By now, you've probably heard your fair share about how the workplace is changing. It may even sound a bit cliché at this point. Many attribute this to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the truth is that it was already in motion — the pandemic shined a necessary light and sped things up a bit. Fortunately, we're finding that many of these changes are for the better, especially concerning employee well-being and happiness. This begs the question - What do companies need to improve employee well-being and happiness?
Having a great experience that allows for a positive work-life balance is a big part of the answer. One way to inspire that balance is to reevaluate the decision-making tools and technologies you're using to ensure that they indeed help you optimize your workplace.
4SITE, a sensor-based workplace occupancy and utilization platform, provides incredible value on this topic. We deliver insights related to space and desk utilization that allow our customers to evolve their workplace and optimize their employee experience while providing the confidence necessary to know that the decisions being made are the right ones for the future.
Let’s take a moment and look at what an employee experience can look like and how sensor technology and data with 4SITE can help.
When business leaders are setting up the workspace, employee experience may not necessarily be their primary focus. They are likely more concerned with cash flow, profits, and their bottom line than designing a workplace that optimizes the employee experience. But without a great employee experience, their bottom line might not be optimized.
Simply put, employee experience is what an employee goes through when they work for a specific business or organization. It's how they observe and perceive what happens while they're employed at a particular place. It's how they feel as individual human beings — rather than as nondescript employees — within a certain work environment.
Finding good employees has always been a challenge – and while organizations may face new challenges like the Great Resignation of 2021, attracting and retaining great employees will always be an important issue for every business. According to the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the number of employees who have voluntarily left their jobs hit a new record of 3% in September 2021. In all, 20.2 million workers left their employers from May through September.
While creating a more positive experience for employees is not a guarantee for preventing an employee from leaving an organization, as you might suspect, a positive employee experience helps create excellent employees. It inspires happiness, enthusiasm, purpose, a sense of belonging, and passion for the work. In turn, employees are more productive and engaged.
There are also other benefits for the employer like higher employee retention rates and a tool for recruiting new employees.
With all of this in mind, one of your number one goals as a business leader should be to create a better employee experience. There are several ways to do this:
In May 2021, a survey found that 54% of employees from around the world would consider leaving their job if they were not offered some form of flexibility in where and when they work.
Within your organization, if your staff is still coming into the office every day from 9 to 5, it may be time to consider creating a hybrid workplace environment that incorporates both in-person work and remote work. Providing employees with choice through activities like hot-desking, hoteling, or a flexible space that can be used for meetings or quiet work can do just that.
One of the best ways to make an informed decision about the future of your workspace so that it has a positive impact on employees' experiences is known definitively what space your employees need, what space they like to use most, and what their space needs will be in the near future. And the only way to gather that granular level of data, without being invasive or making mistakes due to human error, is with occupancy and utilization sensor technology.
With 4SITEbyCORT, our sensors deliver space utilization metrics, which can help your business:
Conduct a sensor study without hassle when you choose technology provided by 4SITEbyCORT. Here's how it works: We take care of the heavy lifting for facilities personnel by installing motion-activated data sensors throughout your office, on desks, in offices, and conference rooms and meeting spaces. As those spaces are used by your employees, the sensor sends data to an onsite gateway, which then sends it to a cloud via cellular signal. That means that our sensors don’t need to utilize your network to get the data into the cloud. That data is stored securely in the cloud and can be accessed from day one via your dashboard. Use it to create customized reports based on real-time space utilization metrics and integrate it with other solutions using our API.
This can be especially helpful in a hybrid workplace by giving you access to information like which desks your employees prefer, when they’re coming to the office, how long they stay, and more so you can make informed decisions on how to best accommodate your workspace’s shifting needs.
Although the 4SITE platform is truly a stand-alone solution that can run independently from the client’s network, our 4SITE API can also integrate your utilization data with any desk or room booking software to help you create a people-first workplace. It can help you calculate space utilization, identify peak booking times, manage your office layout, incorporate technology that makes options like hoteling smoother, and even stop ghost bookings.
In other words, you create an environment that is comfortable, organized, and suited to the needs of your employees so that they can strive for that work-life balance and the improved employee experience they crave.
There is enough uncertainty in the world right now. Let us remove some of it from your workspace, while helping your organization make financially sustainable decisions around your real estate footprint, empower your employees, and so much more.
While our clients have shared with us that they use our solution to find patterns and predict potential occupancy trends in the workplace that creates better support for teams, there are so many other opportunities available when using 4SITE sensor technology and space utilization data.
Some of those benefits are:
Ready to get started with data sensors from 4SITE? Call us today to set up a demo or learn more about what our technology can do to bring your space into a new era of work.