Integrated data: The key success factor for employee-centric facility management

When it comes to creating a workplace that’s designed to meet your employees’ every need, integrated data insights are key.

With a detailed overview of the hard and soft Facility Management (FM) assets that your employees interact with day to day, you can optimize and tailor these to ensure employee satisfaction. With a system that stores all your employees’ HR, IT, Legal, and Finance data in one central, secure hub, you’ll be able to make onboarding smoother than ever. And with accurate insights into how your employees utilize your full range of FM assets, you’ll be able to design effective incentivization programs. These are often instrumental in building motivation, productivity, and a working environment where employees stay naturally mindful of their actions.

We’ll dive into this handful of examples below. But bear in mind that they represent just a fraction of what integrated data can do for employee-centric FM!

Integrating soft and hard FM data to optimize your employee experience

Data insights are the only way you can accurately map, assess, and optimize the hard FM assets that your employees experience day to day. They might not think twice about these commonplace elements, from heating and air conditioning to security systems, light fittings, and desks. Yet the smallest glitch in any of those hard assets has the potential to cause them disruption, discomfort, and frustration.

But what if you could track asset health to action pre-emptive repairs? Or only turn on the heating in the parts of the building where meeting rooms and workspaces had been reserved? You’d be primed to optimize hard service delivery — not just for employee satisfaction, but also for cost-effectiveness and environmental responsibility.

For employee-centric FM, focus on data

Data is also key to understanding what your employees need from your soft FM services. These are the front of house aspects that they do consciously interact with on a daily basis, from catering to parking and IT devices.

The ability to request refreshments when and where they need them, reserve parking spaces flexibly, and get a rapid laptop replacement via one user-friendly interface would transform your employee experience. With an Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS) that covers both hard and soft aspects, you’d be able to achieve all this. In this article you can read more about hard and soft services within an IWMS.

Housing information about all your soft and hard services, your IWMS would provide your employees with a central hub to request amenities or repairs. The same central hub would allow you to track those deliveries and maintenance tasks, from initiation to completion.

Do make sure, though, that you select an IWMS that incorporates both hard and soft aspects, as many solutions on the market tend to focus on just one or the other. Have a look at ASK James for instance. This application is running on ServiceNow and incorporates hard and soft services perfectly. 

Streamline onboarding with system integration

With a one-stop location for all your employees’ key data, you’d be able to simply press a button that says ‘Onboard’ and watch the process smoothly unfold.

If someone joins your organization as a manager, for example, they might need to be issued a particular standard of company phone and laptop. Now, if you could integrate the HR data about that new employee with your IT management system, you could make sure the right hardware with the right licenses, programs, and security permissions for their role was waiting on their desk for them.

Extend that integration to your parking and security systems, and you can make sure your barriers automatically rise when they recognize the number plate of that new manager’s company car. Add in an integration with your finance system, and you can facilitate automating and verifying their mileage expense claims. You could simultaneously log this data for your corporate sustainability reporting, too.

Incentivize employees with tailored perks

With integrated hard and soft data insights from across your workplace, you’re set up to effectively reward employees for positive, productive actions — and sanction them for the reverse.

Let’s take flexible workspace reservations as an example. The theory is ideal: Employees are able to combine working from home or in the office as they choose, simply reserving a desk via your intuitive, user-friendly IWMS portal.

But what happens if someone reserves a desk, then decides not to come into the office and forgets to cancel it? It stands empty, when another employee could have been using it. Or what if an employee turns up at the office without having reserved a desk? That would at a minimum lead to awkwardness and disruption. On the more serious side, it could cause overcrowding that breaches health and safety guidelines.

Guide employee behavior with your IWMS

For the scenario above, incentivizing your employees to consistently and accurately utilize your IWMS booking system is key. If an employee has correctly booked, changed, and canceled their reservations for a month, your IWMS would be able to log this in a data-driven praise system. The data could then be pulled up as part of regular employee reviews, or to assign company perks or bonuses.

If, however, the employee was consistently unpredictable in reserving a desk, they might receive a warning via your IWMS. Enough warnings would result in a sanction, which could be tailored to fit the situation in your workplace. For example, the employee might not be permitted to book one of the most popular and convenient parking spaces for a few weeks.

Of course, employees would always have the opportunity to cancel sanctions if they’d accidentally incurred them due to a legitimate reason. For example, if they were late for a meeting room booking because of travel disruption, or similar unforeseen circumstances.

Integrate to facilitate the everyday, and enhance to attract top talent

To build a workplace that revolves around your employees’ needs, you can’t do without integrated data. In today’s competitive hiring marketplace, employee experience is what can ultimately persuade a candidate — and word of mouth from your current staff counts for a lot.

For a central, secure FM hub that sees your employees smoothly from A to Z, opt for an IWMS that lets you integrate data across your assets, departments, and corporate strategies.

Curious about what an IWMS could do for your workplace? Our team will be happy to provide you with more information.

Most of it you can already find out for yourself in the free Buyer Guide we created: The ultimate guide to selecting your Integrated Workplace Management System. Download it for free.