Author: Mike Brooman, CEO Vanti

Whilst the long-term impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the smart building market is hard to predict, there’s no doubt that it increased the need to optimise spaces and focus more on building occupants versus the traditional smart building goals of sustainability and reducing energy consumption.

As lockdowns are lifted, organisations are looking to make the best use of their facilities and create safe environments for getting people back to the office. Whilst many technology companies have capitalised on the pandemic by introducing solutions for maintaining social distance, disinfecting spaces, and even detecting elevated body temperature, organisations need to be careful not to implement technology for technology’s sake and take a dragnet, temporary approach that ultimately does not get them to the end goal of creating outstanding people-centric work spaces that actually attract and retain talent.

Average is No Longer Good Enough

If there’s one thing the pandemic has taught us, it’s that people can be highly productive working at home, especially when they have the right environment. In some ways, even an average home working environment offers several advantages over the average office-the ability to better focus on individual work, think creatively, hold confidential discussions, spread out papers or materials, take proper breaks, and maintain an overall better work-life balance. This has prompted many top CEOs to state that they plan to shed a significant amount of office space, up to 90% in some cases. That may however be a bit of knee-jerk reaction-I covered this on a recent Siemon TechTalk “How to Make a Smart Building Truly Intelligent”, it’s not the office that’s the problem; it’s the experience.

Although virtual meeting platforms have certainly maintained some level of collaboration, no one can deny that humans are social beings who can achieve more when we work together face-to-face. But if the average home offers a better work environment and improved productivity compared to an average office, what’s to entice people to come back to the office or new talent to come on board? To truly attract and retain talent, offices need to be better than average-they need to be outstanding and offer all the benefits of working at home while driving the social interaction, creative collaboration, and customer interface people crave and need be successful. The key question is, how do we get there?

A People-First Mentality

The intelligent building approach has rapidly shifted away from the early days of systems deployed as smart silos with the ability to control their own behavior and look at their own data. While the industry is now focusing more on integrated systems that can share and analyse data for greater insight, making next-generation smart buildings truly intelligent requires an approach that optimises the user experience and starts with the end in mind.

Adopting a people-first mentality for smart building projects requires designing around the occupants by identifying all the various personas in a building-staff, visitors, facility managers-and determining what matters to them, how they move through a building, and what their ultimate experience should be. When you consider recent reports that break down office-based business cost as 1% for energy, 9% for operations, and the remaining 90% related to people, it’s clear that building technology investment needs to be people-centred.

Instead of focusing on bells and whistles and getting lost in the promise of next-gen innovation, technology needs to be utilised to allow people to do their best work-and it needs to be convenient, intuitive, and consistent via a unified interface.

It Takes a Holistic, Collaborative Approach

Once the desired user experience has been determined, the process should then work back from there to identify the right technologies and implementation, answering such questions as:

• What type of data required?
• How should the system function and be controlled?
• Which systems should be integrated?
• Which systems can be integrated?

In a large multi-tenant building with dozens of various systems, some of which are landlord based (i.e., security, building automation, parking) and others that are tenant based (i.e., meeting room booking, lighting control, audiovisual), designing and implementing systems with the end in mind can be complex and challenging, especially considering many of the systems have been traditionally designed, implemented, and commissioned as silos.

To avoid these silos, it’s important to adopt a holistic approach where everyone has a seat at the design table and all stakeholders understand the technology implications to avoid anything getting lost in translation between the client, the design team, and those involved in the actual construction and implementation. It’s therefore critical that those looking to get started on a smart building project choose the right partners.

Whether you’re building new or retrofitting an existing building, listen to our Siemon TechTalk: “How to Make a Smart Building Truly Intelligent” to gain valuable insight on what makes an outstanding office, common pitfalls to avoid, implementation strategies, and how to get started.