — you improve collaboration and free them up to focus on what really matters.
A highly engaged workforce is over 20% more productive, 20% more profitable, and has over 40% less turnover.
(Gallup Employee Engagement Survey)
Analytics
Workplace analytics can be a huge asset to your organization. Having the right data at the right time can help you make smarter decisions. For instance, if you’re considering eliminating some individual workspaces in favor of offering more collaborative areas, you need to know how many employees are in the office on a typical day. If you eliminate too many desks and employees have a hard time finding a seat when they need it, they might stop coming into the office altogether.
By looking at historical workplace data from sensors or desk reservations, you can determine your peak occupancy so you’ll always have enough desks to support your workforce.
The key is to be able to find this data easily and analyze it instantly. Unfortunately, many organizations have dozens of different software systems, making data analysis a difficult and manual task.
A mature digital workplace gathers data from many different sources and integrates them into a single system. This allows multiple users to access the information they need anytime.
Your HR manager may need to see how many desks are available within a particular building as they make plans to onboard new employees. Meanwhile, your facilities management team will want to know which desks have been used each day so they know where to clean.
Having all this information in one place makes everyone’s job easier. It can also result in significant cost savings.
A large organization saved $300,000 a year using sensors to implement desk-sharing.
Integrations
In today’s digital workplace, integrations go hand-in-hand with analytics. Your smart workplace solutions need to connect to the critical systems that power your operations.
That can be increasingly difficult because new technologies are emerging every day.
When you inherited a new building or division, you may have inherited their legacy systems. Additionally, employees often find their own solutions when something isn’t working for them. One day your IT director realizes you have 60 different technologies, and many of them don’t integrate with each other.
That may sound like an exaggeration, but this was a reality for McKesson. The healthcare company was using 58 different software systems to manage its facilities, IT, and HR functions.
This made it nearly impossible to uncover a single source of trusted workplace data and analyze it to make property management decisions.
Since implementing an IWMS, McKesson has reduced total costs per square footage, implemented flexible seating, and decreased service request response times.
As more of your business processes move to the cloud, ease of integration becomes even more critical. Having to retrieve data from company servers or on-premise facility management software systems is inefficient and limits scalability.
These legacy systems can also be expensive to maintain because they typically require regular updates. That’s why software-as-a-service (SaaS) has become the preferred choice for growing enterprises.
Operations
How efficiently is your company managing energy usage? Cleaning? What about important business processes like office moves, service requests, and visitor management? How well does your technology support your customer experience?
If these critical processes aren’t working well, they can have a negative impact on your workplace experience and your bottom line.
Consider how difficult it was for beauty retailer Sephora to manage office moves across 10 floors. As the manager of corporate facilities, Edgar Sanchez was responsible for managing frequent moves that involved 1,500 people and 300,000 square feet of space. Each time one of the company’s 40 different departments experienced growth, he would have to find a way to accommodate new hires by shuffling existing seating arrangements.
Planning a large move with hundreds of people could take several months.
If this sounds familiar, your company likely needs better technology to support its business processes. For Sephora, it was as simple as implementing move management software. This allowed Sanchez to plan moves that used to take months in just one week.
Beauty retailer Sephora cut its office move planning time by over 90% using iOFFICE’s move management software.
Take the next step with our iXMS maturity model assessment
When your workplace technology is lagging, your entire organization suffers. Perhaps your office was more than half empty before the pandemic, and you wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars on real estate you didn’t need.
Or you’ve found small, daily frustrations among employees are adding up to growing discontent. If you don’t have the right workplace analytics, you can’t make critical decisions that reduce costs and improve your growth potential.
And when tasks that should be simple take weeks to complete, it takes time away from more profitable activities.
As you prepare for the transition back to the office in the coming months, you have a unique opportunity to reflect on your digital workplace strategy and take steps now to improve it.
This 10-question maturity assessment will give you a better understanding of your tech landscape and what you need to do to position your company for future success.
After completing it, you’ll receive a detailed report with your results, recommendations, and resources to keep you moving forward.
You’ll also receive our exclusive benchmarking report later to see how your organization compares to others.
There’s never been a better time to evaluate your digital workplace. Get started now.
