There’s so much change happening in today’s workplace—rapidly evolving expectations of modern workers, the workspace becoming a competitive differentiator, and the rise of workplace tech. While these dynamics impact how today’s workplaces are managed, ultimately the majority of corporate real estate teams still report into the CFO—so any new investment to address these challenges must drive positive, quantifiable business results. Better workplace management matters because there are big dollars at stake.
Here at Comfy, we believe that an “experience first” approach to workplace management is a critical way to drive bottom-line value. We start with the employee experience first—empowering employees to 1) connect, 2) control, and 3) communicate with the people and systems around their office.
This approach improves employee satisfaction, productivity, and their overall workplace experience—while simultaneously fueling a rich set of data to inform workplace managers’ business decisions in critical areas like space utilization and operational efficiency.
Let’s dig into this approach a bit more. To achieve a great workplace experience, we believe companies must provide the ability to:
1. Connect
The need: While employees have much more choice in terms of where and when they work, variability in their work environment makes it much more difficult to consistently find what they need. It’s more important than ever to help people feel a sense of connection to their workplaces, their colleagues, and their company.
How we address it: Comfy’s easy-to-use workplace app allows employees to find available rooms, find amenities nearby, or find their colleagues. Meanwhile, workplace teams are able to increase space utilization, promote amenities, and schedule services more effectively by leveraging Comfy as a one-stop-shop for employee info.
2. Control
The need: Employees are often hindered from doing their best work due to a variety of workplace frictions. The more ability employees have to adjust their physical environment and personalize it to their preferences, the more comfortable and productive they’ll be.
How we address it: Comfy allows employees to control temperature, adjust lighting, book meeting rooms and more, while workplace professionals are able to save time by eliminating hot/cold calls, and rely on the app’s machine learning to increase energy savings.
3. Communicate
The need: Employees want a straightforward way to communicate about their experience and workplace needs. And this should be as easy as providing feedback through some of our favorite consumer apps, like Yelp or Uber. People feel much more engaged and invested in their workplace when they feel that the organization is aware of and responding to their needs.
How we address it: Comfy allows employees to submit work requests, while workplace teams get real-time, location-based feedback from employees, are able to identify and prioritize workplace issues, and promote workplace events and programs.
As employees use Comfy over time, mechanisms like machine learning and personalization algorithms help predict and automate employee preferences, driving more satisfaction, productivity and a better overall employee experience. The more employees use the app, the better their workplace experience gets, and the greater the impact to a company’s bottom line.
We believe putting people and their experience first creates a positive win-win cycle of employee and business value improvement.
If you’d like to learn more about our philosophy and how it plays out in a modern workplace, check out our on-demand webinar, “Experience First: A New Way to Solve Today’s Workplace Challenges.”
