TECHNOLOGY FOR THE 6 FEET OFFICE

HOW CAN TECHNOLOGY SUPPORT THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE 6 FEET OFFICE CONCEPT?

by Marie Dahmen

Executive Summary

The 2-meter office concept ensures that employees work with a minimum distance of 2 meters to each other. A range of easy-to-implement solutions allows this concept to be supported by technology:

Selection of the desk where work is permitted. This is in all probability a subset of the total number of desks available.

Introduction of an easy-to-use booking tool to ensure that there are no more people in the office than there are secure desks and to allow employees to organise who is in the office and when

Intensive cleaning of workplaces that have been used.

Sensor technology that can be retrofitted in the inventory allows, among other things, to detect and react to misuse.

If you are interested in a more detailed exchange on the topic or in a demo, please contact me via the Action Button on this page or via LinkedIn or follow Thing-it on LinkedIn.

Background

Cushman & Wakefield developed the concept of the 6 Feet Office in Amsterdam. It aims to help companies to combine social distancing and everyday office life. The concept is purely analog and does not contain any references to technology.

As an expert for office digitalization I take up this coherent concept and would like to show how it can be supported by technology. Our branch office in the Bad Homburg locomotive shed serves as an example.

Define Availability of Desks

Our office in the Lokschuppen (i.e. engine shed) in Bad Homburg has 14 desks for more than 20 employees. Due to the structural conditions, we cannot rearrange the desks in our office in such a way that all 14 desks are 6 feet apart. Instead, we explicitly define at which workstations work is still allowed and at which not.

The floor plan shows our 4 offices with a total of 14 desks - the three rooms above the corridor and the one on the upper right-hand side of the picture. Please ignore the meeting rooms for the moment.

With social distancing measures we now have 6 of 14 desks available.

Managing Scarcity of Desks

As you would expect from a technology company, we support remote work in every way. This is why we have always had relatively few desks for our employees. We have about one desk per 1.5 employees. Due to the social distancing measures, however, the number of available desks is now reduced to one per approx. 4 employees.

While all of our employees are technically capable of working in a home office, there are a number of personal and professional reasons that make a working day in the office worthwhile.

How do I know as an employee whether I will have a workstation in the office tomorrow?

Due to the high number of employees per desk, it can quickly happen that too many employees want to be in the office at the same time and a safe desk is not available for everyone. To prevent this, we use our own product and book desks quickly and easily via app. This can be setup extremely quickly and it takes only seconds for the employees to book a desk. This means that everyone can know whether there are still desks that conform to social distancing standards before leaving their home.

How to select and reserve a desk from the floor plan in 15 seconds in our office is shown here:

We currently still have assigned desks. How do we communicate a change in the workplace model in the middle of the crisis? Do we even want to introduce unassigned desks?

The Corona crisis has already established a new workplace model: almost 100% home office. In my view, it is now a question of offering a better workplace model than the one that is de facto forced by Corona. A comparison with the workplace world before Corona is emotionally understandable, but it misses the reality of the current situation.

We advise our customers, especially those with several large locations, to gradually introduce bookable desks.

  1. Offer desks in the office: Once a number of desks have been identified where work can be done, these are offered to a group of employees. For example, a group of 500 employees can use 50 desks in the office via booking. No one needs to use this, but it is an option that many do not have today and may be very welcome. Booking per app allows self-organization and thus produces little overhead for administration.

  2. Measure: As soon as employees book desks, data is being gathered. To what extent is the offer accepted? Do 50 of the 500 employees consistently want to go to the office? Are there much less who want to? Or many more? How satisfied are the employees who can come into the office? Since the current situation is new to all of us, such reliable and concrete data is the key to informing the strategy for revitalizing the offices.

  3. Adapt: The data will quickly show in which direction the office needs to evolve. If it is not accepted, reasons be analysed and other approaches can be tried. However, if the offer is well received, more deskls should be made available in this way. It is then important to observe whether the social distancing discipline is being observed and, if necessary, additional measures should be introduced. And these would then naturally be measured again.

Cleaning of Used Desks

Viruses can remain on some surfaces for several days and pose a risk of infection. To minimize this risk, desks should be thoroughly cleaned daily. In order to keep the effort for this justifiable, so that the currently already heavily burdened cleaning staff can cope with the tasks at all, areas that are actually used can be cleaned preferentially.

Thing-it has developed a priority-based control system for cleaning staff for this purpose. In this control system, the cleaning staff is scheduled based on information in Thing-it, such as which desk was booked or - see next section - at which desk occupancy was measured.

In addition, the switch to unassigned desks in combination with a "clean desk policy" means that desks have drastically better hygienic values. Permanently assigned desks apparently have hygienic values that are worse than those of toilets - based on HOK's Kay Sargent says in the following article: Isolation will force office rethink

A conversion about dynamic cleaning only works in cooperation with the cleaning service provider. All German cleaning companies, some of which we have worked with for years, are open to this change. Technologically and organisationally, there are certainly things to be clarified such as data protection, technical equipment, etc. - but this can be mastered well, especially against the background of the current crisis. We are happy to support you in these discussions.

Measuring Desk Utilization

It may be worthwhile to invest in sensor-based occupancy measurement in addition to booking. Reasons for this are:

  1. Incorrect occupancy can be detected with sensor technology

  2. Empty bookings can be prevented.

  3. Areas to be cleaned can be determined more precisely.

  4. Future space requirements can be determined.

Hardware Options

There is a wide range of hardware available for measuring the utilization of desks. Some buildings, such as the cube berlin, The Ship Cologne, or even our Lokschuppen, are already structurally equipped with systems that allow the recording of usage. These systems include, for example, wtec's smartengine or Vossloh-Schwabe's Blue2Light.

In most offices today, however, no sensor technology is installed, i.e. the sensor technology must be retrofitted. This means that sensors are only installed for the purpose of desk utilization analysis and are not part of a new building or major renovation.

Experience has shown that the following aspects are very important when selecting hardware for a retrofit: 1 No wires necessary: The costs of the installing wires often exceed the costs of the sensor technology many times over. Therefore, wireless sensors must be used in the retrofit. 2 No battery change necessary: The number of sensors required quickly runs into the thousands. Battery errors and high electric consumption of the sensor technology can result in very high maintenance costs, so that in the worst case you may need staff dedicated exclusively to replacing batteries.

Two technologies that meet these requirements are:

  1. EnOcean multisensor: Power is supplied by a PV cell on the sensor and the data is transmitted via EnOcean radio to a gateway, from where Thing-it picks it up.

  2. Disruptive Technologies temperature sensor: Power is provided by an internal battery with a life of between 5 and 15 years. The sensor uses a cloud gateway to radio the data to the Disruptive Technologies cloud, from where it is sent to Thing-it.

In both cases, Thing-it can use the sensor data to deduce whether a desk is occupied or not and use this information in a variety of ways, e.g. for a "live" display. The red dots in the display below represent occupied desks.

Prevent Misuse

Employees who have booked desk A can still go to desk B. This may be because the employee sits in the wrong place by mistake or because the instructions are ignored for some reason. In the example here, one of the middle desks in the top center of the office is occupied, although it should not be.

In this situation, Thing-it has, for example, the following automated action options:

  1. Thing-it can send a push message to all people in the room, reminding them of the social distancing rules. It can even point out directly which desk should not be occupied.

  2. It can send a push notification or email to other teams, e.g. security or reception, to clarify the situation.

  3. A warning can be issued via automated output, e.g. via IP loudspeaker.

  4. The light in the room can be adjusted as a signal.

The security staff or real estate teams can of course also view the current office use at any time and react to it.

Prevent Empty Bookings

The more employees return to the office, the more likely it is that the reduction of available desks will lead to a real bottleneck. As soon as the utilization of the still available workstations regularly exceeds 80%, it can be useful to introduce further optimization measures.

If Thing-it detects that a desk is booked but not used, Thing-it can ask the person making the booking whether the desk is still needed by them. In response to repeated requests, the booking can also be automatically removed and the desk reported as available.

Precision of the Cleaning Request

Cleaning on the basis of booking data alone has the risk of being imprecise in some cases as desks may be used without having been booked. In the same way, empty bookings lead to unnecessarily increased effort. Desk sensor technology makes it possible to differentiate whether a desk was not used at all, only very little or heavily used on a given day, which then flows back into the prioritization of cleaning.

Determine Space Requirements

With remote work and home office established everywhere, an impending recession and all the factors that spoke created a trend in that direction before Corona, the use of office space will change dramatically. One of the many changes will be that the permanently assigned desks will become much less common.

But how many desks will I need in the future? Reliable data are essential for this decision. Related to a subset of our desks, for example, the data for the month of March is as follows:

It is clearly visible that office occupancy is falling sharply in the second half of March. In the same way, we will be able to observe the "new normal" in the coming weeks and months to decide how much space we really need. The dashboard is also well prepared for analysis across multiple locations and supports dicing and slicing by location, team and type of desks (e.g. focus desks, telephone desks, collaboration desks, etc.).

The investment in the sensor technology for desk utilization can therefore pay off at the next renewal of the lease, as a fact-based decision can be made. I am willing to bet that in the future most companies will be able to get by with fewer jobs. My recommendation is to give higher priority to equipping offices with expiring leases in the next 12-24 months with desk utilization sensors.

Customer Questions and Concerns

In the discussion of these concepts, the following challenges are repeatedly raised. I am curious to see which others will arise. So far, in my view, the opportunities clearly outweigh the concerns. However, here are the concerns:

  • Isn't it also enough to remove chairs from desks where noone is supposed to sit? Or to mark the desks in a different way?

To manage the social distancing on site, that works. But only as long as the demand for desks is lower than the supply. If there is a shortage, employees must know reliably before they leave home that they will have a safe desk.

  • We have many small office rooms and have asked our employees to coordinate who comes when. Why an app?

In our experience, coordination processes are time-consuming. Strict regulations (Monday employee A, Tuesday employee B, etc.) often do not meet the actual needs. They ensure only in one office that availability and demand are coordinated. It can easily happen that an employee could work in a nearby office, but not their own, however, he or she simply doesn't know this and the shortage is therefore implicitly perceived stronger than it actually is. In addition, ad hoc coordination is much more time-consuming than the 15 seconds shown per booking and involves several people. Booking is possible via app at midnight the day before without any problems, a situation in which peer-to-peer coordination reaches its limits.

  • Can I not use my existing calendar management system (Outlook, G-Suite, etc.)?

From a purely technical point of view this is certainly possible, but Outlook and Co are not designed for the special needs of desk booking. There are no views of the floor plan, no simple display of only the available desks, etc. In my opinion, the quick and easy booking of desks is critical to gaining acceptance among employees.

  • Does the installation of sensor technology pay off?

That depends on a number of factors, not the least of which is how the office should look in the "new normal". With our network of partners, we are happy to help you shed light on installation costs on the one hand and possible benefits on the other.

Wrapping it Up

Cushman & Wakefield explains the initiative for the 6 Feet Office as follows.

“The 6 feet rule” isn’t going away any time soon and we at Cushman & Wakefield understand how critical it is to normalize this guideline into everyday life. Eventually, we will all return to work, but we must not forget this golden rule.

I can only agree with that. Of course, technology is only one aspect of an overall concept that is needed for the new office routine. But as shown here, corporate real estate teams have a whole range of tools at their disposal to help employees quickly and seriously implement the social distancing rules in the new office environment.

As a core concept, the conversion to unassigned desks including their booking helps. Further optimizations are possible and also form the basis for improved workplace management in the future. We at Thing-it are always available to discuss the concepts, their meaningfulness and, if desired, their implementation.

Further Concepts

Today, I have dealt exclusively with desks. There certainly are other issues where technology can help. We are working on the following topics, among others:

  • Social distancing in meeting rooms

  • Contact tracing in the office

  • Risk prevention in entrance area and lobby including visitor management

To get updates on these topics, simply follow Thing-it on LinkedIn.

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