Space Management Solutions for Remote and Hybrid Work Environments
- Blog
- August 16, 2024
Space management is now more important than ever in creating work environments that not only attract the best talent but also encourage productivity, innovation, cost control, and employee engagement. By effectively managing your space, you can greatly enhance the efficiency of your hybrid workplace.
What is Space Management?
Space management involves auditing, tracking, and managing a company’s physical space. The concept is simple, but it can be complicated. For example, you could be in charge of overseeing various company locations. This could include a range of levels, structures, or locations. Each space has its own purpose and specific requirements.
Make the most of your space and provide employee support by utilizing space management tools. By using these resources, you can uncover trends and patterns in the way people utilize their workplaces. Utilize these insights to optimise your space, increasing efficiency and satisfaction through data.
Efficient space management is crucial in a hybrid work environment to encourage employees to return to the office. It can detect whether an office is occupied or vacant.
Strategies for Effective Space Management
For your business to make the best use of its office real estate, effective space management and optimization strategies are essential. Make the most of your space to reduce waste, increase employee satisfaction, and save costs.
Here are some strategies for improved space management:
Prioritize Employee Needs
By understanding your employees’ needs, you can create a space management strategy that not only meets their current and future expectations but also optimizes the utilization of your workspace. Furthermore, it aids in analyzing, testing, and implementing new technologies to optimize space usage. Before creating your space management plan, survey your employees to collect their opinions on remote work and in-office preferences.
Identify Space Needed Per Employee
Begin by determining the average occupancy percentage prior to implementing the hybrid work model. What matters most is the available space per employee. This will assist in improving office space design and maximizing the use of every square foot.
Keep in mind that employees’ space needs can vary depending on the type of work. For instance, your legal team might need a private space for confidential conversations, but your graphic design team can work together in an open space to come up with ideas. When creating general guidelines for space management, keep this in mind.
Adopting Activity-Based Working
Instead of using assigned desks, the concept behind ABW is to create dedicated workspaces for different work styles. Workers can select the location that most closely fits the task they are doing now.
To optimize a small workplace, it is necessary to reduce fixed allocation workstations and provide hot desking locations. Moreover, it could be advantageous to allocate specific areas of the workspace for different types of tasks. These locations might include meeting rooms equipped for video conferences, private phone booths for concentrated work, and cozy lounge areas to encourage community bonding.
In larger offices, silent zones are set aside for focused individual work. Enclosed pods provide an easier way to have private calls and video meetings. Collaborative areas with flexible furniture and big screens foster team co-creation.
Create a Clear Remote Work Policy
Clearly defining expectations company-wide encourages transparency and clarity. Improving space management can be achieved by identifying in-person meetings, designating locations for client meetings, and scheduling meeting rooms for remote workers during business events. Following these guidelines will guarantee efficient and effective space management.
Monitor and Optimize Meeting Room Booking Usage
Office meeting rooms are often not used to their full potential. In a hybrid environment, reduced office occupancy results in greater space inefficiency. However, employees are rushing to find places to work together.
45% of employees struggle to find available meeting rooms, and a solution is meeting room booking software. With meeting room booking software, you can easily monitor room occupancy and schedules. If your large meeting rooms are not being used, try transforming them into hot desks or smaller spaces for collaboration.
Optimize Your Hybrid Workplace
See all your office spaces, including floor plans, desks, and meeting rooms, using space management software. It also assists in tracking usage and adapting floor plans as necessary.
The use of graphics in space management software allows for visualizing floor plans. Moreover, you can access live data on desk and meeting room bookings. Such detailed data allows for data-driven decision-making in your hybrid workplace.
Change Management & User Adoption
Engaging employees and implementing effective change management are key components of a successful workplace transformation. Start a conversation about strategies for maximizing space usage, focusing on the advantages of being flexible and promoting collaboration.
Gather input from users by organizing focus groups, conducting interviews, and administering surveys. Address any concerns related to privacy, noise, or technological issues. Modify various aspects, including technology, policies, and capabilities, using lessons learned. Encourage activity-based working and space sharing by organizing meetings and hosting events. Create an inclusive atmosphere that encourages employees to work remotely according to their individual requirements.
How Can VLogic Help You with Space Management?
Knowing how to utilize your space will enable you to establish a practical hybrid workspace. By being well-managed, a hybrid workplace can best meet the needs of both on-site and remote staff. Effective space management ultimately leads to increased productivity, improved morale, and reduced costs.
VLogicFM provides an integrated space management software solution that efficiently tracks facility metrics and improves space utilization. With our new user interface, which centers around a native CAD drawings engine, we have completely transformed space management software. Users can easily store, display, and share facility CAD drawings using this drawings engine; no additional software or licences are needed.
In addition, our space management software cleverly connects spaces and rooms on digital floor plans to a vast database of relevant facility information.
Customers can easily understand facility metrics, usage, and location by linking rich data to facility drawings. VLogicFM’s user interface, which focuses on drawings, simplifies the navigation process through complex facility data, preventing users from getting lost in the overwhelming details of database tables and endless spreadsheet cells. To know more about VLogicFM’s space management solution and how it can benefit your organization, contact us today.
