This new reality will be challenging, with the need to solve many issues like social distancing, people density in offices, access & visit control, contactless management, communication and emotional support.

The office and open spaces as we know them might be gone, but useful solutions exist for the short, mid and long term challenges of the post covid-19 offices. And as always technology can help.

Short-term: solving the way back equation

A secure environment, where processes will help maintain social distance, prevent excess interactions between people while providing a productive and healthy spot for everyone. How do we fix this logistic headache?

Basically, this means new ways to manage space density and better control who is coming in, when and how.

What should be done:

– Limit people in spaces, to guarantee adequate social distancing
– Offer alternatives to home office, helping people manage better their work/life balance, and access proper work environments (who’s really willing to work from the couch more than a few hours?)
– Better communicate with teams, about health protocols, last news, etc.
– Avoid, or streamline external visits, to reduce interactions
– Offer emotional support to individuals and teams. Addressing stress caused by the context (workload, infrastructure and personal context) is key.
– Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning.

How to make it happen?

Not everything can be done in the short term. Changes involving infrastructures will need several months to be deployed. Meanwhile, quick wins can be achieved through:

– Appointing a Health Manager, a person in charge of coordinating the new initiatives taking place
– Increase cleaning activity in the space, to prevent any spread of the virus.
– A booking system to limit daily occupation in the office
– The same booking system can spread access to the building over time, to lower the “rush hour effect”
– The same flexible booking system would allow for rotation of employees between on site and remote working, easily managing offer of flex desks and demand.
– Access to coworkings near home, as alternative to “couchworking” and to prevent unnecessary commute.
– Offering online events, addressing key “hot” topics, from remote work trainings to managing emotional stress
– Implement technology to support your actions, when it does not require complex integrations: indoor mapping and digital signage to help getting the most of the space and services supporting healthy initiatives, for example.

Long-term: toward a new way to work

In the mid to long term, we bet flexibility and remote working will be permanent.
Most companies will reduced their rented square meters and accomodate with rotation of use and telework. Spaces can adapt and offer solutions that will ease these new habits while automating operations.
For companies and headquarters, it’s an opportunity to boost happiness at work and productivity, incurring less fixed cost for office rent while simplifying the management of all services, from parkings to catering.

Further technical integrations like smart doors for contactless access, connected lockers for automatic deliveries and other tech improvements will become the norm.
New furnitures and new air conditioning system will also be needed.

Several network of offices are moving toward these directions, lowering density, improving communication and personal flows within their installations.
The future is brighter that we can think yet, but it’ll get time and efforts to get there.
Luckily, Technology solutions like Daysk can help smoothen the way to the new normal.

About Daysk:
Daysk is transforming the way people work by making office buildings more connected.

We offer a turn-key software solution to help Real Estate investors, innovation hubs and corporates better manage their offices and service offering.

Our simple SaaS platform connects all tenant-facing technologies and amenities for office buildings, creating vivid communities, boosting space operations and fostering more business opportunities, while helping resolve the post covid-19 challenges listed above.

Interested?

– Download our brochure with our covid-19 solutions here (english upon request)
– Get in touch ! [email protected]

With less than a year since launch, Barcelona Health Hub (BHH) is already recognized as a key player within the digital health industry.
Their main vision was to build a thriving ecosystem of start-ups and corporates located in the emblematic modernist Recinte San Pau.

When it launched, fostering more connections between it members and simplifying its daily operations was really at top of mind topics to focus on in order to make the HUB grow.

And now that the HUB has launched and more members are coming in, it’s even more important to have automated all the core processes between room bookings, members’ networking and information flow.

EASY SETUP, SCALABLE SOLUTION

What BHH asked Daysk first was to ” be able to forget about space management”: deploy a tool that would let all members of the HUB be autonomous with their bookings, freeing the team from any time spent on room scheduling.
Next was the possibility to create specific privileges between members, to assigned dynamically consumption rights depending on their membership profiles.

With Daysk, the BHH team was able to setup the whole space booking process and privileges in a few clicks, saving hours of work from day one.
Plus, the platform allowed for additional booking coming from Daysk marketplace, adding new revenues, activities and networking opportunities onsite.

LOOKING FORWARD FOR A SMART FUTURE

Barcelona Health Hub is growing fast, worldwide and is already a consolidated network of nearly 100 companies. We are looking forward to strengthen our partnership to build more features which will help this vivid community to thrive.

With Daysk, the Barrabes Growth Space team was able to create a single tool that allowed them to easily manage their space and community of members seamlessly. They saved hundreds of hours, improved occupation rates and monetized better their space.

Now more professionals are coming in, making the Barrabes’ HQ a central piece in their strategy without compromising on their day to day activities.

FLEXIBLE, INTUITIVE AND SCALABLE SOLUTION

The Daysk solution puts your space in auto-pilot, freeing every manager from dumb operations such as confirming bookings, or managing room conflicts. Rooms availability is accessible in real time on mobile and desktop, while extra payments are managed internally.

Giorgia Corrias, Space Manager, confirms, “thanks to Daysk’s flexibility and scalability, we quickly got rid of any redundant tasks. I saved more than 25% of my time thanks to the solution. In addition to this, Daysk offers another key advantage: user and company managements, so everyone can be connected to our space.”

BENEFITS FROM DAY ONE, TWO, THREE…

Daysk SaaS solution offers a simple and scalable approach to any deployment, be it for a limited community of 100 people or a solid network of more than 3000 members. Our 3 steps approach helps you define the spaces to be shared (meeting rooms and desks units), the rules to be applied to certains groups of members.

Barrabes used this approach to launch in less than a week, once the definition was set, sending invitations to all key members in their community, who in return took care of creating their company profiles and inviting their own employees. The whole system was fully operational less than 7 days after the first account was created.

GOING FURTHER WITH DAYSK

Following this initial step, Barrabes is now extending its HUB ambition by joining forces with other corporates, connecting to other HUBs: another feature enabled by Daysk.

This operation is the first capital increase of the company, which aims to consolidate its leadership position in the Spanish market of services promoting the mobility of companies.

Since its launch at the beginning of 2017, Daysk has captured more than 200 spaces in its network and has already closed deals with several leading players in the sector, both coworking spaces of which Aticco, Cloud, or the network of Utopicus spaces of Colonial, as well as Business Centers and hotels.

According to Julien Palier, CEO and co-founder of Daysk:
“Daysk is at the forefront of two market shifts, between new ways of working that rethink the way companies operate and the PropTech revolution impacting the office sector. Our partners have experience in both the B2B business environment and the office real estate sector, so they bring a lot of value in the development of these services. This knowledge is key to the growth we will achieve in the coming months.”

For Paula Sancho, Director of Finaves:
“From Finaves we are very excited about our recent participation in Daysk. We think it is a project with a lot of vision, as it combines the best use of space in cities with greater flexibility in the workplace. Both of these trends are currently on the rise, and they are what IESE is committed to. In addition, the experience and knowledge of the two founders, Julien and Ben, in the technological field and in the growth of companies. As well as a group of co-investors formed by IESE alumni executives and Professor Mathieu Carenzo, who, with great enthusiasm, have supported the project from its first steps.

About Daysk

Daysk is a complete mobility solution for professionals, companies and freelancers.
With its Web platform and App, it offers quick access to desks and meeting rooms, where they can find a diversity of spaces to work, such as: coworkings, business centers, hotels, among others.

In this way, it helps companies to improve their agility and flexible work policies, with access and space management tools (both internal and external, throughout its network). Daysk also offers a complete consulting service focused on the mobility strategy of companies.

The future of work and the Proptech revolution

It is predicted that by 2020, 50% of professionals will have a flexible job with weekly mobility. In the US, 30% of employees are already freelancers. In Europe, 16% of employees work outside the company at least once a week.
Flexible work allows to solve many mobility challenges, from improving work life (less time on transport, more time with family or for oneself) to congestion in cities.
For companies, it is an opportunity to improve the agility of their operations and optimize productivity costs.  In addition to impacting the well-being of their teams, implementing this new way of working in a simple way.

On the other hand, the office market is facing a revolution with the creation of flexible spaces, both in small offices and in corporate facilities. This is reflected in the exponential growth of coworking spaces.
Two trends that indicate a radical evolution of the market and open a gap for innovative solutions such as Daysk.com.

Prepare your culture to embrace the remote wave

Even if some notorious cases did a U-turn, a lot of small and big organisations are moving to a more remote workplace. If your culture does not include remote yet, here are a few ideas on how to prepare for a future shift.

Put culture changes in the hands of your employees

First, each change in culture needs its supporters. Employees that will spread the word, show the way and inspire others. Internal evangelists, who will be trusted to try new ways and give feedback on the future of the culture.

Can you suddenly switch to remote offices for everyone? Probably not. Doing it for a handful of people, on the other hand, can pave the way.

Run small experiments

Once you have some squads it is time to start experimenting with them. The goal of each experiment is to trial a potential culture change and measure its impact and feasibility for the whole company. Here are some ideas.

• Allow people to come in the morning between a larger time range. If you are still asking everyone to be at 9 am sharp in the office you should start here. Being more accommodating with the schedule can be a tremendous help for people with kids or those with long commutes. Crowding in the subway for an hour every morning does put people on edge. You want productive smart people, not balls of nerves.
• Take everyone on a coworkation. An expensive option for an entire company, coworkations can be very effective for teams. Keep the normal work schedule and flows but do it from somewhere else than the office. This is great as a team-bonding activity too.
• One-day-a-week out of the office. Squads would be able to work from home, or a place closer to home. Hopefully, you already have the IT infrastructure (VPNs, Cloud tools) to allow your teams to work far from your company’s servers. Remote for a group of selected employees should be enough to highlight potential problems. The important point here is the regularity. Where coworkations are punctual events, the real point of going remote is to do it most of the time.

Those ideas can be used alone, or in any mix, to introduce this new concept of work flexibility. The key takeaway from this is: suggest and open the way, do not impose and direct. Make it a fun experiment where everyone can voice an opinion.

Iterate on the results

When the organisation is satisfied with the learning from those experiments you can then take a decision on the following steps. Is it a good fit for your culture and work style? What was the most successful experiment and how can we roll it out to the rest of the company? Did we identify all the tools to make this work on a permanent basis?

Iterate the selected experiments into your company’s culture. First roll-out one change to the entire company, then experiment with a new change or take an existing one further. Gather feedback. Roll-out. Repeat. You get the idea.

Work flexibility is not something to patch on an existing culture. It rather needs to be melted into. Running experiments on the inside, sowing the idea and showing the way are the first steps towards a deeper change.. Is your company experimenting with work flexibility? Is remote already part of your culture?