As the office of the future’s primary function has become a social destination, you need to make sure your employees want to come to the office. This means that the working environment must fit the needs of your employees. These needs have changed over the past few years. Here’s what you need to know:
Health
More and more people value being healthy, both physically and mentally. A growing number of employers are aware of this, providing their employees with gym memberships or in-house facilities for entertainment and relaxation, such as sport attributes, dart boards or table tennis. Some employers even choose to experiment with different working hours, like shorter days or less days a week. Combining those factors, the trend is that offices are becoming less of a working facility and more of a second home.
Another way in which you can take care of your employees is by providing them with suitable office furniture. Sitting behind a desk for too long may cause your employees to develop back problems in the long run due to bad posture. You can prevent this by offering height-adjustable desks and chairs. GoBright’s Desk Booking System can go even a step further, installing software on your desks that automatically positions the desks at the perfect height for every individual employee. Besides height-adjusting, desk booking also offers the opportunity for your employees to book a desk through the GoBright App, and it provides you with assistance in occupancy management. Additionally, the GoBright desk booking software provides the option to mark a desk as ‘needs cleaning’, which employees can use to make sure they work at sanitised desks.
Collaboration
Hybrid working is becoming the new norm. This means that employees want to choose whether they work from home or at the office. In terms of collaboration between employees, it is important to ensure meeting each other is easy and accessible, whether they work from home or at the office. Consider providing your meeting rooms with technology that makes this easier for your employees, such as a room booking system and online collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom. When you use the GoBright Room Booking System, your employees will be able to book rooms from home, both individually and for groups of people, with the option of making the meeting a recurring event.
Additionally, the Find My Colleague function in the system helps your employees quickly locate their coworkers. Another solution to facilitate your employees is GoBright’s Desk Booking System. This allows for your employees to book a desk for themselves or a group of people, ensuring that they spend the day at the office surrounded by the people they need to collaborate with. Using this type of technology within your office stimulates collaboration between your employees and results in a better working environment.
Autonomy
People generally like to have a sense of autonomy – They want to be able to make decisions for themselves. This can easily be incorporated into the office of the future. Examples may be booking meeting rooms, prolonging meeting times, and looking into analyses of occupancy rates.
It may also be beneficial for employees to be able to reserve desks and view bookings from home. Seeing who will be at the office and where they will take place, may help the employee choose where to work. This may be at home when the office is empty, or next to their favourite colleague at the office.