In our recent webcast, Eddy Wagoner, CIO JLL, showed that ‘future fit’ organizations outpace their peers in adopting technology in the workplace and demonstrated the strong correlation between technology adoption and market outperformance.
Prior to COVID-19, JLL surveyed a little over 600 companies about what they were focused on and their priorities for 2020. In that survey, it revealed a shifting in priorities for the real estate industry. Investing in corporate real estate technology jumped from being a lower priority to being the top priority over the next three years.
Since the survey results pre-dated the COVID-19 pandemic, we wanted to check our audience’s sentiment on data analytics. We polled webinar attendees with the question, “How likely it is that organizations will improve data gathering and analytics on workplace use?” We were struck by the overwhelmingly affirmative response, some 82% of respondents found it very likely (43%) or highly likely (39%), which boldly signals that CRE technology investment will only accelerate post-pandemic.
The Advantages of Being a Data-Driven Organization
It’s well known (as evidenced in reports from all of the major strategy consultancies) that data-driven organizations are increasing their competitive advantage over less-informed organizations. The McKinsey Global Institute has found, for example, that data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, 6 times as likely to retain customers, and 19 times as likely to be profitable as a result.
With the major shifts happening across all industries due to COVID-19, having the right CRE technologies in place should remain a top priority now more than ever. Technology empowers organizations with the flexibility that’s crucial to navigating these major changes.
“If I told you in January that your entire workforce was going to go remote and that you were going to close your offices, people would have thought I was crazy. I would’ve thought I was crazy. Now we’ve proven that we need to be 100% flexible.”
-Eddy Wagoner, CIO JLL Technologies
Prudent CFOs will seek to curtail expenses in difficult times, however, adopting technology in the workplace is a proven way to reduce costs, increase efficiencies, ensure employee and customer satisfaction and retention, and prepare for the future.
While organizations may be looking to reduce short- and long-term obligations, a time of disruptive change such as this is the ideal moment to make investments that prepare the organization to be ‘future fit.’ The challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how to emerge from it, may be just the incentive you need to commit to data analytics to identify opportunities, enable better management, and inform and support key FM and CRE decisions.
Workplace Analytics Solutions Can Help You To:
- Leverage data for use- or event-based vs. programmed cleaning
- Right-size workstations and conference rooms for physical distancing
- Quantify occupant density and triggering alerts when this exceeds a threshold
- Quantify employee mobility for agile workspaces and desk sharing initiatives
- Enable targeted contamination follow-up in affected areas and employees.
Leading solutions such as the FM:Systems portfolio of facilities management products can help organizations better prepare for a return to the workplace in the coming months. With these solutions, organizations can improve workplace effectiveness, and become future fit, by leveraging data analytics and IoT technologies that make the collection and tracking of space utilization data easier, more automated, and more accurate than ever before.
Written by Michael Gresty, VP of Workplace Analytics at FM:Systems. Michael has over 25 years of experience advising Fortune 500 companies on leveraging workplace data to create an efficient, productive organization.
