London Kemp, Global Head of Corporate Real Estate, Netflix
TRANSFORMING THE WORKSPACE AND THE WORKFLOWS
“Did you leverage the change climate of a workplace transformation project and integrate any digital transformation objectives into the scope of your project?”
The change climate associated with a workplace transformation project represents a rare opportunity to accomplish digital transformation objectives as well. By enhancing the technology that your colleagues use at the workplace, you can improve the employee experience, support more effective collaboration, and create efficient workflows. Data collection and analysis can drive especially powerful insights that greatly optimize the use of physical workspaces, taking an organization to an entirely new level of operational and creative excellence.
“We built out a tool internally using our engineers that allowed us to see where people sat, whom they reported to, and what business line they were in within the company.”
We did this at a prior company I was with: Ingram Micro in Orange County, California. We were in a multitenant environment that was undergoing external construction. At the same time, we were trying to work through a number of moves, adds, and changes due to a reorganization.
In this environment, it was difficult for people coming from other international and domestic offices to find their colleagues. Because we were also frequently moving people within these offices, it became apparent that we needed some type of digital tool that would track the floor plan changes, ideally down to head count. Using our engineers, we built out a tool internally that allowed us to see where people sat, whom they reported to, and what business line they were in within the company.
Once we launched this tool, you could go to any office, and then if you wanted to meet with Derek in the engineering team, for example, you would easily be able to find out that he’s on the fourth floor sitting in the third seat to the left. This really changed engagement with our employees, and it made it easy for us to automatically map out any new changes based on a departmental reorganization instead of having to perform a manual pull or just pulling a CAD file each time.
This tool eased the process and made it run more efficiently. It also improved communication between other teams and between other offices when we had visitors.
This is an excerpt from 8 Experts on Workplace Transformation. The eBook was generously sponsored by Iron Mountain.
