If a constant shuffling of desks in your workplace seems like it’s become the new norm, you’re not alone. In 2017, clients of Gensler’s space and occupancy management platform, Wisp, experienced a 49 percent churn rate: half of all occupants moved desks at least once last year. That’s a lot of movement for facilities teams to keep up with. Whether it is due to space needs or efforts to improve performance, a by-product of churn is its impact on data integrity within workplace management systems.
“Data is stale in a week, that’s how it goes in space planning: It needs to be immediate.”
—Vice President of Corporate Real Estate, Banking and Financial Services Firm”
At a time when access to big data is the keystone to workplace strategy, we’re hearing that accessing up-to-date metrics about space usage is a challenge for corporate real estate executives. Instilling and maintaining data governance of space management systems remains an obstacle for most organizations, but especially for large organizations with multi-faceted teams. With consideration and strategy though, a reliable workflow can be implemented.
Graphic © Gensler
Having guided many clients through the implementation of Wisp, we’ve learned what is needed for achieving data integrity in space and occupancy management systems. Whether a workplace portfolio is 3,000- or 30-million-square-feet, these six steps can be right-sized for any organization, resulting in accurate and insightful data:
- Understand: Don’t fix something that isn’t broken. Start this process as a fact-finding investigation to understand the current process. Recognize what’s working well and what could be improved. Identify people who are involved in each step of the process and the information that is being transferred. I like to grab a pen and paper and physically map this out with my clients.
- Define: Once the current process is mapped, define the new process by talking through best practices, key roles and responsibilities. There are typically two or three key roles that are needed in the workflow, depending on the organization:
- Requester: starts the process by identifying a need.
- Approver: optional role with ability to approve or deny the request.
- Completer: oversees the governance of processes and the data integrity.
- Streamline: This is all about working smarter, not harder. Eliminate redundancies by streamlining processes for consistency. Avoid manual spreadsheets and email. Reduce sources for move requests and minimize duplicate data entry. Encourage a proactive approach by empowering the “Requesters” to be part of a systematic process.