This post is also available in:
French
Last week, we released an article about how smart offices can benefit individual workers in an office. In that article, we showed how a smart office can be safe, comfortable, and efficient. Of course, there’s a whole lot more that smart spaces have to offer than the few things we covered there.
This week, we’re going to cover 5 ways that a smart office could benefit the owners of a business.
One of the most attractive benefits of a smart office is the reduced operating cost. With an intelligent system in control of the lights, they are only used when they’re needed. Combine this with an upgrade to LED lights and you’ll be using a fraction of the energy that you were before. For more info on how smart lighting can save you money, contact us and request a copy of the whitepaper we worked on with Carleton University.
The same idea applies to the temperature systems in your office as well. Only the areas that need the heat receive it, so you aren’t wasting energy on unoccupied space.
Speaking of wasted space, did you know that smart spaces can help reorganize your office? A study by Abintra Consulting in the UK showed that businesses in England and Wales are spending £10 billion each year on wasted space. If all the wasted space in your office were put to use, you may be able to delay relocation or even sublet the unused space. This means getting more for your money, and saving you even more in the long run.
What makes this possible is our use of people analytics. By tracking movement throughout an office we can determine which spaces are used frequently or used by a lot of people, and which spaces are used infrequently by a low volume of people. This lets you make spatial decisions in the office that are driven by data and could therefore make a real difference in the efficiency of foot-traffic in your office.
The lighting and temperature controls available to you in a smart system can make a big difference in worker efficiency. Poor lighting can be a distraction, cause headaches, and even interrupt sleep patterns. The lighting system made by illumenai allows you to make short work of these issues. You have control over brightness, light temperature, and even colour. The system also allows the lighting to follow sunlight levels (circadian rhythm), stopping it from affecting your sleep cycle.
Another part of the illumenai platform is the use of White Noise Generation. Offices can be quite noisy, and noises can be quite distracting. Distractions can lower the efficiency of your workforce, so the illumenai platform makes use of white noise to reduce office noise. In studies, white noise has been shown to help with your memory and learning skills. This noise can also be adjusted to different frequency ranges and volumes to suit different environments.
These things come together to create a comfortable office environment that fosters efficiency. This means getting better work from your workers, and likely increasing retention.
Using a wide variety of Bluetooth beacons, the illumenai platform can track your assets in real-time. You could look on a cloud based platform and see where certain important items are in your office. This can be used to determine if safety equipment is put back in its place, or whether expensive equipment is still in the building. Furthermore, you can set up alerts for when assets leave specified areas.
With loss prevention in mind, another great part of the smart office is intrusion detection. Administrators can define protected spaces and receive alerts when unauthorized entry occurs. Authorization can be specified by both time of access and the location of the person accessing it. For the worst case scenarios, the system can also listen for breaking glass. Using movement tracking, you can keep track of where the intruder is in the space and keep your security staff well informed of the situation. Finally, all movement within protected spaces is logged, giving a record of events for law enforcement and insurance.
At illumenai, one of our three core values is saving our environment. At this point it is well known that we are experiencing climate change as a result of our CO2 emissions. As it stands, our emissions are also increasing, having increased by about 30 parts per million in our atmosphere since 2007. It should be clear by now that something needs to change in the way that we consume energy. Smart spaces can help to make that change.
For a 1 million square foot building, our analytics platform could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 1000 metric Tonnes per year. The same cost-saving measures we mentioned before will lower your energy use. By lowering your total energy use and making use of wasted space, you can significantly lower your carbon footprint.
Another big part of committing to do your part against climate change is the social awareness. By identifying empathetically with the concerns raised by your employees and society, you show them that you are listening and that you care. By making an effort to save the environment that all of us live in, including your employees and their families, you show that you are committed to everyone’s best interests, particularly their health and wellness. This could prove to further increase your efficiency and retention over time, as well as being the right thing to do.
So in the end, by upgrading to a smart office you’d not only have a more comfortable and efficient workspace, but you’d also be doing your part in saving the planet. It’s a benefit for you, your workers, and the whole world. A real win-win-win scenario if you ask me!
Comments are closed.