Security, Safety & Wellness and What Role Do They Play in Humanizing Buildings

In previous posts, we’ve covered other benefits of IoT-powered deployments that provide visibility into how corporate space is used, like reducing the costs of real estate and providing a better overall occupant experience for employees. 

Contents

• Security
• Safety
• Wellness
• Now is the time to act

This time, we’re turning the focus to other fields where taking a people-first approach pays off in terms of better outcomes and higher satisfaction for everyone — security, safety, and wellness. 

Security

Let’s look at each one individually, starting with security. 

The pandemic has created a situation in which many companies are working on a hybrid model that is sure to extend well into the future. Some employees are in the office all or most of the time, while others work from home all or most of the time. 

The security challenge here is ensuring that the entire staff — both in-office and remote-based — is following the same security protocols used to protect sensitive data and manage access to information. 

It’s difficult for an IT team to monitor and support so many remote workers and ensure that things like secure equipment and firewalls are properly installed and utilized. The same with troubleshooting when problems arise — providing help in these circumstances is that much more complicated and time-consuming when everything is handled over video conferencing instead of face-to-face. 

Our solutions help you maintain security and privacy at the same time. Sensors that detect office occupants do so through heat signatures, not through anything associated with a particular identity. This allows you to keep real-time insights into space occupancy while addressing privacy concerns as well. 

Bringing remote employees back to the office — one of the core missions of the entire movement of humanizing buildings — is a way to minimize this issue and its costs. Creating a more controlled security environment through having more of your staff in the same office relieves the burden on IT while helping to enhance your overall security posture. 

IoT solutions can also automate some security measures, like detecting the entry or presence of anyone in an area after a time when it is supposed to be empty. If, for example, a server room is meant to be empty between 5pm and 8am, the presence of anyone during those times can generate an alert. 

Safety

When it comes to safety, the benefits of real-time visibility into staff location are clear. These just-in-case solutions are the kind you hope you never need but are exactly what you must have in certain situations. 

Having their presence easily detected increases the safety of employees working late or alone in a large office space. Smart badges can act as a portable emergency call in crisis situations, alerting others to their exact location and allowing help to arrive as quickly as possible. In mustering (evacuation) events, the presence of every employee can be accounted for and the exact location of those not moved to safety can be identified with room-level accuracy. 

Easily scalable networks can extend the digital safety umbrella as wide as it needs to be to provide coverage for these and other times when employee safety is threatened. 

Wellness

Wellness is an area that has come to the forefront of the discussion about the future of workspaces and IoT solutions have a central role to play. 

The challenge of drawing employees back to the office is compounded by the amount of burnout that can be seen among so many employees. Both issues can be addressed through creating safe, comfortable, and productive workspaces.  

There is no “correct”, perfect environment where everyone will agree on, for example, temperature and humidity levels, but employers can now use digital monitoring solutions to set baselines that support productivity from a health perspective. 

Monitoring environmental conditions and reacting to changes automatically is now within easy reach and contributes to the kind of workspace where employees are physically and mentally at ease. From there, it’s just a small step to other benefits, like reducing churn to staying competitive in recruitment, and much more. 

Now is the time to act

It’s hard to imagine that the hybrid work model is going to disappear anytime soon but drawing employees back to the workplace should be a priority for office-based businesses. IoT-powered visibility into how you can improve those workspaces should be the foundation of the reset you need to have more employees working from the office. 

Now is the time to act and implement these solutions because:

• We are in a competitive labor market. Competitive for employers, that is. The competition for talent is always intense but it’s especially so now. Better, more comfortable, and inviting workplaces can be a strong competitive advantage in the battle for the best staff. 
• It makes staff retention easier. Another aspect of the same issue, keeping your staff is more difficult than ever, and creating a better, more welcoming work environment is an obvious step to take to meet this challenge. 
• You can start collecting data now. It takes time to collect data and the more data you have regarding the habits and patterns in your current workspace, the better decisions you can make in the future. Also, data can be applied to other aspects of your operations, like lease renewals. When you have precise metrics regarding your real space needs, you’re in a better position to right-size your commitments and avoid overspending on unneeded square footage. 

If you want to know more about how your facility can benefit from going smart, reach out to our smart building experts team today.

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