Workplace-as-a-Service? The digital disruption of the office

Intelligent buildings with employee-tracking capabilities are closer than you think, explains Tom Carroll of JLL property services

The workplace as we know it is undergoing a technology-driven transformation, powered by a new digital ecosystem. It's an ecosystem that comprises more powerful and inexpensive computational power, billions of connected devices, faster and more widespread connectivity, and it's churning out huge volumes of data.

In this rapidly evolving scenario, agile businesses are remodelling their products, services and structure to place user experience, productivity and sustainability at the forefront of workplace strategy. These businesses are using smart buildings, powered by the Internet of Things (IoT) as the vehicle to drive change.

The next generation of smart buildings

Advanced sensor systems and the ubiquitous adoption of mobile devices, combined with the IoT, will transform the services a building can provide, optimising energy provision, temperature control, digital wayfinding (using sensors to find deskspace and map surroundings) and, ultimately, delivering a better overall user experience.

The next generation of building management systems (BMS) will function like the building's operating system, taking in data and making decisions on how to optimise the building's design and performance.

These systems will produce, and rely on their ability to interpret, vast streams of data. Analysis of this information will cement the link between building performance and business objectives, with the operational and tactical management of workplaces delegated to algorithms that will support the productivity of staff.

In the near future, buildings will be able to marry building usage data with information about individual staff movements and work habits to engineer collaboration between staff members, increasing cooperation and driving business success.

Functioning like a building's operating system, data from multiple smart devices can be transmitted back to the BMS, which can then make decisions on how to optimise building performance. In the event of an emergency, for instance, CCTV cameras could be redirected, access to affected parts of the building restricted, and the information systems used to direct occupants to safety.

On another level, these smart buildings will be able to monitor individual devices (such as TVs, PCs, and desk lamps) via Power-over-Ethernet technology. These devices will be able to be switched off remotely when not required, making the building more sustainable and cost effective.

The most innovative buildings have already embedded some of these solutions in their management systems.

Deloitte's The Edge (above), in Amsterdam, is perhaps an overused case study but nonetheless relevant. Equipped with more than 30,000 sensors, employees are connected to the building via an app, which helps them to find parking spaces, desks or even other colleagues. Sensors are also used to monitor temperature, movement, light, CO2 and humidity. As a result it uses 70 per cent less electricity than comparable office buildings.

However, smart buildings will soon go further than this. Sensors will compile data on space usage within the office building, which will change the very way workplaces are designed. The analysis of this data will reveal crucial information on work patterns and people's behaviours, which will translate into optimised office space and a business strategy that will place individuals' needs at the very core of it.

'Workplace-as-a-Service'

Technology and the IoT is already being harnessed in the workplace as an instrument for businesses to improve performance and user experience. In The Edge, for instance, the location of every employee is tracked via an app on their smartphone, allowing users to locate each other and find empty meeting rooms easily. This has had a positive effect on productivity, optimising employees' own time management while making their working lives easier to navigate.

Elsewhere, Bank of America used sociometric badges to identify why some of their call centre employees were more productive than others. Realising that the most productive employees were those that took breaks together, the bank rescheduled employees' breaks to maximise interactions and saw a 10 per cent increase in productivity.

When sociometric badges and similar technologies become suitable for use at scale it will be possible to gauge the impact of workplace design changes in real time and to experiment and model how this will impact a business. The offices of the future, again powered by devices and data, will go one step further.

How smart is your workspace?

By 2030, we predict that the tactical and operational management of workplaces will largely be undertaken by algorithms analysing millions of data sets. Buildings will be able to link location data with information from corporate databases and social media to engineer interactions between staff members. Offices will soon become part of the management team of any business - for example, notifying one employee working on a project that another specialist is nearby and suggesting a meeting.

We are on the cusp of a hugely transformative period that will see rapid technological advances fundamentally altering not just where we work, but how. In the not too distant future, only those businesses prepared to embrace this disruption and redefine their real estate will be able to thrive.

Tom Carroll is head of EMEA corporate research at JLL property services