Employees returning to the office in the midst of the pandemic
are bound to arrive with a new set of questions: What health precautions have
been put in place? How crowded is the cafeteria? Which meeting rooms are
available? How do visitors gain entry to the building?
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To ease their adjustment, a growing number of office managers
are using mobile apps that offer the answers that workers seek.
Building apps are designed to connect office tenants to
maintenance, security and logistics systems and community-building programs.
They began gaining traction in 2018 as a way to make offices more efficient and
have taken off in the pandemic as employers try to entice workers back on site
by making work-related tasks safe and convenient.
“COVID has definitely accelerated the development, accelerated
the use and expanded the use cases,” said Meghan Rooney, senior vice president
of operations for experience management at JLL, a global commercial real estate
firm.
The apps can be customized for each location and specific tenant
and expanded as needed. Employees can use the app to enter a building, reserve
conference rooms and request maintenance. Safety information, such as in a building
emergency or a natural disaster, can be disseminated quickly. Building managers
can monitor the use of workrooms and other locations.
In the pandemic, the apps can also help the office feel safer by
communicating building-wide health information and reducing physical
interactions. But the rise of these apps, which can track workers in a
building, have also prompted warnings from privacy advocates.
Still, the idea that each office building should have its own
app is becoming the industry standard, Rooney said. She added, “Every
conversation with investors now includes, ‘What app would you recommend?’”
JLL increased its investment in HqO, a building app platform, in
a fundraising round last year. Other companies creating building management
apps include Cohesion, Rise Buildings and HiLo.
In the Chicago Loop, 15 companies in an office tower known as 77
West Wacker began using the TranswesternHub building app from Cohesion in June.
Rosalyn Griffin, an office manager at Rothschild & Co., an investment bank
with offices there, can use her phone for simple tasks like submitting repair
orders or getting notified when visitors have arrived, which gives her more
freedom to leave her desk.
One of her favorite features is calling for the elevator from
the app when she steps into the building. “You turn the corner, and it’s
there,” she said. “It’s super easy.”
The app benefits other employees in the building, too: No one
has to worry about forgetting or losing a key card, she said, and those who
work late and on weekends can control the office temperature and reserve
conference rooms.
The health and safety features of office building apps have
become a focus in the pandemic. Coronavirus protocols, contact-tracing
information and emergency alerts can be disseminated via an app.
“We don’t have to rely on each business getting information out
to their staff,” said Annie Panteli, head of operations at 22 Bishopsgate, a
62-story office tower in London’s financial district that opened in 2020.
Bishopsgate worked with Smart Spaces to create a custom app for the building.
Tenants are looking to increase “contactless” building
operations, Panteli added. Building apps offer some of these, including the
ability for guests to preregister for a visit and receive a QR code to scan for
entry, rather than checking in at a security desk. “We still have staff in the
lobby, but they act more as greeters,” she said.
The TranswesternHub system offers touch-free automatic doors for
the parking garage, building entrance, elevator, conference rooms and
restrooms.
The app is “an important piece of technology that helps people
feel safe coming back to the office,” said Myrna Coronado-Brookover, senior
vice president of asset services at Transwestern, a commercial real estate
company, who helped oversee the introduction of the app in the building.
Building apps also offer the ability to monitor the use of
conference rooms, cafeterias and parking lots in an effort to improve
operations. This data collection is part of the larger move toward “proptech,”
an approach to real estate that allows companies to track how many people are
in different parts of a building, which can help save money on heating, cooling
and lighting in unused areas.
But privacy advocates say they are worried about the collection
of workers’ personal data.
Companies have tracked employee phone and computer use for
years, but these apps “take employee surveillance to a new level,” said Lorrie
Faith Cranor, an engineering and public policy professor at Carnegie Mellon
University and director of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory.
The apps can cause stress for employees who feel their movements
at work are being monitored, she said, especially if the system flags personal
information such as when employees who do not work together spend long periods
in one another’s offices or when someone is using the restroom frequently.
Companies should be transparent about what information they are
tracking, how they are using it, who will have access to it and why, Cranor
said. Privacy practices should differ depending on the types of data collected,
she said, with the idea that the more personal the information, the more
restricted the access should be.
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