Nadir Ali, CEO of Inpixon
The challenges facing the corporate real estate sector today are plentiful and varied, due in large part to the impact of COVID-19 on the world of work. While many organizations are either already heading back into the office or are planning for a September return to work, many have opted to embrace hybridized working formats and won’t require their employees to be on site every day moving forward. Work-from-home has well and truly transformed into work-from-anywhere, and the nature of engagement with offices and corporate workplaces is drastically altered. Physical offices have become collaboration zones, rather than a place to send emails, and, in light of public health and safety changes, the often-maligned open floorplan is being retrofitted with partitions and cubicle walls.
As workplaces evolve physically and our physical presence in them is altered, commercial developers, owners and managers would be wise to take heed. Now is the time to redefine the way commercial buildings operate and the ways in which tenants interact with them. Today, the stakes for remaining stagnant are too high, as corporate real estate faces lower price-per-square-foot, higher vacancy rates and new competition. The traditional formula around price and location is no longer an adequate recipe for real estate success. It is now imperative that you provide an experience that your tenants will stay — and pay — for.
The question is now how one can make the necessary changes before it’s too late. The answer lies in leveraging indoor technologies to create tenant experiences that are so good, their employees will want to be on site, as well as a level of connectivity so great that they won’t need to be in the office every day in order to be productive. As a starting point, it is time for building owners and facilities teams to reevaluate their tenant experiences and assess where meaningful improvements can be made.
The tenant experience is essentially the ways tenants or employees working in a commercial building interact and engage with their workplace. It includes everything from building amenities to connectivity and community. Employees’ expectations for their employers are being passed along to the building owners and operators, and the duty now falls to them to provide a connected workplace that supports greater flexibility, enables third-party services and integrations and includes top notch amenities.
Improving tenant experiences may appear to be a somewhat esoteric goal. However, providing exceptional tenant experiences has been shown to lead to increased tenant retention, longer-term leases and higher occupancy rates at better per-square-foot pricing.
Commercial real estate professionals must ask themselves what kind of experiences they are building for their tenants and how they are differentiating from other office operators. With tenants’ teams becoming more dispersed, the previous allure of downtown locations is not enough to sustain higher rates, and many organizations now find themselves competing with smaller office spaces in a larger geographic catchment area. We may also very well find that the increase of hybrid working structures leads to a resurgence in varied flexible co-working locations. Considering what kind of experience your tenants have is ultimately integral to ensuring that you won’t lose tenants to more agile or affordable competitors by not satisfying their evolving needs.
A long-time driver of value has been in the building amenities. In 2021, the amenities that will secure your stability are not ping pong tables and fancy cafeterias. Instead of superfluous items and bottomless snacks and treats, when surveyed, many employees actually rank productivity tools at the top of their smart office wish list. Some of the most common amenity requests include touchless building entry, visitor management systems and conference room and desk reservation systems. This is where the power of location technology can mean the difference for corporate real estate organizations.
Employee apps that are location-aware and interoperable not only have the power to provide the aforementioned sought-after productivity tools and amenities, they have the power to redefine your entire workplace experience. From indoor navigation and facilities management to repair requests and reduced capacity management, indoor and location-based technology can play a key role in keeping employees safe and tenants ever more inclined to renew their leases.
Tenants and their employees live on their phones, so that is ultimately where you must meet them. The most straightforward way to improve experiences swiftly is to provide mobile applications that make it easy for tenants to manage and interact with their space. Mobile apps help tenant organizations to be productive and communicate within the space. Through a smart tenant app, employees can do everything from register their workspaces to manage office climate controls.
It is not enough to provide a generic app that is limited to sending out building alerts whenever monthly building inspections are happening. The most important element of any real estate strategy — location, location, location! — is just as true for these apps. Users must have access to maps of their office within the app and it must offer wayfinding, especially for those employees who are not on-site full time or who need help finding their newly-assigned workspace each day. The critical features to include are desk booking, office wayfinding, work order management and service requests and office news bulletins specific to the employee’s building.
Location-awareness supports use cases that help to make your commercial properties smarter, including permission-based map views for different user types to support facilities management and security, as well as the experiential component. Layer-based indoor maps are integral to the success of an office app. Whether you’re building a solution in-house to offer to clients or looking for an employee app provider to partner with, it’s important to account for an app’s interoperability with dynamic maps. Location awareness is also paramount to delivering the use cases that will help reassure teams upon their return to the office. Without an understanding of location and the ways people are interacting with their office environments, your building cannot support the measures that are needed to keep people feeling safe and confident and organizations compliant.
As we transition into the new world of work, everything from our office layouts and furniture to where we spend our working days is changing dramatically. Real estate companies would be wise to start implementing location-aware employee apps to improve their tenant experiences before they lose their leases to the competitors who opted to embrace technology. By supporting the evolving needs of employees and tenants and providing access to community-building tools and amenities, real estate organizations can come out ahead over the course of this year and not get stuck in a price war.
As many companies are scheduling their return-to-work time-lines with a September deadline, now is the time to partner with the organizations who can help you build and execute a tech-enabled tenant strategy.
Nadir Ali is CEO of Inpixon, an indoor intelligence company. Inpixon supplies mapping and location-enabled workplace experience solutions to the corporate real estate market.
