The Guide To Smart Buildings

A smart building could be as small as a 120 sq. ft. office or as big as a university campus, but they are classified as smart if they use technology to enhance and aid the way the building is being run.

Take the National Grid, for example. They used technology in the form of occupancy sensors to make their buildings smart and optimise their space utilisation. They also gained valuable data on the time employees went for lunch, enabling them to choose quieter times to visit the canteen, avoiding queues at the typically busier periods.

Within the hospitality industry, hotels could also adopt this smart approach. If they use a smart building system to gather information on how busy their facilities are, they can show residents how active the gym or pool is at different time periods so they can choose a quieter time to go.

Utilising smart space buildings for wellbeing involves the business optimising all internal spaces to create an environment that enhances staff’s physical and mental health. The social distancing enforced due to COVID means that staff will look to find uncrowded areas that provide them with the necessary space to ease any concerns or anxiety about being in close proximity to others. Smart technology can enable you to optimise space for this purpose by monitoring occupancy within your building and help you implement social distancing by putting capacity limits to specific spaces.

Adopting technology that allows you to provide the correct lighting and ventilation is one way businesses can help satisfy the employee experience. Employees considering a return to the office post-COVID will be keen to see the steps you've taken to ensure their safety and wellbeing. Primary concerns will be around touchpoints, i.e., have you introduced automated lighting to remove the necessity for lightswitches? Staff will also want to know what has been done to improve the quality and cleanliness of the air in the building.

Another way is through adjusting your cleaning schedule to be smarter. Research shows a link between staff morale and unclean toilets, and monitoring usage of these facilities means you can carry out cleaning when it’s required. This improves hygiene standards for your staff by setting the schedule to correspond with how many times it is being used rather than just at fixed regular intervals – something that is likely to be demanded by workers in the aftermath of the pandemic.

As a facility or property manager, finding out how your building is being utilised by staff can help you make sure it runs more efficiently for your business and its staff.

Using systems that produce real-time data can help you achieve this by monitoring the availability of facilities such as hot desk stations and meeting rooms to increase productivity. 

The data can save staff time by making it easier to find an available area to use. For example, it can tell you if a meeting room has been booked, but that the attendees are a no-show, enabling the meeting room to be automatically released. 

Optimal configuration of a meeting room or conference room’s capacity can also be achieved by using data that measures if a meeting room is being used by groups of appropriate size. For example, if a 10 person conference room is only used by groups of four or less, then it is not being used efficiently and indicates that it would serve the business better if it were repurposed into two smaller meeting rooms for 4 to 6 people.