Smart Workspace past Covid-19

The work environment has changed significantly over the last decade with more working from home, video meetings and work in open landscapes. With Covid-19, this change has been accelerated as organizations and employees have been forced to adopt new ways of working. Even after the measures of Covid-19 has ceased, it is expected that more people will work from home, more meetings will be done over video and the office will be where you go for live discussions and social interactions with your colleagues, partners and customers. Thus the work place needs to be more dynamic and flexible going ahead. Having office space that is not suited for the new way of working will give unhappy employees, low productivity and lower utilization of the office which is both costly as well as an environmental challenge. Real estate is the second main cost for companies, and an area that has been overlooked for too long. Before Covid-19, companies reported that up to 40% of meeting rooms are booked but unused , while 40% of employees report wasting up to 30 minutes a day searching for spaces to collaborate, and 50% of meetings occur with just one or two people in the space . The accumulated cost of unused offices, energy and lack of productivity accounts for over a billion NOK in Oslo alone and almost a trillion euros worldwide, yearly! Unless offices adapt and are provided with tools so user needs are better matched, the waste in productivity and real estate will increase drastically leading to both economical as well as environmental losses. This project will provide solutions to these problems by: 1) Optimize real estate by a) increasing desk utilization, b) eliminating the fake usage problem and c) matching room sizes with actual needs 2) Augmenting user satisfaction by a) quickly guiding users, b) delivering resources closer to the time of consumption and c) finding colleagues in real time 3) Ensuring policy and safety including a solution for social distancing.