How One Healthcare Company Eased Growing Pains through Space Utilization

If you look back through history, it’s inspiring to see how businesses and the workplace have evolved. In the days of the Wild West, a business consisted of four walls and a dirt floor. Innovative thinkers with enough cash flow were even able to build individual work spaces for those that needed a quiet place to think or carry on a private conversation. Boy have we come a long way since then!

With the evolution of the workplace and the welcoming of a very diverse workforce, businesses have begun to discern the influence a strong company culture has on employee mindset. As management teams communicate more with employees and invest in tools to help strategize, many have begun to recognize the need for well-defined goals, transparency, and flexibility. This shift in priorities has re-shaped the entire organizational strategy, helping leaders realize improved operational efficiencies and overhead costs.

Success can’t be realized simply with a flexible culture and defined goals, however. Facilities managers must implement workplace tools that help integrate all organizational information for more intuitive decisions. Progressive thinkers utilize this data to predict employee needs before they become a reality, offering ample time for planning things like work space redesign and employee moves. These are what make a good company, great and disengaged employees, engaged.

So, how does proper management of one’s space impact the entire organization? What tools should your company implement to help achieve this success?

For one iOffice customer, the Space Consultant of a leading healthcare provider, the answer was found through an understanding of his workforce’s spatial needs and utilizing that knowledge to empower them with the right tools.

Proper Space Management Directly Affects Business Productivity

“The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture. If you do not manage culture, it manages you, and you may not even be aware of the extent to which this is happening.” –Edgar Schein, Professor MIT Sloan School of Management

What does your office look like on any given day? Is everyone in their own space with their nose to the grind? Or is the office buzzing with energy, employees huddled in groups collaborating on their next project? A more collaborative, open work environment sparks creativity and boosts employee engagement. Technology now affords us the mobility needed to nurture that culture. With this mobility, however, comes its own set of challenges.

As a major contributor to the healthcare system, it is critical that our client continuously evolve and grow with the needs of their customers and employees. Trust is critical to their success, meaning both clients and the workforce must understand and relate to the company’s mission and culture. This means consistently keeping their facilities up-to-date technologically, expanding and adding services where needed.

These needs, however, bring about their own set of challenges. They are continuously re-vamping their brand, adding new facilities, and re-designing current spaces as the need arises. During one of their re-branding and expansion projects, the Space Consultant realized the current system for maintaining floor plans and coordinating moves wasn’t working. At the time, they were partnered with a drawing management company that worked with them once a year to map out their current space utilization and update any changes to the facilities. The process took six weeks and even longer to be furnished with the latest drawings. Six long weeks to get updated floor plans that, with the rapid company growth, would be obsolete within months. The effects of this lack of real-time data had a trickle down effect, affecting each member of the workforce’s productivity in some way.

With well over 250 facilities and 204,000 people to manage every day, the Space Consultant had to make a push for a better solution. One that would not only aid his facilities team in identifying current open spaces, but that would help plan moves without disrupting employee productivity.

In just a few short months, they were able to begin putting their new Workplace Management software to the test. The results were almost immediate. Move strategies are now mapped out ahead of time, allowing for a more fluid process. Reporting capabilities now afford the FM team the ability to make predictions about future spatial needs, as well as handle current space assignment needs with ease. Processes that once required multiple people now only require one, allowing the rest of the employees to focus on mission critical tasks. The results are a more engaged and empowered workforce and an informed management team.

Today’s facilities manager has entered uncharted territory, facing a multitude of challenges never before considered. As teams realize the intricacies of running a successful business and how each factor is entwined, it has become increasingly evident that enterprises must invest in workplace tools that successfully manage and interlace these factors. Workplace management software affords FMs these capabilities seamlessly, offering the opportunity to gather data and strategize at a moment’s notice and free of the typical workplace boundaries. With the right investment, businesses are able to align the work space with the workforce, without sacrificing organizational goals. The result, is a reduction in expenses, increase in productivity, and the tools needed to achieve short and long-term goals.

Read this national enterprise’s case study to learn more about what modules were implemented to better manage their growing real estate portfolio and what their plans are for future implementations.