How to Reduce Your Workplace Solutions Technology Stack

The New Year is the perfect time to get rid of excess clutter. But rather than going all-out Marie Kondo on your closets, consider consolidating elsewhere — specifically, your workplace solutions stack.

Here are a few reasons why you should reduce your workplace solutions stack this year and how to best approach the project.

The Case For Reducing Your Workplace Tech Solutions Stack

According to Blissfully’s 2019 Annual SaaS Trends Report, a company with 200-500 employees uses 123 apps, which means the average employee uses about eight different apps every day. What’s more, as a company increases in size, the average number of apps usually grows at the same rate, often leading to inefficiencies and redundancies.

Discover how the new generation of IWMS simplifies workplace solutions.

With no oversight, companies are susceptible to “orphaned subscriptions,” which occur when the person who originally purchased the subscription leaves the organization but doesn’t transfer ownership to another employee. As a result, no one is monitoring how much the company is spending on the software, when the subscription renews or whether anyone is still using it. A staggering 71% of businesses have at least one orphaned subscription. The average organization spends $710 per month ($8,520 annually) on orphaned subscriptions for software that may not even be in use.

Larger companies are also at risk of duplicate subscriptions. A duplicate subscription is when multiple teams are using the same workplace solution but under separate contracts, resulting in the company paying more than necessary and making data management more complex. Companies with more than 500 employees have, on average, 8-12 duplicate subscriptions.

While investing in all of the latest workplace solutions on your employees’ wish list may lead to a temporary spike in employee satisfaction, it can have long-term negative effects. If these workplace solutions don’t communicate with one another, you’ll end up with data silos and a lack of collaboration. 

Additionally, when employees have to use multiple solutions to complete a single task, it can have a major impact on productivity. Toggling between multiple systems, known as “context switching,” makes it more difficult for employees to focus and hinders employee productivity.

Another good reason to consolidate workplace solutions: the larger and more complex your tech stack becomes, the more time and money you’ll have to spend reconfiguring your existing IT infrastructure to accommodate any new technology.

Implementing more workplace solutions than necessary can also increase an organization’s security risks. Each time an employee is given access to a new app, it opens the door to potentially weak passwords, account sharing and theft of credentials. And when an employee leaves the company, someone needs to make sure user permissions and access are properly revoked from every software the employee used. The more solutions the employee used, the greater the chance one will be overlooked during this process.

How To Evaluate Your Workplace Solutions

Choosing which workplace solutions to remove from your tech stack can seem overwhelming. But knowing which attributes are essential can greatly simplify the decision-making process. As you evaluate your workplace solutions, consider eliminating any that doesn’t meet this criteria:

• Is a SaaS/cloud-based solution (as opposed to on-premise or hosted)
• Offers a native mobile app
• Easily connects to other business-critical workplace solutions
• Costs less to maintain than to replace
• Has an intuitive, user-friendly design and an easy-to-navigate interface
• Contributes to a positive employee experience
• Provides actionable data for continuous improvement
• Can be integrated with new workplace solutions — even those that have yet to launch
• Clearly shows value to the organization
• Is provided by a vendor who offers ongoing customer support
• Supports easy knowledge and data transfer
• Provides a unique benefit not found in other workplace solutions
• Has robust security measures in place
• Looks and operates like consumer technology

iOFFICE: A Single Workplace Solution To Manage Everything

In a recent survey, 44% of our customers said iOFFICE allowed them to reduce their workplace technology stack.

This is because in addition to bringing so many workplace solutions under one platform, iOFFICE’s integrated experience management system (iXMS) has an open API that allows leaders to easily connect with countless other workplace applications.

That means you can log into one platform and:

• View available space by building, floor and department
• Manage room reservations
• See asset management details
• Manage maintenance requests
• Manage visitor arrivals and departures
• Manage mailroom deliveries
• Share important announcements about the workplace
• See energy usage, measured through energy management systems
• See real-time space utilization, measured through IoT sensors
• Review lease accounting information
• Manage capital planning, new construction documents and schedules…

…and much more. In the future, that list could include workplace solutions that don’t even exist yet, such as artificial intelligence applications.

As you make plans to be less cluttered and more efficient in the coming year, consider how our flexible, cloud-based workplace management platform can help you achieve your goals. Schedule a live, personalized demo today.