Insights into Workspace Planning
FacilityQuest Research Community Explores New Needs
What is the status of Workspace Planning?
Due to acceleration of remote and hybrid working triggered by Covid-19, organizations and practitioners are faced with making workplace decisions in an uncertain context.
In January and February of 2021 FacilityQuest worked with Chris Diming, PhD to engage workplace practitioners. We wanted to understand how this research community of strategists, planners, designers, and facility managers were addressing the emergence of hybrid working, and what data were they using to help make manage and make decisions.
To understand if better workplace data can address the current climate, we sought to answer the following research questions:
How do participants view and carry out their work?
What pain points, needs, and aspirations do participants have?
How do participants understand and utilize workplace data?
Key Insights
Professionals tasked with planning, designing, and managing workplaces have their job cut out for them. To create effective working environments, they have access to numerous data types, from quantitative utilization rates to qualitative observations of behaviors. However, of all the data and tools at their disposal, what would practitioners need most? Stepping back, how do practitioners view their work, and what tasks would the data assist?
Workplace practitioners care about a wide range of issues regarding people and place. They view their work holistically. Focusing on making their tasks simple and integrated allows them to perform regardless of their official roles.
While carrying out workplace planning, practitioners operate within relationships with decision-makers, employees, other stakeholders, and collaborators. Facilitating employee engagement and team collaboration represents a major opportunity to increase the collective capacity of teams to respond to challenges and realize opportunities for innovation.
To cope with workplace uncertainty, practitioners can harness data to augment iterative programs and project future space requirements. However, for the data to be useful, practitioners must be confident in its validity and accuracy. Addressing data accuracy can bolster the capacity of practitioners to co-create working environments, thereby fostering certain amidst uncertainty.
Get the Research
Workplace planning amid the acceleration of hybrid working has challenges in relation to employee engagement, team collaboration, and data certainty. However, by addressing these gaps, workplace management software can play a role in reimagining work. Download the research paper here.
Try Out Integrated Workspace Planning and Management
Join The Research Community
We continue to engage with our research community, asking for feedback and diving deeper into their needs. If you would like to participate in our occasional one-on-one or group inquiries, we would love to have you. Please let us know.