– Raj Krishnamurthy, Freespace
Financial institutions are attempting to understand the short, medium and long-term challenges the pandemic has had on the interconnected financial system and global economies. It’s hard to ignore the major role it has in contributing to GDP in the UK. According to a House of Commons briefing paper in July 2019, financial services contributed £132bn or 6.9% of total UK economic output at the end of 2018 and the UK financial services sector was the seventh largest in the OECD at that time. There were also 1.1 million financial services jobs in the UK, 3.1% of all jobs at that time.
The industry also has a pressing concern on its doorstep – the issue of surplus commercial real estate and the wellbeing of its workforce. The latest CBI/PwC financial services survey found 74% of companies have been revising their office requirements and 88% of the financial services firms polled said the pandemic had resulted in a greater shift towards remote working.
Trends such as flexible start and finish times, a shake up to the traditional five-day working week and refurbished headquarters to allow for social distancing are now commonplace across the financial services sector. The eventual ‘return to work’ for this crucial sector is of national importance and workplace technology can play a central role in supporting this. For example, the Freespace booking app has been designed to help employees plan their day into work. Enabling the reservation of a clean, socially distanced desk for employees to use on their days at work, the app also helps manage communications and questionnaires to ensure employee wellbeing. Futhermore, it helps users to coordinate their visits into work with an inner circle of colleagues ensuring they are there together on the same days and find safe spaces in the vicinity of each other easily. The app, which integrates with smart tags on the desks, also becomes a key tool in office based contract tracing.
Two further strategies are also proving popular to reduce the impact on business operations. The ‘split group’ solution separates employees into different weekly groups in the event that one group becomes infected. This supports business continuity by isolating the group that has been infected at home until the risk of infection passes. Meanwhile, the other group continues to work from the office.
Alternatively, the ‘split desk’ strategy enables the alternating usage of desks between days, creating maximum usage of the space overall and more time for cleaning teams to react to the demand. Our SPOT micro-location service can help demarcate a space to achieve this outcome digitally. This is a critical time and organisations must do a lot of thinking when it comes to making their workplaces as safe and productive as possible.
A large professional services firm deployed our social distancing solution to support the phased reopening of its offices across the UK. This features a combination of sensors and digital systems designed to help identify and communicate which available spaces are safe for employees to use. To support its ‘split desk’ strategy, a digital tagging system using colour-coded SPOT tags on each desk physically identifies which workstations can be used on each day of the week. These align with colour-coded sensor screens that depict office layouts and display coloured dots which indicate where employees can sit depending on the day of the week. Only permitted desks, meeting rooms, phone booths, floors and other work zones will be displayed on the digital screens, ensuring employees do not accidentally access restricted areas.
Turning to technology
Employers will keep workplaces hygienic and allay people’s fears if they communicate the right information, at the right time and to the right level of detail—and the most effective way to do this is by providing employees with mobile apps and installing digital signage throughout the workplace. While there will always a place for static posters, digital platforms allow for the instant and dynamic delivery of messages at the exact point they need to be consumed.
Displaying live data on socially distanced spaces to use, cleaned space availability and cleaning regime updates will help to guide staff and reduce cross-contamination. Facilities teams can also use the technology to deliver methodical cleaning practices and reassure occupants by highlighting the preventative infection control measures that they are undertaking.
Technology has the ability to sense and learn when and where spaces are in use. This enables an organisation to keep its premises clean and compliant. Occupancy-based data can also keep heads of HR, facilities management (FM) and commercial real estate (CRE) abreast of individual and collective behaviours, allowing them to make educated decisions on optimising real estate. To evidence the cleaning history of a desk so employees know when it was last used and cleaned ahead of their arrival. To help staff plan their day at work so that they are assigned a safe work space and know who among their colleagues are working in the office on that day.
The sudden change brought about by COVID-19 has highlighted several misconceptions about the workplace. Office-based workers, even those who were previously sceptical, will now accept that technology is going to play a key part in how the workplace experience is delivered. Employers across the financial services space will still need to reassure their teams that their working environment is going to be safe with the goal of being equally productive as it was prior to the pandemic.
