A positive workplace experience has the power to foster strong company culture, drive business growth and improve employee satisfaction and morale. According to a Willis Towers Watson worldwide survey, 92% of employers said enhancing employee experience is an important priority for their organisations.
People have a great deal of choice when it comes to where they work. They expect a workplace experience that makes them feel valued, satisfied and enthusiastic, whilst supporting their creativity and productivity. If the workplace experience isn’t a positive one, businesses run the risk of losing valuable workers, failing to attract top talent, and losing out to poor productivity.
Achieving employee engagement is just one aspect of improving the workplace experience. Both need to be made a priority if a business is to succeed.
What is ‘workplace experience’?
Workplace experience is the sum of all touchpoints employees have with their working environment. These touchpoints encompass the physical office, the digital workspace, and the workforce, and how they all interact.
Whilst employee experience plays a role in workplace experience, the two are not one in the same. The latter places more focus on the wider elements that support productivity, such as the physical workspace, the digital tools available, and flexibility.
Why is workplace experience so important?
A positive experience within an employee’s working environment will lead to better performance. A study conducted by Oxford University revealed that happier employees are 13% more productive.
Global organisations like Google have long put workplace experience and employee experience first, and have enjoyed great success as a result. A study by a team of professors at Warwick University showed that employee satisfaction saw a 37% rise after Google invested more in employee support.
Workplace experience also influences recruitment and staff retention success.
Increasingly, companies of all sizes are considering the workplace experience when creating their employee value proposition. Recruiting becomes a whole lot easier when potential candidates can see the effort an organisation is putting into making the workplace a great place to be.
LinkedIn data suggests that workers are twice as likely to recommend working for a particular company that offers flexibility in terms of working hours and location.
How to improve the workplace experience?
There are a number of effective ways in which the workplace experience can be enhanced.
Involving employees is vital. Talking to the people who matter is essential if you are to understand what their challenges are, and where they believe there is room for improvement.
It’s also good practice to make someone responsible for workplace experience. If your organisation calls for it, you may need a team. Their role will be to manage, improve and report back on the process of improving conditions within the working environment.
Technology will also help you in your mission to boost employee engagement and the experience in the workplace. One such technology is a smart building platform.
How can smart building technology enhance workplace experience?
A smart building makes a great place to work for many reasons. This is a place where operating systems are controlled centrally courtesy of Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices, together with machine learning and artificial intelligence-powered automations.
Here are some of the key ways in which a smart building improves working environments…
Creates a healthier workspace
A healthy building makes a positive place to work. Such a building can be defined by good indoor air quality, ample natural light, low noise pollution, consistent thermal conditions, and excellent ventilation and water quality.
Smart building technology contributes towards the achievement of healthy building status by incorporating the likes of smart HVAC, which can boost workplace comfort by monitoring and improving indoor air quality, and smart lighting, which can work out optimum lighting settings and, with the use of artificial intelligence, alter the type and tone of lighting to suit current conditions. All contribute to the ultimate workplace experience.
Allows workers to control their own working environments
Smart building technology makes it possible for workers to control lighting and temperature in their own personal working environment via an app on their personal smartphones.
The apparently simple process of being able to set your own working conditions can have a significant influence on morale and engagement, so improving the workplace experience.
The technology also allows users to send personal feedback via their app, so they can relay their feelings on the things that matter, such as noise pollution, lighting and indoor air quality. This in turn gives facilities managers valuable feedback, as well as providing staff with a sense of value.
Creates a sense of community at work
A great workplace experience will always involve a sense of community. That connected feeling at work is so important, especially when hybrid working is in play, or when teams are distributed across multiple offices.
With a sense of community comes a feeling of belonging. In many cases, this translates as better commitment on the part of staff. There are many ways to create a sense of community at work, and smart building technology can help with this.
Some smart building apps incorporate smart office community features, including newsfeed style local events, special offers and community chat forums. All excellent tools for connecting workers.
Streamlines everyday tasks
When workers can’t get through their to-do lists efficiently, or they find everyday tasks cumbersome, they’ll soon start to feel frustrated, which will negatively impact upon engagement and productivity.
In the workplace, there are so many platforms to log into, as well as processes that call for credentials, such as gaining access to buildings or particular zones. The average user signs in to 10 apps every day, which is clearly a time consuming business.
Single sign on access control is another feature of the smart building. It allows for role-based, secure sign-on to everything with a one-time login, making access to everything both physical and digital within a building so much more streamlined.
Automated desk booking
Trying to find a desk, in the right place, with the right people and with the right conditions is not always easy, and pinning down a meeting room isn’t far from challenging either. One way of improving the workplace experience in this respect is to use automated meeting room and desk bookings, which is yet another valuable feature of smart building technology.
In today’s hybrid and hot desking environment, this technology can remove so many barriers to streamlined working. And when it’s brought together with contactless entry and digital wayfinding, the benefits are further amplified.
How does Smart Spaces help with enhancing the workplace experience?
Smart Spaces is a cloud-based platform that uses internet-connected sensors to manage and automate a whole range of workplace activities.
As well as its value as a workplace engagement app where users can share latest news and community events, Smart Spaces places workplace control in the hands of individual employees so that they can set their preferred working conditions and manage their own desk booking and meeting room needs. It’s also a powerful platform when it comes to creating a healthy workspace courtesy of smart lighting and HVAC controls.
To learn more about how Smart Spaces can help you improve the workplace experience and reap the many benefits that come with it, you are welcome to request a free demo or get in touch.
