Five key elements that will transform the future smart office

Global technology company Siemens Building Technologies has partnered with WORKTECH Academy to launch a new report outlining the emerging landscape of the future smart office.

The white paper, entitled The Future of the Smart Office: giving your building the competitive edge, sets out to show how digitalisation is transforming work and workplace, paving the way for a new era of smart offices.

The research looks at how the smart office can ultimately help to attract and retain talent, create the right conditions for innovation and improve levels of productivity, identified as the three major workplace challenges for organisations.

But the report is careful not to champion smart technologies as a direct solution to address these three essential human challenges.

‘Interaction with people in an entirely different type of building…’

Instead it argues: ‘Technology is unlikely to achieve these goals all on its own. Transformational change of this order has the best opportunity to be realised through the interaction of people with an entirely different type of office building.’

A more holistic, people-centred approach is presented as necessary to enable all stakeholders in the process – building owners and investors, facility managers and operators, tenants and occupiers, and architects and planners – to achieve their particular goals.

This approach comprises five key elements enabled by smart technologies: better experience, greater wellbeing, more connectivity, increased agility, and improved sustainability.

The report outlines a series of scenarios to describe these five elements and concludes with Siemens’ commitment to remaining at the forefront of smart office building technologies by taking a user-centric approach to the workplace.