Over 100 speakers, more than 30 case studies, and interesting panel discussions in several rooms were held in April at the Connect Conference organized by the Blue Colibri team.
More than 700 participants from the field of marketing, communication, HR, and business development visited the event to connect with each other, network, and develop digitally.
Workforce shortages and economic crises have pointed out that digital transformation is crucial to organizational development. Connect’s leading topics were digital transformation, internal communication, and the corporate culture of SME sector. Particularly as these businesses are often competing for the same employees as large companies.
The Blue Colibri team gave us the opportunity to participate in one of the most exciting panel discussions of the digital transformation session, where Réka Nagy, Head of Strategy at Invensol discussed digital solutions for hybrid working in detail, with Zsolt Somogyi (Parkl) and Lipót Nun (SMP Solutions) moderated by Zoltán Kalmár.
All the participants agreed with the fact, that digital transformation is the key to increasing income, optimizing costs, improving efficiency, space & asset utilization, workplace experience, and reaching sustainability goals. The way how to do the process might be different in each organization.
WORKPLACE TRENDS AFTER CRISIS
The employees’ expectations have changed a lot in the past couple of years which forced the companies to change their working conditions, corporate culture, and consider digital development.
Several HR challenges have been raised: how to retain employee loyalty, attract different generations, and provide an engaging workplace experience while cutting utility costs.
Applicants were seeking a modern, innovative workspace, and employer branding needed to meet these requirements.
During the Covid crisis, the home office became incredibly popular therefore HR needed to organize special campaigns, and offer flexible working conditions to motivate employees to return to the office. Although there are some situations when most of the employees are present in the office, and they need to find a proper place to work. Creating collaboration zones and providing mobile seats meant a great option.
Furthermore, many people cancelled their lease agreement and moved to the countryside, and visit the office a maximum of 1-2 times per week. Meanwhile, another trend was identified (so-called brownout): the increased number of home office days had a negative effect on the work-life balance, therefore people were seeking opportunities for social events, networking, and connecting to others.
TRANSFORMATION OF SPACE UTILIZATION
As fewer people visited the office on a daily basis, the utilization of office space decreased significantly. In a hybrid workplace, most of the workstations can be flexibly booked, and just a few dedicated seats are available. Hot desking and defining activity-based collaboration zones are also popular trends.
Same trend appears regarding the parking lots: the employees are sharing the space on those days when they commute to the office. By offering spaces for rent to external users, they could easily improve the utilization of the free spaces. The problem with this alternative usage is the security issues, letting unauthorized people into the building has some concern.
There are great examples of car sharing as part of the cafeteria system or charging fees only for private car users in order to motivate people for preferring sustainable mobility options.
DATA-DRIVEN OFFICE MANAGEMENT
As the number one goal is to improve office utilization implementing digital solutions is a must.
A modern, sustainable organization applies several digital tools to gather data, analyze them and optimize business processes accordingly: motion sensors, heatmap, access control systems with face recognition, integrated BMS system…endless technological tools available on the market.
Any kind of corporate assets, spaces, employees, and processes can be measured easily with a professional office management solution e.g.: office space and meeting room utilization, occupancy of normal and electric vehicle parking lots, and employee productivity at the office and at home, etc.
However, there are certain departments like software development where measuring productivity is particularly difficult.
FUTURE EXPECTATIONS
All of the participants agreed that sharing infrastructure (IT, office, meeting room, parking place, fleet, smart lockers) could be a cost-efficient, long-term solution for organizations. Although it’s advised to inform the landlord as well about possible office transformation.
There are great examples of dynamic space sharing in the USA (Lufthansa, Masel) and in the Netherlands, but currently on the Hungarian market the occupants still don’t feel comfortable with this option.
All in all, we believe that not every company needs to maintain their own private office space. Invensol could provide guidance on how to transform the current workspace in order to meet the actual requirements and run an innovative space efficiently.
The Connect Conference provided a perfect opportunity for networking and exchange of experiences with other professionals from the sector. This event was a great start to discussing the way of transformation and supporting each other on this journey.
Thanks for inviting us and let’s meet at the next event!
