If you’re a manager or employee at a utilities company, you know full well the challenges that come with adopting hybrid work. As your team grows and adapts, you are tasked with managing your office space effectively, so that it’s both functional and enjoyable for your employees.
But making the best use of your space is easier said than done. People are unpredictable, and their use of your workspaces doesn’t follow a simple set of rules. With so much complexity, how do you make sure you’re on top of your management of hybrid work?
In this article, we’ll look at some of the most common challenges utilities companies face in managing their spaces and explore how space management software can help you optimize your use of physical space.
1. Do Hybrid Right
The transition to hybrid work can seem like an uphill battle at the best of times.
As a utilities company with employees spending their time between home and the office, there are so many things you might feel you need to get on top of: having a system for scheduling and booking rooms and desks, managing your evolving teams and spaces, encouraging use of your office, and finally just knowing if it’s all working or not!
The pile of tasks keeps getting bigger and you don’t know where to turn. Is there someone or something out there that can help provide clarity and simplicity?
The Solution
Space management tools are designed to organize people and spaces efficiently and remove all of the headaches associated with hybrid work. With scheduling software, insights, software integrations, and office neighborhood planning, the best hybrid work tools are designed to make going into the office an enjoyable experience — where everyone is on the same page. Hybrid work can get messy when it’s left to the people themselves, but when it’s managed properly with a dedicated tool, it can make a huge difference to the health and success of your business.
2. Use Your Space Effectively
As a utilities company, you may well be feeling like you simply don’t use your space effectively enough. Though you may have implemented some basic infrastructure for desk booking or room scheduling, you are still struggling to connect the dots and make sure that every inch of your office serves a purpose — and keeps your employees both focused and engaged.
Certain desks or meeting rooms might be neglected, while others are constantly in demand. This uneven distribution ultimately leads to wasted resources (powering parts of the office that never get used!) and frustration among employees, who may find it difficult to access the spaces they need when they need them.
The Solution
Integrating a space management tool into your workflow will instantly help you become more efficient with your use of the office. The best tools come equipped with data and analytics that provide valuable insights into space utilization patterns. By seeing how different spaces are used throughout the day, week, or month, managers can identify trends and make informed decisions that benefit everyone involved. This could mean “switching off” certain areas when not in use to save on energy bills or reorganizing desks to distribute workers more efficiently.
3. Reduce Real Estate Costs
In today’s economic climate, your utilities company is most likely on the lookout for ways to get leaner as a business and cut down unnecessary costs. Your attention may well be turning towards one of your biggest overheads — your office lease.
But with your employees spread between home and the office, it can be hard to see exactly how your office space is being used — and therefore what action you can take to downsize and reduce your real estate bill. It seems like a big step to break your lease when you don’t know what size office your company actually needs!
The Solution
To address this challenge, utilities companies can implement desk booking management tools. Desk booking tools give you a clear understanding of the actual use of your office space and help you make decisions about how you manage your space. By implementing a desk hoteling system, you remove the need for dedicated desk space and instead gain a clearer picture into how many desks your office floor actually needs. Working with space management software ultimately empowers utilities companies to optimize their space usage and make crucial decisions on where and how to downsize.
4. Designate Office Neighborhoods
It’s likely that your utilities company is also looking for ways to get smarter about how office zones are organized for a layout that encourages collaboration and cohesion.
Sometimes hot-desking can come with the unfortunate side effect that team members are strewn across different areas of the office floor, unable to work with each other as effectively as before.
While you may be preparing to implement desk and room booking software to get more flexible about how you work, you don’t want this to come at the expense of team cohesion and productivity.
The Solution
Implementing a space management tool that supports designated neighborhoods and permissions can help utilities companies manage your spaces efficiently. Space management tools allow administrators to assign specific neighborhoods (groups of desks) to particular teams and set permissions to control who can book or access these spaces. This ensures that teams can go about hybrid work flexibly without losing one crucial aspect of their work: collaboration.
5. Robust Security and Privacy
In a time where privacy concerns are high of mind, ensuring the security and privacy of your employees’ data is another major challenge — and not one that should be ignored.
Utilities companies are tasked with protecting sensitive information related to their employees and ensuring any new tools uphold the best security standards available.
The Solution
Make sure your chosen space management software comes with next-gen security infrastructure and measures. It should be SOC 2 compliant, maintain Cyber Essentials certification, and data should be encrypted both in-transit and at rest. Joining forces with a space management tool that upholds the highest data and privacy standards will provide peace of mind when integrating a new tool into your utilities company workflow.
Kadence: The Intelligent Space Management Tool for Utilities Companies
The best space management tools don’t just provide a neat solution to room and desk booking.
Tools like Kadence have a track record in going above and beyond to ensure that utilities companies gets hybrid right, offering a comprehensive space management solution tailored to all kinds of challenges.
Our platform leverages AI-driven desk booking and flexible scheduling, data analytics, powerful integrations, and robust security measures to organize your people and spaces and get the most out of hybrid work.
Trust Kadence to provide the tools you need to create a seamless, efficient, and secure environment for your employees.
