Tag: Flexible Working & Workplaces

Would you agree that these are some of the top challenges large corporations face today?

• Attracting skilled knowledge workers
• Declining productivity due to workforce health problems
• The skyrocketing cost of providing healthcare benefits

These challenges are motivating companies to address wellbeing in the workplace with wellness programs and even workplace design.

Recent CBRE research presented at the CoreNet Global Summit revealed that more than half of surveyed companies already provided programs to address workforce health, and 91% expect to increase health and wellness programs in the years to come. Many are turning to active design guidelines to improve health and wellbeing in the workplace.

Active design is a philosophy that was originally developed to improve public health by building city infrastructures to encourage more activity. However, active design is becoming a global movement that is also driving the design of the modern workplace.

Why companies are investing in active design for the workplace

According to research by the non-profit Center for Active Design, American workers spend upwards of 1700 hours at their workplaces each year. Not surprisingly, those spaces can have a tremendous impact on their health. Workers often spend more than half their waking hours sitting in a vehicle during commute time and sitting at a computer the rest of the workday. The lack of movement has resulted in skyrocketing rates of obesity and diseases like diabetes. That’s why sitting is being called “the new smoking” by health experts.

Not only does this health crisis reduce workers’ quality of life, but it costs their employers in increased absenteeism and lower productivity, as well as rising heathcare expenses.

Active design solutions address these issues by incorporating environmental changes, policies and programs into the workplace that encourage employees to move more throughout the workday.

As an added bonus, these strategies can also help companies with another critical problem: the so-called “war for talent” that has companies vying for highly skilled knowledge workers. The millennial generation in particular are placing a high value on a well-designed workplace in choosing their employer. They expect their workplace to support their lifestyle, and are drawn to companies that demonstrate an interest and commitment to their wellbeing.

If your company is looking for ways to support health and wellbeing in the workplace, here are some proven ideas put forth by the City of New York in their Active Design Guidelines.

Active design ideas to get people moving in your workplace

1. Design your space to encourage walking

The idea behind this active design strategy is to give people a reason to walk around your workplace. Shared spaces such as team collaboration lounges, food service locations, and even printer/copier rooms should be placed within a pleasant walking distance of individual workspaces. Typically that means giving them a central location rather than tucking them away in a corner. Removing trash cans from individuals desks also encourages people to walk to place trash in the communal bin.

2. Include strategically-located staircases

Grand, open staircases are the hottest design feature in modern offices today. And that’s not only because it looks cool. Staircases that are highly visible and easily accessible (sometimes centrally located in the main lobby, within the main office space to connect floors, or even near the kitchen) encourage workers to use them instead of elevators. One of the most effective active design strategies is to design spaces so that stairs are the primary means of travel between up to 4 floors.

There’s also another benefit of incorporating everyday stairs into your active design workplace strategy. In an emergency, workers may be safer in environments with integrated stairs since safe exit paths are not tucked away behind closed doors.

3. Include integrated vertical circulation system in high rises

Even in a high-rise building, a combination of staircases and elevators can encourage more movement. One strategy is the use of skip-stop elevators that stop only on designated floor. Workers can be encouraged to use centrally-located staircases within workspaces to get to adjacent floors. Additional accessibility to elevators can be provided for mobility challenged employees.

This active design strategy can also cut elevator maintenance expenses and reduce the wait time for employees when they do need to use the elevator. And it has the added benefit of encouraging collaboration between people on adjacent floors.

4. Provide active furniture

Take a walk around a modern workplace, and you’ll probably see sit-stand workstations, treadmill desks, and possibly even cycling workstations (in all honesty I’ve never seen one, but apparently they are out there!). Workers of all ages are realizing that working does not necessarily require sitting. Phone calls, answering emails, and even other types of focus work can be accomplished while getting exercise at the same time.

While workers may not always want to take the time to do a yoga class or work out at the gym during the workday, these active furniture options let them build a little more activity into their day.

5. Include dedicated & convertible exercise spaces

That being said, many workers can benefit from taking an exercise break at a strategic point in their workday, whether at lunchtime or to combat a mid-afternoon energy slump.

Dedicated exercise spaces, such as yoga rooms, running tracks and even swimming pools, allow them to do so without leaving the office. Don’t forget to provide outdoor space for exercise whenever possible, including bike and pedestrian paths. Some tech companies with large campuses even provide bikes for people to travel between buildings.

More tips to get employees to use your active design features

Have you tried to implement health and wellbeing programs in the past, and then wondered why workers were not taking advantage of them? The “if you build it, they will come” strategy is not enough to change behavior. Take the following strategies into account as you create and implement your active design plan.

6. Understand workplace utilization patterns

Successfully incorporating active design requires a deep understanding of the utilization patterns in your workplace. You can’t place stairs and collaboration spaces in a central, high-traffic location unless you understand how people prefer to use space and can analyze patterns.

Utilization tracking technology, such as occupancy and lighting sensors, card readers and network technology give you the reliable data you need to design your workplace around actual usage by your business teams.

Learn more about how to track space utilization with this informative guide: Managing Workplace Utilization.

7. Location is key

According to the Active Design Guidelines, people are more likely to use staircases located within 25 feet of your entrance and encountered before they get to the elevator. However, locating stairs near the elevator is a good thing: people tired of waiting for the elevator will opt to use the stairs.

The same can be said about locating other active design features like exercise spaces: make them available within principal paths of travel.

8. Make active design features visible and attractive

Using grand, architectural staircases can be preferable to squeezing into a crowded elevator. Use glass enclosures for visibility, as well as appealing colors, materials and finishes that reflect the company’s brand and design aesthetic. Incorporating artwork, greenery and even outdoor views can go a long way to increasing use of a staircase by employees.

The same goes for your outdoor paths and walking spaces: make them beautiful and people will want to spend time using them.

9. Build in collaboration spaces

Make your staircases and active design spaces into hubs for collaboration and social activity. Install comfortable lounges on staircase landings to encourage people to stop for a chat.

10. Promote them!

Help your employees decide to take the stairs instead of the elevator. Put up strategic signs by the elevators reminding people to use the stairs. According to the Active Design Guidelines, this simple practice can up stair use by up to 50%.

Some tips for signs:

• Remember to include multi-lingual messages
• Use large, easy to read fonts
• Include motivators like the number of calories burned by taking the stairs or time saved waiting for the elevator

11. Remove barriers

Get rid of the barriers that keep people from using your active design spaces. For example:

• If you must use staircases with doors because they also must serve as fire doors, don’t limit access by requiring an access code or card swipe.
• Wondering why people aren’t using the treadmill desks or taking yoga? Providing locker rooms with showers can make a world of difference for employees.
• Encourage people to bike to work and around your campus by providing bike racks, ideally on the ground floor of the building.

Learn more about work space design and wellbeing in the workplace:
Wellness Implications of the Activity Based Workspace
Workforce Health: Is Your Workplace Helping or Hurting?

Download your guide to best practices in the modern workplace today.

Just about every large corporation is transitioning from traditional office space to more modern spaces featuring an open office plan with an agile working strategy. That’s because companies are all facing the same issues with office space:

• An increasingly mobile workforce means as much as 60% of traditional office space sits empty every day. Everyone wants to make better use of all that wasted space.
• A need to control rising property costs.
• A desire to increase collaboration among workers to generate ideas and boost innovation.

Moving to a more modern, open office plan can be an important step toward achieving these goals. Open offices with agile working can reduce space requirements and costs, as well as creating an atmosphere where people naturally communicate and share ideas. However, some of the concerns about the open office concept include a lack of privacy and distracted employees.

How do you get the benefits of the open office plan while minimizing the pain points? Read on to learn about best practices that go a long way toward improving employee satisfaction and productivity. Also, we’ll reveal how the open office plan can benefit senior leaders in unexpected ways.

Tips for improving satisfaction & productivity in an open office plan

1. Enhance the open office plan with ABW

For many companies, the answer is adding Activity-Based Working (ABW) features to the open office concept. That means providing spaces designed for a specific activity, such enclosed “phone booths” for private phone calls, comfortable lounges for team brainstorming, and quiet areas for concentration.

These modern spaces combine the best features of the open office plan with task-oriented spaces. The well-designed ABW workspace improves the open office concept since it also provides the equally important spaces for quiet and focus in addition to spaces for collaboration.

When ABW is combined with a non-assigned seating model (also known as agile or flexible working), many of the problems associated with the open office plan are eliminated. That’s because people can choose where to sit based on the work they need to do at any given time.

Learn more: Why ABW Is A Better Alternative to Open Office Design

Even if you’re not quite ready to go full-on with ABW and agile working, you can begin with small steps in the right direction. Adding breakout spaces and quiet areas can improve productivity and employee satisfaction with the open office plan.

2. Embrace flexibility

Keeping employees happy and productive in an open office plan may require shifting your corporate culture. Giving people the flexibility to work off-site when needed can mitigate problems with distraction in the open office. However, that shift must be fully supported by corporate leaders.

“The leaders of the organisation must live and breathe flexibility,” according to CRE expert Roland Chua. “Their practice of flexible working arrangements must be highly visible, consistent, and regular. This will drive the culture of flexibility into the organisation and infiltrate into the mindsets of each individual.”

It’s also essential that flexible work policies be fully documented as an expected way of working, rather than a right or a privilege. In this environment, workers feel trusted and appreciated, and much more willing and able to give their very best performance.

Learn more: 5 Ways to Get Management Buy-In for Flexible Working Arrangements

3. Adopt technology that supports your workforce and your future needs

Moving to more modern office spaces and ways of working may seem like a daunting task. As you plan your journey to the workplace of the future, it’s imperative to put technology in place that helps you better understand space requirements and enables you to implement more efficient and productive modern spaces. You also need tools that support employees in these new spaces. Here are the essential components:

Workplace management technology that supports agile working
In the open office plan of the future, you’ll be setting up shared neighborhoods for each team or a group of teams to share. That means you need space management software that doesn’t require you to assign a person to each seat. Instead, you need the ability to assign teams to a neighborhood.

Scenario planning
Today’s business environment is changing faster than ever before, and property teams need to be ready to support those changes. Scenario planning tools allow you to turn on a dime by easily modeling changes, making smart decisions, and quickly implementing new plans.

Utilization technology
To support an agile environment, you need to provide the right mix of different space types in each area, as well as the right ratios of people to seats for each team. That means you must track real-time space utilization using smart building technology like badge readers, occupancy sensors, beacons and more.

There is no one technology that will capture all the data you need to get a true picture of space utilization. That’s why most companies choose to implement a combination of smart building technology. To make the best use of that data for driving space decisions, look for a workplace management system that integrates multiple data sources to give you a complete picture of your space usage.

Learn more about utilization technology options with this informative resource: Managing Workplace Utilization.

Wayfinding
In an agile work environment, you don’t want employees having difficulty finding a place to work each day. Wayfinding tools allow workers to quickly find space based on the type of work they need to do, or to choose a space near people they need to work with. They might also choose to work in a particular area of the building due to comfort issues, such as proximity to amenities or a window. With the right tool, they can find the perfect space in seconds, right from their smartphone.

BONUS: The open office plan also benefits senior executives

One question that always comes up with moving to the open office concept and ABW is: where will the senior execs sit? Should they transition to collaborative working along with their teams or must they stay in isolated offices?

Although people accustomed to private offices may resist at first, there are a whole host of valuable benefits to working alongside the team in an open office plan. Here are just a few:

1. Tuning in to people’s concerns

When leaders sit alongside their teams in an open office plan, they hear more of what everyone’s talking about. That includes both the good and the bad, which leaders don’t always get to hear behind closed doors.

2. Becoming more approachable

When executives are tucked away in the corner office, staff often don’t feel comfortable approaching them with questions or ideas. In an open office plan, employees get to interact with leadership on a more personal level. That familiarity and opportunity creates an open atmosphere that can result in more work getting done.

3. Joining the conversation

This is the true value of collaboration: not just listening, but participating in the ad-hoc conversations going on in the open office plan. Senior leaders are not only more aware of what’s going on, they can more readily offer guidance and weigh in when appropriate.

Download a guide to creating an activity based workplace today.

Workplace occupancy reports: how’s that going?

What’s your level of frustration with your workplace occupancy reports?

A.  Just fine, thank you. They give me everything I need.
B.  I’m uneasy basing my decisions on them.
C.  Annoyed with what I’m getting and embarrassed to show them to anyone.
D.  I’m tearing my hair out as we speak.

Since you’re reading this, chances are you’re in the B to D range (or even all the way to Z). If so, your frustration with occupancy reports is understandable. After all, there’s a lot riding on the CRE plans and decisions you’re making every day. There’s the cost of long-term leases and all those empty desks, for one thing. Not to mention your reputation and your inability to move toward modern workplaces that better support your business.

Without accurate and actionable information from your occupancy reports, you probably feel like you’re flying blind. As a result, your decisions concerning your CRE portfolio may not be working out as you hoped they would. You are likely facing low occupancy rates, lots of wasted space, and business units that are just as frustrated as you are.

Let’s talk about some of the most common problems with occupancy reports, and how modern workplace reports technology can improve things.

Top 6 frustrating problems with occupancy reports

1. It takes too long!

Whether you’re crunching numbers yourself, or relying on analysts to pull together the occupancy reports you need, it’s a maddeningly slow process. If you’re doing it yourself, you’re stuck at your desk well into the evening juggling spreadsheets. Or struggling to extract some useful information from your behemoth IWMS database.

You might be even more frustrated if you’re waiting days or even weeks for someone else to produce the commercial real estate analysis you’re after. That’s because analysts have to pull raw data from various sources, crunch all those numbers manually and put the results into a (somewhat) readable format.

SPOILER #1: Imagine if you could just open a modern workplace tool and click a button to get the information you need.

2. Information is unreliable

Are you collecting occupancy data with manual audits? How often is your data validated? When you’ve got incomplete or out-of-date occupancy information (or likely both), nobody trusts the data in your occupancy reports.

You heard the old adage, “garbage in, garbage out.” That’s why, when you finally do manage to get a report, you probably find yourself reluctant to trust what it’s telling you. Certainly your superiors and your business units won’t.

SPOILER #2: How much more would people trust you (and your plans) if you had accurate occupancy data? Using the right tools, you won’t need to waste time with manual audits. Believe it or not, you can get business units to enter and validate their own data.

3. You can’t get the level of granularity you need

Are you stuck with the canned occupancy reports provided by your IWMS system? These will rarely provide the level of detail you need to make decisions. For example, you can only see occupancy levels at a building level, rather than for a particular business unit or team.

You also might have data that’s stored in non-auditable locations, so you have no ability to track high level metrics. For example, how many move requests did you fulfill this year? If many of the requests are stored in email instead of a ticketing system, you have no way of knowing.

SPOILER #3: How much better could you plan the use of space if you could drill down in occupancy reports to see the exact information you want? Or access a central source of truth to roll up information and see how you’re meeting high-level goals and KPIs?

4. Customizations are difficult

Another reason canned occupancy reports don’t fit the bill is that they are never designed for the way you do things. If you want to do something as simple as change terminology in an IWMS report, you’ll have to pay extravagant fees for (and wait ages for) customizations.

SPOILER #4: What if you could get customizations done quickly and easily? Impossible? Not with the right workplace management system.

5. Presentation quality is poor

Are you actually embarrassed to share occupancy reports with your superiors? Not surprising when you see the sophisticated, graphical dashboards and reports your business unit counterparts are producing.

This is really about more than impressing people; it’s about wasted time. When you have to pour over piles of complex, cumbersome spreadsheets to get answers, it hampers your ability to make decisions.

SPOILER #5: Grasping the essence of your data is much faster and easier with interactive visualizations. And it takes seconds as opposed to hours to find out what you need to know. Plus, you look like a star!

6. Can’t integrate multiple data sources

It’s difficult enough to track occupancy without a modern workplace management system. What if you’re tasked with tracking actual hourly utilization of space, with the goal of moving to flexible work spaces?

To plan for the efficient & collaborative workplace of the future, you need workplace reports that can aggregate data from a variety of sources. These include badge reader systems, sensor technology, WiFi triangulation, and many others. There’s little chance you can pull that together manually, or using an IWMS system.

SPOILER #6: What if you could see heatmaps on a floor plan showing real-time space utilization? You can plan seat ratios by neighborhood, revise the mix of space types on a floor, and even provide wayfinding tools for your employees.

Modern tools do it better

You’ve probably guessed by now that you can easily fix all these occupancy reports problems with modern workplace management software. Here’s what you can get with the right best-in-class technology:

• A central source of truth for all your CRE data. And TRUTH is the key word here: data that’s accurate and up to date.
• Less work for your CRE team gathering occupancy data and more help from your business units. (Read this related post to find out how you can “crowd-source” your occupancy data: The 8 Superpowers You Need For Office Space Management).
• Always-available presentation-quality commercial real estate reports that make you look good and are available at the click of a button.
• Visual reports like heatmaps, building-level stack plans and floor plans showing seat assignments that make it easy to find & process information.
• The ability to drill down and slice & dice information exactly how you want to see it. Or roll up data from numerous sources to provide high-level insights.
• The ability to track utilization data from numerous technologies and see that data in a useful format for driving smart decisions for smart environments.

Want to see how easy it is for us to customize workplace reports in Serraview? Watch our video.

Isn’t it time you moved up to the “A” level for your workplace occupancy reports?

The right reporting tool is only one of the essential vetting points for workplace management software. Get this informative guide so you don’t overlook anything that could make you regret your decision: 5 Critical Comparison Points for Workplace Management Software.

Create an activity based working strategy. Learn more today.

Still relying on manual audits or “bed checks” to collect occupancy data for your commercial space planning? We don’t need to tell you it’s inefficient, but you’re losing more than you think without a modern workplace management tool.

6 reasons why bed checks aren’t useful for commercial space planning

1. Labor-intensive and costly
To properly handle commercial space planning, you need to know which work spaces are being used and who is using them. Walking the floors with a clipboard and checking off occupied desks sounds simple enough. But with multiple regions, dozens of buildings, hundreds of floors and many thousands of work points to check, it takes quite a lot of people (not to mention money) to gather all that data manually.

TRY THIS: How much are space planners making? How long does it take to audit a floor, then input the manual data into a spreadsheet or IWMS system? How often does the task need to be done to update the data? Do the math and see how much this inefficient process is costing you.

2. Take too long to capture constantly-changing data
That brings up another big problem with bed checks for commercial space planning. How long does the process take to audit even one building? Keep in mind, during that time your business is not standing still. If you’re like most large corporations, people join the company and leave the company every day. Teams continue to move around. So by the time you’re done with one floor and moving on to the next, your data about the first floor is already out of date.

After weeks (or longer) of work collecting and compiling data, the result is inaccurate. And the worst part? You need to start all over again to update it! It’s like your dog chasing his tail: you’ll never quite catch up.

3. Subjective process that’s prone to error
As we mentioned, to those who have not done it, conducting bed checks for commercial space planning seems like a simple task. Just check off which desks are in use.

Well, that’s never as easy as it sounds. People try to game the system. There’s a computer on this desk, but nothing else. Is someone using that or not? This desk has a pile of files, but not much else. Is it a dumping ground for someone’s extra stuff or is that space in use? An empty-looking cubicle could turn out to be assigned to someone who is currently traveling or off on leave. In some cases, teams actually try to “hide” vacant space by putting coffee cups or jackets there to try to fool you into thinking it’s in use.

As a result, the manual audit process is subjective and error-prone by nature. That gives people even less confidence in the data and your commercial space planning.

4. No ability to track utilization
We don’t need to tell you this: today’s mobile workforce is using space differently. So even if bed checks could tell you accurately which spaces were assigned to whom, the process tells you nothing about actual utilization of space. Even if someone is assigned to a space, how much time do they spend there? Optimizing space based on utilization data is the biggest opportunity to reduce CRE costs.

That’s the data that should be driving your commercial space planning and helping you to create more efficient and productive modern workplaces.

5. Contributes to adversarial relationships with your business
Why do you suppose those teams feel the need to “hide” vacant space when they know you’re coming around to check? They want to keep ownership of that unused space because they’re not sure they can get more when they do need it. Simply put: they don’t trust you to provide what they need. The inefficient manual audit process only contributes to that lack of trust.

On the other hand, modern tools for commercial space planning help you do the opposite: build good relationships with your teams by solving problems and meeting their needs. More on that in a minute.

6. Can’t help you plan for the future
With manual commercial space planning, you have no basis for making good strategic space decisions. When considering renewing leases, adding or consolidating space, or implementing flexible workspaces, you need more than occupancy data (and flawed data at that).

Successful strategic planning requires an understanding of your business units, their goals, and their projections about how their space needs will change over time. To get that information, it’s imperative to gain their trust. You also must have modern tools in place so it’s easy for teams to provide that information.

The modern way to collect data for commercial space planning

Even if you have a legacy IWMS system that’s not helping you much with commercial space planning, you can still take advantage of modern tools that can change everything. Here’s what you get from a best-in-class workplace management system like Serraview:

• Integration with your other enterprise systems (including your IWMS) to provide reliable data about your organizational structure and workforce.
• Business units can enter and update their own occupancy data, so it’s always current and accurate. Even better, they can provide you with projections for future space needs. Think they won’t do it? Read this article to learn how to make it happen: How to Get Business Units to Help With Office Space Management.
• Accurate data visualized on a floor plan and in customizable dashboards and reports. This feature completely changes the conversation with your business about commercial space planning. You quickly gain their trust when they can see you know all about them and have the ability to meet their needs.
• Powerful scenario planning tools that help you create a plan to restack a building in minutes. Even better, you can easily create multiple scenarios to right-size your portfolio in an entire city or region. It’s a great way to turbocharge your commercial space planning.
• Best-in-class tools (like Serraview) integrate with sensors, badge readers and many other utilization tracking technologies to provide real-time data about who is using space and how often. This goes far beyond tracking occupancy to help you optimize space, move towards modern flexible spaces and reduce CRE cost.

Read these resources to learn how corporations are moving away from inefficient manual audits and gaining the benefits of modern tools for commercial space planning:

How To Turbocharge IWMS With Facilities Space Management Tools

Learn how to manage your workplace utilization today. 

Do you have a major company relocation coming up? Chances are you’re feeling a little anxious.

When you do it the old-fashioned way, a company relocation is chaos for everyone involved. That includes the employees being moved, management, IT staff, and most of all the relocation team. People have come to expect extra work, frustration and inconvenience, wasted time, lost productivity and even lost items. A botched relocation doesn’t do anything positive for anyone’s career, either.

The “old fashioned way” is doing everything manually: with manual audits, piles of spreadsheets, to-do lists scribbled on white boards and post-it notes, and little to no communication before, during or after the move.

Sound familiar?

The good news is, modernizing your company relocation process can make your move happen faster, more efficiently, and with less anxiety for everyone. And make your relocation team look like heroes.

Here’s our guidebook to using modern tools and strategies for better results.

Some advice for making your company relocation go smoothly

Before we address specific strategies, let’s start with some general advice for improving the outcome of a company relocation.

• Start planning early. Begin creating your company relocation plan as early as possible, documenting as many details as you can, and updating as more information becomes available.
• You can’t communicate too much. Well, that might be a slight exaggeration, but there is a pound of wisdom there. Everyone wants to know what’s happening and when, how it impacts them, and what they are expected to do. The more you tell people, and the more you listen, the happier (and more cooperative) people will be.
• Stay abreast of changes. Planning a major move takes time, and as you know all too well, things won’t stand still while you’re making and implementing your plans. People will join and leave the company, and individuals and teams will continue to move around. So foster a team of move champions throughout the business who will help you keep your ear to the ground, then be sure to adjust your plans accordingly.

Modern company relocation strategy #1: Collecting information & building relationships

As a corporate space planning professional, you know what a struggle it can be to get occupancy data from your business units. People are busy and don’t understand why they should spend their valuable time answering your questions. They just don’t see what’s in it for them, and they may not trust what you’re going to do with the information. Will you take away some of their space?

If you don’t have a workplace management tool helping you with that process, you’re stuck with time-consuming manual audits and nightmare spreadsheets to find out who is sitting where, what space is vacant, and how much space each team really needs. To make matters worse, some teams make a habit of “hiding” available space. That’s just one reason the manual process is fraught with error. Do you really want to base your company relocation plan on this unreliable data?

Here’s the trick: your upcoming company relocation is the perfect “excuse” to get business units to provide you with accurate and detailed occupancy information. After all, now it’s obvious what’s in it for them. Business unit stakeholders will want to make sure everyone in their group is taken into account in the relocation plan, and that their team gets what they want and need in the new space.

BONUS: While you’re collecting occupancy information, it’s a perfect opportunity to collect additional information that will streamline future moves and also help you with compliance. For example:

• Conduct an IT asset audit, which is a great help to your IT department
• Document first aid offices
• Record who is a fire warden

Here are some tips for building relationships with your business to get the information you need, and to get them what they need.

Sell them on the benefits. Get them excited (instead of apprehensive) about the company relocation process, by talking up the positives: better facilities, amenities, locations, and opportunities to consolidate the team or sit near a team they work with closely.

Show you’re on their side. Ask each team about their plans and business objectives, so you better understand their needs. Also, you’ll be in the know about any plans for major staff changes that could affect your company relocation plan. If possible, try to time a move around any critical projects or upcoming deadlines to avoid disruptions.

Recruit space champions. For each business unit, recruit someone from the business (executive assistants are ideal) who can provide you with data, handle tasks related to the relocation, and communicate changes to you when they come up. That person not only provides the information you need, but can act as a goodwill ambassador to help others feel better about the move.

Modern company relocation strategy #2: Smart data storage

When you’re handling a company relocation the old way, lots of people are running around with clipboards, then typing whatever information they get into spreadsheets. After that’s done you end up with stacks of spreadsheets that somehow have to be consolidated into information you can use. And of course, while you’re busy manually aggregating all that data, people are changing it.

It’s enough to make anyone have nightmares.

You know what’s worse? After your company relocation is done, all that data gets trashed. So next time you’re faced with a move, you need to go through the manual process all over again.

Updating your company relocation process with modern technology is much easier and more efficient.

• Today’s workplace management software allows you to capture and store your occupancy data in a central database that integrated with your other enterprise systems (such as Finance, HR, your intranet and other IWMS systems). Best-in-class systems are cloud-based for faster, easier and less expensive implementation.
• Your space champions for each business unit can enter their own information with a simple online tool.
• When things change, updates are quick and easy, and you’ll always have an accurate source of truth for occupancy.
• Best of all, after the company relocation, that information remains accurate and available for future use. So the next time you face a move, you’ve already got the data you need to make and execute relocation plans.

Related article: How To Turbocharge IWMS With Facilities Space Management Tools

Modern company relocation strategy #3: Automating communication

One of the most important ways to mitigate problems with a company relocation is to communicate early and often with everyone who’s involved and impacted by the move.

How have you handled comms in the past? Probably by trying to remember to send out emails to tell people what they needed to know. With this strategy, inevitably people get left out, you forget to include important details, or you run out of time altogether and people end up frustrated.

Instead, try this time-saving strategy: create email templates in advance, so you can plan exactly what information you need to send to each person and group. Then use an automation tool to schedule those emails. Here’s what people will be looking for:

• Where they are moving and when
• Instructions for packing and how to prepare for the move
• How to find their new space
• What to do on move day
• How to get help if a problem arises
• How to use features of a new agile work environment, such as wayfinding systems

Here’s an example of what automated comms can look like:

Don’t forget to plan emails for members of your relocation team, including movers, IT consultants, workplace strategy consultants or other technology service providers. Planning your communications with third-party providers will make sure they are aware of and committed to your schedule.

After your company relocation is complete, continue to use your automated comm tools to make sure everyone knows whom to contact if they are experiencing any problems. You can also use them to distribute your customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey.

Related articles:
Office Relocation Planning: Keeping Your Move On Track
8 Tips for Optimizing Churn Management

If you’re missing essential space management features that you need for your company relocation, such as a business unit portal and automated communication tools, it’s time to consider a more modern workplace management system.

Learn more about other must-have features from this reference guide to 5 Critical Comparison Points for Workplace Management Software.