The Challenge
In a rapidly developing world, it's important for businesses to stay ahead of the curve and be able to adapt to changing conditions quickly. This is especially true when it comes to office space. With the rise of remote working and the birth of new technologies, the way we use office space has changed dramatically in recent years.
In today's business environment, companies are under pressure to do more with less. Like most businesses, Yokogawa Deutschland GmbH also faces some challenges in workspace management. The first challenge they are facing is the increasing expense of office rent. Also, the conflicts between Russia and Ukraine lead to an increment in energy. Due to that, most businesses in European countries need to be well prepared for increasing energy costs. They also devote themselves to reducing CO2 emissions to protect the environment.
Increasing Office Real-Estate Cost
This is especially true when it comes to real estate costs. For many companies, the cost of renting or owning office space is one of their biggest expenses. Yokogawa is facing these challenges head-on. The company has announced plans to reduce the amount of space it uses in its office buildings by 3 floors to 2 floors. This may seem like a drastic measure, but it's one that Yokogawa is taking to reduce its operating costs.
High Office Energy Cost and Responsibilities for Emission
The potential for increased energy prices due to the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine becomes another challenge for Yokogawa. To solve this problem, Yokogawa is looking at ways to reduce the temperature and office area to save on energy costs.
The Employee in Need of Work-life Balance
In addition to these financial challenges, Yokogawa is also facing the challenge of balancing its employees' work life. With the reduced office space, the company is looking at ways to allow its employees to work from home or in person based on their job duties. To avoid the employees' isolation and better involve employees, encouraging people to come to the office at the right rhythm is a good way to reduce screen hours and improve employee job satisfaction.
Based on the challenges described above, Yokogawa needs a smart workspace management solution urgently to help them encounter those challenges. That is why they reached out to GaiaDigits for Gaia Workspace implementation.
Specific Requirements
User-friendly Solution
As the world increasingly moves towards a hybrid work style, Yokogawa is one of the many companies that are changing their workspace requirements to better suit this new model. In the past, Yokogawa had a complicated software system that was not well-integrated with other tools like Azure AD, Teams, and Outlook. They understand that people are fully packed with their daily schedules, so it is overwhelming if employees need to spend a lot of time in learning the system. That is why they require a user-friendly solution to which employees could quickly adapt.
Visualize the Floor Plan and Facility Status
They prefer to practice Hybrid Work mode as they like employees to come to the office a few days a week for better engagement. Before using Gaia Workspace, Yokogawa had 3 floors in use. Therefore, they decided to stop using Floor 3 and set up a certain number of hotelling desks for sales and consultants who travel a lot. They have also assigned some desks for office employees and the senior management team.
The Solution
To migrate to the hybrid office mode, the office manager removed one floor and more than 80 assigned desks. Based on the job category, they keep the assigned desks for those people who need to come to the office regularly and set hotelling desks for the people who can work flexibly and remotely. All the areas and settings are marked on the intuitive floor plan with different colors and icons.
Then the office manager set up the booking rules for the rooms and desk separately, which automate the facility booking process and save managers a lot of time. During the transformation, the office management team also realized the team need more and more collaboration areas and meeting spaces for in-person and hybrid meetings, then the team just transform the redundant area into a meeting area to improve the collaboration activities.
Most big organizations are saturated with enterprise applications, and it is reluctant for employees to use the new applications. Therefore, Gaia Workspace Team just integrates the solution with Azure AD to retrieve all the organization's members and integrates with Microsoft Teams and Outlook, which makes the solution easy to use without leaving the daily office applications.
Results
Improved Office Utilization
Office utilization is a vague concept if we cannot measure the index. Here we helped our Yokogawa measure the meeting room, open space and desk booking rate, and occupancy. If the occupancy is over 75%, which means the office is highly occupied and employee satisfaction will be infected; if the occupancy rate is lower than 50%, which means the office ROI is a bit lower and should be improved. Yokogawa encourages the employees to rotate the in-person schedule to balance employee satisfaction and office ROI. The Desk/Employee rate decreased from 1.0 to 0.58.
Lowered Office Costs
With the updated hybrid office mode, a lot of employees in Yokogawa just go to the office 2 to 3 days per week based on job requirements, which helped to reduce a lot of CO2 emissions. The company had saved office rental for 1 floor, which is over 33% of the total office real estate cost in 2022. Also, they have reduced CO2 emissions and improved employee satisfaction at the same time.
"I'm very happy with your solution and services, especially that you and your team are always available for us and also help us very quickly when there are problems."
— Fetih Denizdas, Head of Automation Cybersecurity & IT Manager D-A-CH, Yokogawa Deutschland GmbH
About Yokogawa Deutschland GmbH
Yokogawa is a global company and leading provider of solutions and products for the areas of process automation and test and measurement technology. Yokogawa provides engineering services, project management, and maintenance services combined with cutting-edge technology and technical know-how to implement operational efficiency in production based on safety, quality, and reliability.