There has been a change in the nature of workspaces due to the change in building technologies. Many businesses have started realizing the importance of flexible, engaging, and creative workspace that has a significant impact on the productivity and well-being of the people.

You need to put people in the Centre of the workspace and use the latest technologies to build smart workplace experiences that can connect people to people, people to places, or even places to places. Recently, there has been advancement in technologies for Indoor Positioning System, which is like a GPS for indoor environments. You can build amazing experiences for connecting people or navigate to any space or meeting rooms inside buildings.

IPS is not new, but with excellent improvement inaccuracy, it has become feasible to build smartphone applications (powered by augmented reality) that saves employee’s time and also optimizes the space usage at the same time. You can get directions on your smartphone to reach any location in the building. Wouldn’t it be great if your mobile’s virtual assistant could tell you where to park your car while coming to the office in the morning, and also, what time a particular meeting room or seat would be available for you to book instantly just when you were standing near that place? Technology can make infrastructure information easily accessible to every employee and also expand the field of vision.

Many workplace surveys have revealed that it is difficult to get conference rooms, but when you walk into the room, most of the time, it is empty. Modern technologies allow you to leave the room automatically (in a cost-effective manner) when you have not used the room for a longer duration. Even in the case of no-show, technology could identify those rooms and make it available to others. There could be substantial savings for a large organization when it comes to optimizing space usage and improving the utilization of open space.

Also, think of a smart system powered by artificial intelligence that can automatically detect a delay in the meeting and propose a new time to all the stakeholders and accordingly, reschedule the meeting and book the conference room.

The other use of it could be to create smart spaces for building ideation hubs that can encourage active participation and give everyone an equal opportunity to share ideas. Unfortunately, most of the time, employees get traditional rooms for the ideation workshops. Such environments have a significant impact on brainstorming ability and the outcome of the meeting. One could improve those experiences with low-cost technology intervention. Just think of game experiences similar to horse-racing, which people are playing in a meeting room to throw ideas. Those ideas can be seen over the digital screen controlled by mobile apps of individual team members sitting at the same or remote locations. Those ideation spaces can be built to truly transform brainstorming sessions and create a feeling of fun and excitement among employees to help them be productive.

These are just simple examples of smart building management systems. Still, there could be many of those experiences that can make employees feel better and give them a feeling of belongingness in a company. On a large scale, there is an opportunity to motivate people indirectly by providing them with good building experience in the workplace environment where they spend most of their day.

Key Takeaways 
Leverage the latest technologies to build smart workplace experiences, considerably improve the utilization of the available space, like that of the Indoor Positioning System.