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 National Grid, for example. They used technology in the form of occupancy sensors to make their buildings smart and optimize their space utilization. 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.

Utilizing 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-19 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. Using smart technology, such as desk monitoring sensors, can enable employees to find a hot desk that is free and has been recently cleaned, whilst ceiling occupancy sensors allow you to optimise space 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-lockdown 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. By using sensors you provide peace of mind for staff, such as alerting cleaning staff when meeting rooms or hot desks become free so they can disinfect the spaces before their next use. Not only this, but 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. By integrating this data with your existing calendar tools, it can tell you if a meeting room has been booked, but even more importantly, it will automatically release the meeting room if the attendees are a no-show.  

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. 

Not only does this help meeting rooms be used more efficiently, but it also helps employees to be more productive. With 4 in 10 office workers spending around 60 minutes every week searching for available conference rooms, you can dramatically improve the efficiency and wellbeing of your staff and break the misconception that there’s never enough meeting rooms.

The systems that can be used to help make a building smart come in a range of different solutions. These solutions can differ by the way the technology collects data, the amount of data it can provide, or the function it provides.

The way a smart building solution collects data is down to the function it will serve. For example, if the system is to enhance space utilisation, then solutions that use occupancy sensor technology to count people, monitor desk or meeting room utilisation will be best suited as they provide the data that can give insight on how to aid this requirement. 

And even once you have decided on the type of smart building solution you need, there are often other considerations that you need to think about. For example, when choosing a workplace occupancy sensor you will need to make considerations based on aspects such as how the technology is powered, if it can integrate with other systems and the connection type it requires. There are also differences in the type of detection technology it uses, such as passive infrared, ultrasonic or image recognition. Each comes with limitations and advantages in terms of the amount of data it can provide and the anonymity it keeps.

There are numerous companies around the world providing smart building services and solutions. These range from integrated workplace management systems (IWMS), to building automation and building management systems (BMS) and to solutions developed to solve or overcome specific problems.

True Occupancy is one of these specific solutions. Understanding how occupants of a building are actually using it is vitally important if you want to increase its efficiency and reduce running costs whilst also improving the occupants experience.

Our occupancy analytics solution makes your building smart and can help you revolutionise the way your business is run. Our solution uses advanced people counting technology to provide you with accurate data and reports on the utilisation of different buildings, floors, areas or individual rooms. Accurate occupancy data from our solution can bring further benefits as it can be integrated into other systems, enabling automatic control - for example lighting and HVAC systems.