Is Our Workplace Getting Too Sensitive?

Our workplace is becoming sensitive. Not only does the workplace become “woke” with different social subjects, but it is also becoming physically sensitive with more sensors installed at the office. 

It has been years since facility management firms installed sensors for measuring occupancy and footfall traffic for planning. In recent years, more sensors have been added to measure temperature, indoor air quality (IAQ), and other environmental-related data. But besides enabling smarter facilities, are these sensors genuinely helping to bring a better workplace and a more productive workforce? 

Driving well-being and de-carbonization

“Having sensors creates a lot of transparency,” said Truddy Cheung, head of consulting for North Asia at Work Dynamics, JLL. 

At a panel session during the Revive Tech Asia Conference, Cheung discussed an interactive dashboard at JLL’s office, showing real-time data on occupancy, temperature, and IAQ. “The dashboard allows anyone to dig deeper into the information, and we found that people do care about the air quality in the office,” she said.

With the rising concern for well-being after the pandemic, IAQ data is becoming an essential indicator of a healthy work environment.

“After the pandemic, people are starting to feel uncomfortable to return to the office,” added Nicholas Lesek, director, APAC corporate real estate and services region head and global digitalization thought leader at Swiss Re. “We need to understand the psychology of the situation.  If we display IAQ data, people get more comfortable, then their anxiety level decreases. It’s well reported that this increases productivity.”

On top of providing a well-being indicator, sensors are increasingly used to help businesses measure their de-carbonization progress. At Swire Properties, the company aims to reduce its carbon emissions by half and Scope 3 carbon emissions — emissions that the business is indirectly responsible for and produced by parties up and down its value chain — by 28 % by 2030.

To help the company achieve these goals, the property developer launched the Green Performance Pledge — a program that guides its tenants to operate sustainably. Patrick Ho, deputy head of the sustainable department at Swire Properties, said energy meters and waste monitoring smart systems are used to help its tenants to measure and benchmark their performance against others in a similar industry. 

A sensitive subject with sensors

Despite the widening use of sensors in the workplace, Cheung from JLL said sensor installation remains a sensitive subject for many businesses.

“Half of the battle is getting the leaders to agree on putting in sensors. They feel it’s intrusive; they feel there’s going be a ton of questions,” she said. Without a clear purpose and well thought out strategic goals, it can be very challenging to justify sensor usage.

Cybersecurity is another major challenge, noted Patrick Stewart-Blacker, program director at  AIA Shared Services Hong Kong. He noted CISOs are mainly concerned with sensors being the weakest link of the business’ cybersecurity posture. But more importantly, many lack a clear purpose for collecting the data.

“Facility managers are asked to make the building smarter, but no one knows what that means,” added Stewart-Blacker. “[It] boils down to what we want to understand about our people in the workplace.”

He added the energy saving from smart meters is often marginal, according to JLL’s 3-30-300 rule. It estimated companies, on average, spend USD3 on utility, USD30 on rent, and USD300 on payroll per square foot per year.

“Saving a bit of here and there is nothing compared to making your employees more productive,” said Stewart-Blacker. He added a direct benefit on productivity from sensors is measuring CO2 saturation in the environment. “If [there is] too much CO2 in the space, your staff gets sleepy.”

Measuring the value of sensors

Deriving measurable value from sensors appears to be a chicken-and-egg situation. Often new insights and usage can be found only after installing the sensors. To experiment and study data generated from different sensors, Lesek from SwissRe said the company has a living lab in Zurich. 

One project at the lab is to analyze data from Microsoft Viva with the hot desk booking and utilization rate to make booking easier. “We realized people hate booking systems,” he said. By studying the data, the lab aims to identify an individual collaboration pattern and frequent partners, then automate the assignment of desks to create a higher quality of connections between people.

Meanwhile, there are also valuable data if businesses can take advantage of existing gear, according to Yulia Protasova, segment director for commercial and office at Neoma, an AI and location-based insights platform.

“We try to look beyond the sensors. Our platform is hardware agnostic, so we can connect different types of sensors,” said Protasova. One of its clients is a co-working space that would like to measure occupancy rates against the booking system. Instead of installing new sensors, she said the client has been using digital door locks, which is an excellent tool for collecting utilization rates. 

“It’s about having a more comprehensive approach to what we are doing with the space, leveraging the existing ecosystem, and complementing what’s missing,” she said.

Lesek noted all installation of sensors should aim to answer the important questions — why? Each company’s purpose and value for using sensors could be different. They could be for financial results — like reducing rental cost — or non-financial and intangible results — like creating a better return on experience (ROE) for employees.

“When asked that question, we have three responses: TCO, down; experience, up; CO2, down. If the use case doesn’t fit at least two of them, then it doesn’t fly,” he concluded.

Sheila Lam is the contributing editor of DigitalWorkforceTrends. Covering IT for 20 years as a journalist, she has witnessed the emergence, hype, and maturity of different technologies but is always excited about what's next. You can reach her at [email protected].

Image credit: iStockphoto/Oleksandr Shchus