The Next Normal in a Post-Pandemic Workspace

Whether your office has already partially returned to work or you’re planning a workplace reentry, one thing is certain—things may never be the same. Safe facility management during an unprecedented pandemic requires a high level of planning and precaution. The measures you implement should increase employee productivity, promote workplace trust, and most importantly, keep employees and customers safe.

Rule and Regulation Compliance

It’s not always easy to keep up with new regulations, especially with constantly changing guidelines. Regardless, the first priority is employee safety. In most nations, employers are encouraged to provide a safe working environment. Physical safety should be a constant for all employees, but some may tolerate risk better than others. It’s wise to consider your most vulnerable employees when creating a return-to-work plan, but determine strategies with everyone in mind.

Second, keep employees informed of changes and guidelines. Assign staff to monitor local conditions and guidelines, then share updates on a consistent schedule. Keep a global perspective and adjust plans as needed to comply with local requirements.

Third, align business priorities with global realities. Inspect your building for potential hazards and determine remediation costs. Be willing to remodel, reconfigure, or rearrange everything including work schedules, walls, and seating arrangements.

Masking, Sanitation, and Social Distancing

Most official guidelines center on three principles—masking, sanitation, and social distancing. Depending on your industry, some guidelines may present more of a challenge than others. Restrictions will change as the coronavirus threat diminishes or increases, so keep long-term needs in mind when investing in safety equipment.

Personal protective equipment (PPE) requirements can vary depending on the role. There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to PPE. Some employees may not be able to wear masks. Others may need to avoid the workplace altogether, such as employees with asthma or other respiratory conditions.

Employees want clean workplaces, even more so now under COVID-19. Make sanitation a priority by setting up hygiene stations with hand sanitizer, soap, gloves, and disinfecting wipes. The typical weekly office cleanings may not be enough. Consider hiring extra cleaning staff to more frequently clean bathrooms, break areas, and shared spaces like conference rooms and lounges.

PPE isn’t limited to individual employees. Plexiglass shields provide an additional layer of protection around pinch points where social distancing may be a challenge, such as reception areas, entrances and exits, and payment areas. Posted policies and directional signage are great visual reminders for customers and employees to abide by your workplace precautions.

Other measures such as UV lights and thermal scanners are options for combating COVID-19 but should be part of an overall workplace health and safety strategy. It’s wise to check with locally, regionally, and country-specific requirements to determine what’s feasible for your team to manage.

Technology and Real Estate Optimization

For most workplaces, safety decisions center around official guidelines. Maintaining six feet of distance helps protect people from breathing in infected air particles. However, this is easier said than done for many businesses.

Social distance guidelines vary by country and region. In the U.S., 6 feet is the standard; the World Health Organization recommends 1 meter. Social distancing may reduce workplace capacity, depending on your current seating configuration, plan density, desk sharing, and other factors. The potential for space loss raises some interesting options:

  • Should some individuals work remotely forever? Can we stagger work schedules? Do we need to let some staff go?
  • Should we purchase or rent additional office space or retrofit the space we have? Should we consider moving? Should we renegotiate the terms of our lease?
  • How can we prepare our workplace for future emergencies?

During the pandemic, many business leaders are leveraging real estate planning software to visualize coronavirus-related changes to seating arrangements, staff schedules, and office remodeling before committing time and money to wholesale changes. For example, hoteling software helps maximize seating efficiency using dynamic data such as HR information and floor maps.

Business owners can require that employees reserve a hotel desk prior to coming to work and show the reservation before they’re allowed to enter. After someone uses the hotel desk, facility management can be notified that the area must be cleaned and sanitized before another reservation can be made.

The Next Normal is Now

Reopening your workplace can be difficult. Regulations are constantly changing and there’s no saying when COVID-19 will ease. The post-pandemic “next normal” requires flexibility and adaptability. Desks, rooms, and entire floors may not function the same way. Previous policies for remote work, sick leave, and work schedules may need to be reevaluated in the new work environment.

You can’t foresee every situation, but you can be flexible in establishing your new normal. Employees will appreciate your efforts as they return to their former—though newly arranged—workspaces.

By Nai Kanell
Vice President of Marketing
SpaceIQ

About IMS Consulting
For more than a decade, IMS Consulting has delivered the full scope of Archibus- related services to both government and commercial clients. As a Virginia Certified Small Business, IM犀利士
S Consulting provides our clients with personalized attention by experienced Archibus certified consultants. Our experts work with our clients to thoroughly understand how they do business, identify their unique needs, pinpoint opportunities to better manage their infrastructure, employ more efficient work processes, and make smarter capital budgeting decisions—both today and over the long term.

IMS Consulting specializes in the implementation of Archibus, the #1 real estate, infrastructure & facilities management solution in the world. Archibus is the global leader in streamlining how you manage your real estate, infrastructure, and facilities. Centralize your data, planning, and operations onto one seamless platform backed by 35 years of innovation and the world’s largest support network. Reduce costs, enhance sustainability, and create a better workplace by transforming how you connect with people, places, and processes.

2 Minute Drill – Archibus Real Property Application v.25

2 Minute Drill – Archibus Real Property v.25

 

Align your real estate portfolio with your organizational mission with Archibus Real Property v.25.

Centralize Leases

Manage all of your leases in a single database, with the ability to locate lease information through an interactive map.

Evaluate Total Cost of Ownership

Understand the true cost of properties by assessing operational costs alongside lease costs.

Archibus v.25.4 Real Property - IMS Consulting

Enhance Lease/Buy Decisions

Inform all lease/buy decisions with a comprehensive understanding of costs, compliance, occupancy, and key deadlines.

Automate Compliance & Administration

Integrate with solutions for ensuring compliance with lease accounting standards and automate important lease payments to stay on top of key deadlines.

Streamline Chargebacks with Accurate Reporting

Chargeback building expenses to occupants with accurate and automated invoicing.

Forecast Real Estate Scenarios

Leverage advanced portfolio forecasting to create a multi-year plan for your real estate strategy.

For more information about these offers contact IMS Consulting: hello@ims.consulting or find us online at http://ims.consulting Connect with us on LinkedIn.

About IMS Consulting

For more than a decade, IMS Consulting has delivered the full scope of ARCHIBUS-related services to both government and commercial clients. As a Virginia Certified Small Business, IMS Consulting provides our clients with personalized attention by experienced ARCHIBUS certified consultants. Our experts work with our clients to thoroughly understand how they do business, identify their unique needs, and pinpoint opportunities to better manage their infrastructure, employ more efficient work processes, and make smarter capital budgeting decisions—both today and over the long term.

IMS Consulting specializes in the implementation of ARCHIBUS, the #1 real estate, infrastructure & facilities management solution in the world. ARCHIBUS is the global leader in streamlining how you manage your real estate, infrastructure, and facilities. Centralize your data, planning, and operations onto one seamless platform backed by 35 years of innovation and the world’s largest support network. Reduce costs, enhance sustainability, and create a better workplace by transforming how you connect with people, places, and processes.

2 Minute Drill – Hoteling Application v.25

2 Minute Drill – Hoteling Application v.25

 

When workers — whether they are on a temporary contract, typically telecommute, or are employees temporarily displaced from their offices and requiring swing space– arrive at the site, their first immediate action is to go to their assigned workspace so that they can settle into the day’s work.

Ensuring that these workers have an office or workspace to go to, that this office is equipped to meet their needs, and that the employee is notified of their assigned space can be accomplished through the Archibus Hoteling application and its tasks to create and manage the Hoteling process. From the administration and cost side, the Archibus Hoteling application supports charging departments for their use of temporarily occupied seats, assessing the utilization of booked seats, and helping you to determine if you have enough seats dedicated to the Hoteling process.

The Archibus Hoteling application is organized into a set of role-based tasks designed for the various roles within your organization. With roles and security established by a business process owner, users will log into Archibus and access just those tasks appropriate for their roles and security settings.

For more information about these offers contact IMS Consulting: hello@ims.consulting or find us online at http://ims.consulting Connect with us on LinkedIn.

About IMS Consulting
For more than a decade, IMS Consulting has delivered the full scope of ARCHIBUS-related services to both government and commercial clients. As a Virginia Certified Small Business, IMS Consulting provides our clients with personalized attention by experienced ARCHIBUS certified consultants. Our experts work with our clients to thoroughly understand how they do business, identify their unique needs, and pinpoint opportunities to better manage their infrastructure, employ more efficient work processes, and make smarter capital budgeting decisions—both today and over the long term.

IMS Consulting specializes in the implementation of ARCHIBUS, the #1 real estate, infrastructure & facilities management solution in the world. ARCHIBUS is the global leader in streamlining how you manage your real estate, infrastructure, and facilities. Centralize your data, planning, and operations onto one seamless platform backed by 35 years of innovation and the world’s largest support network. Reduce costs, enhance sustainability, and create a better workplace by transforming how you connect with people, places, and processes.

Webinar – What’s New in ARCHIBUS v25.2

Webinar – What’s New in ARCHIBUS v25.2

ARCHIBUS V.25.2 is the first full-software release that is on our target quarterly cadence. ARCHIBUS V.25.2 contains the following major enhancements:

Return to Work

Planning to safely welcome employees back to the office is a concern for all facility managers. To support a return to work, ARCHIBUS V.25.2 supports:

  • Space planning cases
  • Social distance validation
  • Auto-cleaning after hoteling

Additionally, to support maintaining a safe environment after employees return to work, V.25.2 includes the Dynamic Workplace home page.

This is available for both ARCHIBUS Cloud and the full ARCHIBUS product.

Space Enhancements

Many enhancements designed for Return to Work were trends before the pandemic and will continue going forward.

Even if you do not use the Space features specifically for managing Return to Work, you can use the features for general space planning. For example:

  • Assigning employees to phases and days of the week

  • Designating employees as working remotely

  • Assigning room statuses

Application and User Interface Enhancements

Maintenance

You can now access reference docs for archived work using the Search and Manage Work Requests task.

Capital Projects

When working with projects, you can now import and export Microsoft Project 2016 projects.

Company Logo

Administrators can now display their customer logo in the view header using the System / System / ARCHIBUS Administrator – Application Configuration / Edit Logo task. Previously, a company entered its logo by overwriting \ab-core\graphics\customer-logo\customer-logo.png. Since sites working on a hosted Cloud deployment did not have easy access to this file, we have added this task so you can upload your logo file to the database.

Workplace

The self-service Workplace view has the following enhancements:

  • Customers with a Corrective Maintenance license can now define problem types that will appear in the Workplace Service Catalog.
  • Workplace can now display a company logo, as described above.
  • Administrators can override the default Workplace colors to match customer brand colors. For example, you might configure Workplace to use a shade of yellow to match your company branding or use a red color scheme.

For more information contact IMS Consulting: hello@ims.consulting or find us online at http://ims.consulting Connect with us on LinkedIn.

About IMS Consulting
For more than a decade, IMS Consulting has delivered the full scope of ARCHIBUS-related services to both government and commercial clients. As a Virginia Certified Small Business, IMS Consulting provides our clients with personalized attention by experienced ARCHIBUS certified consultants. Our experts work with our clients to thoroughly understand how they do business, identify their unique needs, and pinpoint opportunities to better manage their infrastructure, employ more efficient work processes, and make smarter capital budgeting decisions—both today and over the long term.

IMS Consulting specializes in the implementation of ARCHIBUS, the #1 real estate, infrastructure & facilities management solution in the world. ARCHIBUS is the global leader in streamlining how you manage your real estate, infrastructure, and facilities. Centralize your data, planning, and operations onto one seamless platform backed by 35 years of innovation and the world’s largest support network. Reduce costs, enhance sustainability, and create a better workplace by transforming how you connect with people, places, and processes.

2 Minute Drill – ARCHIBUS Workplace

 

ARCHIBUS WORKPLACE SERVICES

Archibus Workplace connects everyone to a web-based experience that adapts your workplace to support teams, projects, and daily needs. Enhance productivity, automate operations, and maximize the use of space.

Find Resources

Connect Staff to Their Needs

Search people, spaces, equipment, and more in one system with advanced filters. Browse by list or floorplan and drill into key details. Build a central inventory of all assets.

Book Meeting Spaces

Make Collaboration Easy

Connect staff to their meetings and workspaces with bookings by phone, tablet, kiosk, or QR code. Avoid scheduling conflicts, view photos and details to see if spaces meet your needs. Enable staff to track all reservations on a personal homepage.

Book Work Spaces

Free-Up Seats for Evolving Projects

Free underused seats by letting part-time staff book workspaces based on daily and weekly needs. Enable staff to browse different seat types based on which projects they are working on.

Request Services & Moves

Put People First

Empower staff to make and track service requests, from maintenance to personal moves. Include photos, descriptions, and location details to improve outcomes and ultimately, enhance the safety and well-being of everyone in the workplace.

Centralize Oversight

Prioritize Needs

Integrate with ARCHIBUS management solutions to centralize, prioritize, and track requests for space and services.

For more information contact IMS Consulting today or connect with us on LinkedIn.

About IMS Consulting
For more than a decade, IMS Consulting has delivered the full scope of ARCHIBUS-related services to both government and commercial clients. As a Virginia Certified Small Business, IMS Consulting provides our clients with personalized attention by experienced ARCHIBUS certified consultants. Our experts work with our clients to thoroughly understand how they do business, identify their unique needs, and pinpoint opportunities to better manage their infrastructure, employ more efficient work processes, and make smarter capital budgeting decisions—both today and over the long term.

IMS Consulting specializes in the implementation of ARCHIBUS, the #1 real estate, infrastructure & facilities management solution in the world. ARCHIBUS is the global leader in streamlining how you manage your real estate, infrastructure, and facilities. Centralize your data, planning, and operations onto one seamless platform backed by 35 years of innovation and the world’s largest support network. Reduce costs, enhance sustainability, and create a better workplace by transforming how you connect with people, places, and processes.

2 Minute Drill – ARCHIBUS Real Estate Portfolio Management

ARCHIBUS Real Estate Portfolio Management

As certified ARCHIBUS Business Partners, we offer the implementation of the Real Estate Portfolio Management application.

Your facility areas, whether you own, lease, or sublease them, represent one of your organization’s most significant and expensive assets, and therefore one that it is important to track and analyze.

Portfolio Management

Improve the analysis and management of real estate assets to align the portfolio with the organizational mission. The application improves asset stewardship through comprehensive tracking and analysis of portfolio holdings. Provides multiple perspectives on portfolio performance to enable rapid, fact-based decisions.

Lease Administration

Centralize and automate lease administration processes to increase efficiency, reduce errors, and avoid penalties. It automates processes for lease tracking and management, as well as improves access of lease information to facilitate easy analysis and reporting.

Cost Administration

Centralize and streamline the processes of defining, allocating, and approving portfolio occupancy costs. The application complies with current changes to FASB 13, FAS 13 and FAS 13 GAAP requirements. It improves portfolio occupancy cost management and decision-making with advanced cost analysis/projection capabilities.

ARCHIBUS Real Estate Portfolio Management - IMS Consulting

Advanced Portfolio Forecasting

Project costs and simplify portfolio planning and forecasting to support multifaceted strategic space planning requirements. Align your multiyear strategic portfolio plan with overall business plan objectives. Project costs for advanced portfolio forecasting of space requirements. Optimize the strategic space plan at all levels—from the portfolio, city, site/campus, to the building and room levels.

Strategic Financial Analysis

Provide a unified, correlated view of real estate, infrastructure and facilities assets and costs so they are optimally aligned to support an organization’s mission. Provide a common operating picture to view capital and operating expenses for the portfolio. Evaluate the mix of leased and owned properties relative to space vacancy/occupancy/availability for specific buildings, campus/site, cities, regions or for the entire portfolio.

For more information contact IMS Consulting today or connect with us on LinkedIn.

ARCHIBUS Space Management

ARCHIBUS Space Management

The ARCHIBUS Space Management Application provides an integrated Web and mobile-based solution for viewing and managing an organization’s diverse types of space to ensure optimal space allocation.

With the ARCHIBUS Space Management application organization can finally answer that fundamental question, “What does my space look like?”

The application is made up of 4 distinct programs:

Strategic Space Planning

Simplify strategic space planning and forecasting to support multifaceted space planning requirements. Optimize space planning and forecasting at all levels from the portfolio, city, site/campus, to the building and room levels, as well as plan short, medium, and long-term “what-if” scenarios for organizations of all sizes.

Space Inventory & Performance

Evaluate performance and plan space usage to maximize efficiency and decrease total occupancy costs. The application delivers flexible, self-service reporting for effective space allocation and cost control. Improves evaluation of building performance and enables accurate benchmarking.

ARCHIBUS BIM Space Management

Personnel & Occupancy

Optimize space occupancy rates and improve planning capability to accommodate future expansion, consolidation, or re-balancing. The application provides immediate, accurate reporting of occupancy statistics for space usage and re-balancing purposes. Improve your forecasting accuracy for future needs based on current room availability and planned occupancy growth. Easily assign employees to temporary or permanent available space using highlighted drawings.

Space Chargeback

Streamline the chargeback process to increase space accountability and reduce occupancy costs. The application improves accuracy of departmental cost reporting for greater accountability on dedicated and common area space costs as well as assures more accurate planning based on current space costs and planned future growth projections that improve critical decisions on consolidations, moves, and acquisitions.

For more information contact IMS Consulting today or connect with us on犀利士
LinkedIn.

ARCHIBUS Overview

ARCHIBUS Overview

ARCHIBUS is the #1 provider of real estate, infrastructure and facilities management solutions in the world, with expenditures for ARCHIBUS-related products and services exceeding $2.7 billion (US). With ARCHIBUS, organizations can use a single, comprehensive, integrated solution to make informed strategic decisions that optimize return-on-investment, lower asset lifecycle costs, and increase enterprise-wide productivity—reducing their infrastructure and facilities related costs by as much as 34%. Today, more than 8,000,000 ARCHIBUS users around the globe collectively save over $100 billion each year for their organizations. Available in 190 countries and more than 30 languages, ARCHIBUS is supported through a global network of over 1,700 professionals.

For more information contact IMS Consulting today or connect with us on LinkedIn.