Connecting Employees with Smart Buildings in the People-Centered Workplace

At Future Offices Fall, Modo hosted a fireside chat with Brook Potter, Director of Product Management, Cloud Services and Platforms at Schneider Electric. As a strategic partner, Schneider Electric not only uses the Modo platform for its own app development, it also offers Modo-powered workplace apps to Schneider Electric clients to help keep building occupants productive and engaged. Here’s a summary of Brook’s insights into how companies are actively leveraging sensor data from smart building systems to build a more immersive digital experience.

As the role of the office continues to evolve, the way enterprises manage workspaces is shifting from a facility-centered to a people-centric approach. Leading companies are integrating smart building data like density and air quality into workplace mobile apps, to create a unified digital experience that not only provides health and safety information employees require, but also connects and engages them across global locations.

Once of interest only to facility managers, data like CO2 levels, density, humidity and temperature is now on the minds of employees too, as they make choices about coming into the office, and timing their visits to shared spaces like cafeterias and conference rooms. 

“A mobile workplace app is a great way to tell people that a threshold has been crossed and there are too many people in the conference room,” Brook said. “Employees get an alert saying it’s overcrowded, and that same sensor data also alerts the building management systems to supply more fresh air. Those things are now possible and can be connected in a way that even five or 10 years ago would have been difficult.”

Touchless mobility is another need in the post-COVID workplace that can be accelerated by integrating smart building data. He noted, “​By connecting to a building management system we can enable things like using the mobile phone as a digital badge to access spaces, call an elevator, or manage temperature, lights, blinds, and other things that are being built into smart office buildings today.”

And in the reality of unrelenting change, the mobile workplace app is an ideal hub for communicating continually updated policies to employees — proactively and reactively. “Different countries and states can have totally different COVID policies. Because it’s regionally organized as a single source of truth, the app can become the place for everyone to look at and know what the policy changes might be — literally in real time, before making plans to go in.”

Beyond physical spaces, enterprises are also using workplace apps to drive deeper engagement, connecting employees to each other and the company culture, with capabilities to join clubs and interest groups, share photos and recipes, and compete in challenges through the app. 

Connecting people directly to data about their physical environment through a mobile workplace app that is also the central hub for productivity tools, navigation, communication, and engagement is helping enterprises curate and deliver a unified, hyper-personalized digital experience for every individual in the workplace.  And because Modo’s platform enables native API integrations, productized integrations and native SDKs that simplify development and enable rapid iteration and customization, they’re able to get tools into employees hands quickly, frequently, and seamlessly.

Tune in to listen to the full fireside chat with Schneider Electric’s Brook Potter here.