Crafting the right workplace environment has become imperative towards greater workforce productivity for workplace strategists. Take into account the following insights from the International Facility Management Association (IFMA), Steelcase and Leesman:

• 70 percent of workers say they waste up to 15 minutes looking for a space to meet, and 24 percent waste up to 30 minutes.
• 73 percent of employees are unsatisfied with the variety of different types of workspaces.
• 67 percent is the highest productivity rate across activity-based workplaces, coming from mobile employees who use multiple work settings and rarely find themselves at a single location.

There is an increasing need for collaborative workspaces simply because more tasks require collaboration! An improvement in workforce productivity can be seen immediately by designing a collaborative workspace.

Human resource leaders are responsible for empowering their employees with the right tools to understand, navigate, and interact with their workplace. The role of digital twin technology—creating a virtual representation of assets and locations— is rapidly becoming a central piece in current office strategies.

Intelligent technologies can be integrated within a digital twin platform, giving the employee a visual interface to interact with the tech. For example, with IoT integrations such as indoor beacons, employees can see and book available workspaces. These types of on the go interactions encourage a more mobile workforce, which leads to greater employee happiness and productivity.

Why Activity Based Workplaces (ABW) Need Smart Workplace Technology

Activity-based workplaces (ABW), in which mobile employees use multiple work settings and rarely find themselves at a single location, are rapidly growing in popularity. As flexible workspaces and ABW become the norm, employees may find clutter and little direction regarding how they should utilize their office to be more productive.

With WRLD’s smart workplace mapping tools, organizations are now able to provide their employees full autonomy concerning the navigation and interaction with their workplace. Different activities present changing demands as employees seek workspaces that complement their daily activities.

WRLD serves as the foundation to improve visibility of the workplace. As one cross-platform solution, this technology makes it easier for employees to educate themselves on their workplace, such as being able to find fellow employees. It provides one focal point for discovering and interacting with colleagues, equipment, and meeting spaces.

A full smart office solution is meant to help employees become more mobile and productive by being easily accessible and fun to use. A future workplace solution is one where employees can interact with on any platform, like VR or AR, with WRLD’s cross-platform capabilities.

The Rise of Workplace Strategy Accountability

According to the International Facility Management Association (IFMA), about 70 percent of U.S. offices have an open office floor plan. WRLD’s high-fidelity representation of the workplace, along with integrated IoT features, sets the foundation for floor-plan and workflow accountability—an opportunity to finally analyze if an open floor plan and activity-based strategies are actually improving workforce productivity.

New smart workplace strategy developments are happening all over the world. Bloomberg recently opened doors to its new European headquarters, a smart building in London. Enabled with WRLD 3D mapping technology, Bloomberg developed a smart workplace app for their state of the art facility designed to maximize innovation, collaboration, and productivity of the workforce.

How a Productive Smart Office Impacts the Bottom Line

Human resource specialists are responsible for measuring workforce productivity and maximizing employee output across all departments. By definition, workforce productivity entails the total production divided by the number of employees.

If a typical full-time employee spends 15-30 minutes finding a workspace and has an average of 3-4 meetings, this could easily translate into a 2.5 percent loss in productivity on a weekly basis. When you multiply this across the entire workforce, it ultimately represents an alarming amount of lost time!

By monitoring the workplace, human resource professionals can visually understand the behavior patterns of top-performers and replicate the results across their workforce. This is an incredible opportunity to optimize the impact of office design and scale employee productivity.

Despite the perceived high cost of implementing smart office technology, the alternative—having no workplace strategy accountability at all—could bring even higher hidden costs. With a WRLD 3D indoor map along with a full digital twin of a building and its surroundings, a workplace strategist can analyze the effectiveness of their efforts and justify further workplace strategy initiatives and investments.

What is the WRLD Smart Workplace?

Standing as a leader in digital twin technology, the WRLD Smart Workplace evolves from more than ten years of dedication to create a beautiful virtual outdoor to indoor representation of our environment. Thousands of developers actively using our SDKs and APIs has allowed WRLD to expand its offering beyond its world-class reputation in the gaming industry, honing in on workplace strategies and workplace accountability around the world.

With WRLD’s intuitive map design tools and modeling services, anyone can upload 2D floor plans and have them rendered into 3D maps within minutes—a simple experience powered by a real-time dynamic platform. A digital twin is designed to facilitate any changes to current floorplans, represent virtual objects such as smart desks and conference rooms, and add points of interest with live data in an intuitive manner.

A skilled team is on standby to provide further insight into WRLD’s extensive array of integrations through our partners with IoT, workplace systems, sensors and indoor positioning.

Whether it is for employee wayfinding or analyzing how the office impacts productivity, WRLD’s digital twin platform serves as a real time visual guide for users on mobile, desktop, and kiosks around the office.

In an era where businesses rely on data to make better decisions and IoT data is proliferating, developing the foundation for smart building strategies is imperative to empower employees to become more productive. After implementing smart workplace tech, business executives can monitor the culture shift toward a more mobile workforce and ultimately understand productivity rates across different employee groups.

Discover how smart workplace solutions play a central role in your workplace strategy and ultimately impact your bottom line. Contact us today!