Why investing in a workplace experience platform can empower your people

Facilities manager: Improving the visitor and employee workplace experience

Facilities managers are regularly tasked with welcoming visitors and VIPs, and ensuring they enjoy a seamless on-site experience. The last thing that you want is to keep your visitors waiting at reception or ask them to fill out endless forms before they are permitted to enter the site.

Using RICOH Spaces helps to remove that friction. You can plan the entire visit in the platform, sending invites and questionnaires to check if the visitor has accessibility, parking, or dietary needs, plus electronic forms or NDAs that they need to sign. Based on the visitor’s responses, you can book rooms, request extra AV equipment, place catering orders and reserve parking or cycle-rack space.

When visitors arrive on site, entering a PIN code on a digital panel prints an access badge and automatically notifies you to greet them. It’s quick and simple, reduces dwell time at reception, and helps to ensure that visitors immediately gain a positive impression of your business.

Facilities managers will spend their time exploring the workplace analytics in RICOH Spaces. For example, environmental sensors can track light, noise, temperature, humidity and air pressure, and enable you to make continual adjustments to heating, ventilation and lighting systems to improve employee comfort levels and wellbeing. Similarly, real-time occupancy data helps to support emergency readiness, in case of an incident requiring immediate evacuation.

HR: Supporting agile, productive and collaborative hybrid working

For your HR team, the analytics dashboards can help to track the effectiveness of your hybrid working polices. You can view data on when and how often employees attend the office and make choices about how to strengthen connections and culture. If employees rarely use the office, you can organise on-site group events to encourage collaboration. And to aid employees with disabilities, you can highlight rooms with wheelchair access and accessibility chairs on floorplans in the platform. 

RICOH Spaces can also play a role in your recruitment and talent management efforts. Giving employees access to nimble, user-friendly solutions will position your organisation as an innovator, helping to ensure you appeal to talented candidates, especially younger digital natives.

Workplace consultants Uncoded recently adopted RICOH Spaces at their London office. Their Commercial Director said this about the platform, “As we continue to grow, placing state-of-the-art digital capabilities in the hands of our employees will help us to attract and retain the best talent.”

Operations team: Managing the workspace with efficiency

Adopting RICOH Spaces makes life easier for operations teams, too. For starters, all space booking is handled through one central platform - employees can log in via web browser or app to book desks, meeting rooms, collaboration zones, lockers, parking spaces, cycle racks, and more. They can plan their entire day before leaving home, and won’t lose time searching for space on arrival. Wealth management firm Evelyn Partners uses the platform to manage more than 1,150 desks and 125 cycle spaces.

RICOH Spaces enables operations teams to manage the workspace with more agility than ever. Real-time occupancy data can help them to track how employees are using spaces, and whether there is a need to rethink and optimise layouts and designs. For example, if you find that employees prefer to use the office for group ideation sessions rather than individual work, you can take steps to add more collaboration zones and meeting rooms.

Finance department: Reducing real estate and energy costs

In RICOH Spaces, finance departments can track long-term office usage trends to ensure a positive ROI, both from an employee wellbeing perspective and a space utilisation perspective. Those insights will enable smarter, data driven decisions on how your real estate is used. Allowing you to free up space for in person collaboration, add communication hubs, or reduce meeting rooms depending on the needs of your people. 

For example, when major airline easyJet implemented RICOH Spaces to support their hybrid working strategy, they soon discovered they no longer needed so much space at their headquarters and they were able to improve overall productivity and collaboration for their teams.

In addition, integrating energy sensors with RICOH Spaces can give finance departments granular insights into electricity usage and spending in the workplace. With that information, you can identify opportunities to reduce energy costs and implement greener operating practices, such as shutting down IT equipment at the end of each day or adding insulation to reduce heat loss.