Digital strategies for the future of work

Like a cross-town drive, the workday is filled with slow-downs, traffic chokepoints, and moments of frustration and inconvenience. Fortunately, there are both micro and macro opportunities for office developers and landlords to leverage digital technology to smooth out these points of friction — and in so doing, create marketable and unique differentiators they can use to attract tenants. For example, by leveraging the phones and personal devices in everyone’s pockets, we can make the workday flow more efficiently. Automations can make moving through spaces easier when security doors, elevators, or directions are tied to personal devices. Spaces built specifically for multi-location collaboration can bring teams together within technology configurations that remove the burden of distance. Transforming these moments can improve productivity and increase the value of coming to work.

As technology has expanded, so too has the number of platforms employees are expected to use. In any given day, we might toggle between multiple messaging and conferencing services, the office conference booking system, and various food ordering apps. The original intention of these digital tools — to make people’s workdays more efficient — is having the opposite effect. Frustrated with too many options, people simply aren’t using them. The workplace needs a unified operating system that would serve as a seamless interface for employees to engage with. A single platform would make it easier for employees to adopt new features and services when they’re available.

Technology is dynamic. Its features and applications are always evolving. By continuing to measure how people interact with space, with technology, and with one another, we can identify new ways for optimizing physical spaces — thereby creating perpetual differentiation for employers. Future workplaces will offer experimental spaces that integrate sensing, spatial analytics, and adaptive design to encourage faster learning and testing. The benefits of such ‘Living Labs’ are abundant. Quantitative and qualitative tracking studies can capture changes in culture, workplace dynamics, or ways of working for proactive versus reactive solutions. Prototyping and experimentation can enable agile learning on a smaller scale with low risk to determine if a broader rollout is worth the investment and benefits. Building ways to stay ahead of technology needs can decrease time to implementation while encouraging a culture of workplace innovation.