The health crisis, an opportunity for the construction of the smart building

November 2020

Commercial real estate has been engaged in its digital transformation for several years now, geared towards a revolution in uses and centered on services and intelligence at the heart of the building. The crisis we are going through appears to be an accelerator of these trends and a great opportunity for the players in the sector to work for the construction of smart buildings.

Work environments geared towards the employee experience

The advent of massive teleworking linked to the health crisis has made it possible to reconsider work environments. They are now protean, made up of both physical places, but also professional collaboration tools that allow companies to overcome the physical limits of the tertiary building. The months that have passed have thus revealed the need to design “offices” that are more agile, more secure and more resilient. Open-space, flex-office, teleworking, whatever form the work takes, the players in the sector must innovate to support its different changes and its different faces over the years, but especially during the same day . Here, the challenge is to support the flexibilization of working hours and the fragmentation which, under the acceleration of the pace of life, see each of the employees moving very quickly from one way of working to another.

According to the Kardham survey "The impact of the health crisis on the work environment" carried out during and after confinement, 80% of the 3,050 respondents wish to continue teleworking after the crisis. There is therefore good reason to believe that the concept of an office will extend beyond the walls of the company in the long term. With two consequences: first of all, the office building will have to be resolutely turned towards a service approach, with a view to providing the best possible experience to employees. Indeed, if the frequentation of offices in companies is less, it will however be necessary to reinforce the value given to the office, that it is more identity and more powerful in the experience. Tomorrow, workplaces will have to magnify social exchanges and the feeling of belonging.

 

A sustainable and secure digital workplace

This also means that organizations will have to think more than ever about adopting complete solutions to communicate, train, collaborate, manage and federate remotely. Solutions that are technically efficient enough to fulfill these tasks on a massive, continuous and flexible basis and thus meet the diverse needs of their users. But also sustainable solutions, in a context of heightened awareness of environmental issues in "the world after". Finally, the challenge will be to think about secure environments. The cybersecurity of company capital (buildings, employees, data) was, already before the crisis, a key issue in the digital transformation of buildings. Under the influence of digital, buildings act as real platforms of connected objects. They are therefore certainly capable of being more efficient, more intelligent, but unfortunately also, intrinsically more vulnerable. The acceleration of the dematerialization of work has made this subject of cyber protection more complex: players in the sector must now ensure information security no longer in a single, closed and clearly delimited place, but in a multitude of places and workstations. teleworking. Companies must more than ever choose long-lasting solutions that guarantee confidence in the digital services offered by commercial property: sovereign services, capable of meeting regulatory requirements both in terms of IT risk management and compliance. personal data (GDPR).

On closer inspection, we can see to what extent the crisis was above all a catalyst for trends that were already emerging before the crisis. And to what extent it invites organizations to reinvent themselves under the impetus of digital technology to rethink the real estate of today and tomorrow.

Pascal Zératès, Managing Director of Kardham Digital

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Article originally published on construction21.org

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Nathalie Neyret

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