Examining the value of IoT sensors in creating a healthy, productive workplace.
Several factors impact productivity and well-being in the workplace, including environmental control, space occupancy, and employee feedback. Informed decision-making through thorough data collection is particularly useful in optimizing the employee experience, especially when setting trackable targets for improvement. As a result, businesses should view IoT sensors as a valuable tool for creating a productive and healthy workplace.
How can IoT smart sensors improve workplace conditions?
Smart sensors have various attributes that greatly assist in improving the workplace – particularly their adaptability, accuracy, and capabilities for remote monitoring. Overall, employers gain significant opportunities to optimize working spaces for the better.
Many businesses are also following the trend towards hybrid working. This trend creates an environment where employee habits change, and their workspaces must adapt. Comprehensive monitoring makes this adaptation process far easier for businesses, allowing them to understand employee needs better.
Tracking environmental factors, space occupancy, and employee feedback is vital when adapting the workplace to optimize productivity and well-being. Smart sensors facilitate this monitoring in the following ways:
Environmental Monitoring
Encompassing temperature, humidity, and air quality, environmental conditions can significantly impact employee productivity and well-being. The optimal office temperature is generally accepted to range between 22 and 24 degrees Celsius, but this can vary depending on factors such as gender, body size, and metabolic rate. Occupancy-dense offices also may require fluctuations outside of this range to maintain comfort.
Primarily, employers must listen to feedback from their employees to determine which temperatures are most suitable. If possible, businesses can offer different climates in different office areas to satisfy as many employees as possible. Installing smart temperature sensors throughout a workplace ensures consistent monitoring, and corrections can be rapidly made where required.
Humidity can significantly impact employee health. Smart sensors supply consistent, accurate data on humidity to maintain levels ideally close to 40%. The air becomes thick and heavy when the humidity rises too high. As a result, employees may find usual office temperatures suddenly too intense, affecting productivity and performance. Alternatively, low humidity adversely affects employee health, causing skin, throat, and nasal dryness.
Air quality is vital in environmental monitoring. High CO2 levels – often caused by poor ventilation – are linked to occupants feeling fatigue, dizziness and other health concerns. However, studies demonstrate that optimized CO2 levels increase employee productivity by up to 60%, making air quality crucial to maintaining a productive workspace.
Therefore, strictly monitoring humidity and CO2 levels is in an employer’s best interest to ensure employee productivity, as well as their comfort, health, and well-being.
Available smart sensors can simultaneously monitor temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and CO2, providing a complete overview of an office. Therefore, businesses can efficiently track crucial metrics with only one sensor type.
Space Occupancy
Previously, office layout decisions involved making educated assumptions concerning space occupancy. Currently, smart sensors comprehensively monitor space occupancy without workplace disruption or privacy concerns, anonymously collecting data about space usage, overcrowding, or inefficiencies to fuel informed decision-making.
For example, occupancy sensors placed under desks anonymously collect data on desk utilization. With hybrid working spreading in popularity, office desk use may drop in favor of meeting rooms and communal areas. Employers must use office space efficiently – when a shift is detected, repurposing space can better suit new employee habits. The workplace will be more optimized to employee needs, encouraging higher productivity.
Introducing hybrid work models in the workplace may also present downsizing opportunities. Tracking employee habits through temperature, motion, and proximity sensors can indicate whether this is a possibility before significant decisions are made.
Smart sensor occupancy monitoring can also inform optimized scheduled cleaning. Understanding how frequently different spaces are used allows cleaning services to be optimised, ensuring a clean, healthy, and operational workplace.
Employee Feedback
Listening to employee feedback is crucial to maintaining a happy workforce. Touch sensors are customizable and can adapt to the needs of almost any workplace. For example, appliances, restrooms, or reception desks can fit smart sensors to request immediate maintenance, technical support, or cleaning services. They can also provide feedback to management, ensuring employees feel heard and appreciated: open, bottom-up communication is critical to a positive atmosphere in any workplace environment.
Why invest in smart sensor technology?
Smart sensors are now robust, secure, tiny, and effortless to integrate into any developing environment. With a long battery life and scaling capabilities, they capture real-time data on a continuous basis that gives facilitates managers a complete understanding of how and when a building is used. Data is relayed to the cloud and is accessible from anywhere in the world remotely through an API. This enables decision-makers to take immediate action when it comes to right-sizing spaces and optimizing HVAC, heating, and cooling.
As demands increase to improve employee experience and retention, employers should utilize smart sensors to provide a supportive, healthy, and productive environment. Informed decision-making ultimately creates a safe, sustainable, smart workspace.
Bengt Lundberg, CEO of Disruptive Technologies.
