Smartphones have become the mission control center of people’s lives – and now they’re in position to do the same for their working lives, too.
As remote work took off during the pandemic, and as ‘hybrid’ model that blended office and home working emerges, employees have come to recognize the ease and flexibility that can comes with working remotely. However, making this work for large workforces, all of whom have different roles, priorities and different ideas of work-life balance, needs careful and seamless solutions that only technology can provide.
Increasingly, people will work at different places at different times, but will always need access to information around where they’re working, when and with whom. As the only technology that’s always with them, it’s therefore essential that mobile app functionality can fulfil these duties. Condeco’s workspace scheduling solution apps for iOS and Android have been designed with this ‘always-on’ need in mind, and they can help employees in four key areas.
1. Knowing before going
The offices of the future must have a specific, well-defined purpose to the business and to the workforce: if they don’t, then nobody will want to use them and everyone will simply work from home all the time. Offices still have great value for collaboration, team-building and in giving those who don’t have access to dedicated working areas at home to get some peace and quiet.
However, to make those functions work for employees, they need confidence before they arrive that their trip to the office that day will be worthwhile. Through Condeco’s mobile apps, each employee can find an available workstation and meeting room that fulfils all their needs, and reserve it for the time period they need it. This makes sure that their trip isn’t wasted and that their productivity is maximized.
2. Making plans that stick
Face-to-face meetings help people connect and build relationships in ways that simply aren’t possible virtually, and so giving people the opportunity to come into the office for meetings will remain important. However, aligning the schedules of every attendee is easier said than done, and can require time-consuming admin work by the meeting organizer to work out which times everyone can make… unless Condeco is used.
Within the mobile apps, an organizer can check each attendee’s schedule themselves and work out a mutually acceptable time, without the need to contact each person in turn. Armed with this information, a meeting room that is the correct size can be booked for the time in question, and if necessary, video conferencing equipment for virtual attendees can be ordered. The whole process can be conducted by one person, entirely within the mobile app, within a matter of minutes.
3. Connecting people and ideas
In many industries like media, law or consultancy, client meetings that take place in person will still be a vital part of normal business operations, whatever the post-pandemic future holds. Making it easy to bring internal and external people together so they can freely collaborate and exchange ideas will therefore remain important, but could potentially be more complicated if remote workers have to be brought into the office from their respective homes.
If equipped with a Condeco mobile app, a user could discuss a potential meeting with an external client, and within moments reserve a meeting space and get invites sent to every attendee from within their own organization. What’s more, they can send an invite to the external client, complete with information on how to check into the building and how to get from reception to the meeting room in question.
4. Enabling contactless work
However the rest of the COVID-19 pandemic plays out, staying safe and taking action to minimize infection risk will be with us for some time, whether through regulation or general wariness of employees. Anything that can be done should be done, and that includes making as many workspace-related functions contactless as possible.
Condeco’s mobile apps enable contactless functions across a number of areas, including checking into and out of a building, or into and out of a booked workstation, once the user gets within a certain distance of it. Furthermore, the app can be used to locate other colleagues within a building, reducing the physical proximity of users to others caused by searching large areas of office space themselves.
All this innovation works in conjunction with Condeco’s system across web, display screens and an add-in for Microsoft Outlook. The result is that every employee can always assume total control of their working arrangements, whether that’s on a PC or in the palm of their hand.
