Consistent experiences: Supporting modern office real estate with technology

A new IDC InfoBrief defines the six building blocks you need to create best-in-class workspaces for hybrid working. Consistent experiences is one of them. 

One of the most fundamental and far-reaching consequences of the work revolution we have witnessed in the last couple of years is the growing demand for flexibility. Along with this, the sheer increase in number of locations employees work from. Even if you set aside home offices (whether purpose-built or improvised), we still have drastically more working locations than before the pandemic. Companies have added spoke offices to the corporate hub and brought desk workers into premises that were previously ‘out of bounds’, such as manufacturing units, retail showrooms and high street branches. Not to mention the rising uptake of flexible workspace to facilitate hybrid and distributed working strategies.

With flexibility now built into normal working life, the obvious next step is to allow people to move easily between these spaces. The key is consistency: employees want to be able to switch seamlessly between work sites. Employers need to reliably predict levels of productivity, security and compliance to ensure consistently personalised experiences for their employees. This encompasses a wide range of elements that contribute to the overall office environment, such as space management, security, amenities, services and more.

Organisations and flexible space providers are prioritising workspace transformation initiatives to provide a standardised experience. This often requires spending heavily on technology and infrastructure. A recent IDC Future Enterprise and Resilience Survey highlights that 42% of organisations say workplace transformation is a top technology investment. But it’s difficult to deliver .

While apps and mobile technology are vital to office environments, developing a disparate solution to each individual challenge can lead to unnecessary operational complexity and security vulnerabilities, and the need for employees to use dozens of different apps just to make it through the working day. An integrated solution is needed, which not only allows individuals to personalise their experience across core working locations, but also develops persona-based models that lend to the needs of individual departments and disciplines. The space and service needs of a sales team are different from those of a finance team – and they need this to be reflected wherever they are working.

This degree of workspace transformation might seem like an ambitious target. However, it’s simply best-in-class. According to IDC, no single organisation is doing it perfectly yet. The InfoBrief is a useful framework for understanding how the future might look if we plan our workspace transformation journey smartly. The main thing is not to be fooled into thinking that taking one element in isolation will do the trick.

A holistic approach to technology, one that provides the digital foundation for seamless portfolio-wide and in-building experiences, can support today’s modern commercial real estate. While companies have created platforms to consolidate apps and point solutions, they don’t address the operational complexity of network management when digitally enabling workspaces. Therefore tackling this by using intelligent network automation becomes a critical component for delivering best-in-class workspaces.