By the second half of this decade, roughly 75 percent of the workforce will be millennials. The millennials come from more of an experience-based-orientation. They want experiences that add meaning to their lives. They care more about this than having a job that pays very well. We are staring at a generation of workers who are attuned to consuming experiences and they go to the workplace with this mindset. For them, it’s not so much about a job, as about what they do and how they do it.

Feeling a need for purposeful work is not something that is unique to the millennials. It is true about other generations as well, including the baby boomers. The way work was designed in the pre-Covid era, in most organizations, makes it simpler for baby boomers and Gen Xers to find purpose at work. The purpose these generations seek from work is different from the expectations of others.

According to the “2021 Workplace Friendship & Happiness Survey“ by Wildgoose, 57 percent of people say having a best friend in the workplace makes work more enjoyable, 22 percent feel more productive with friends, and 21 percent say friendship makes them more creative.

Relatable experience is what make people stick around. This brings to the fore the need to design workplace experiences that employees can relate to. At the same time, given that ‘ease of use’ is high when working off digital mediums, the average office user expects high ‘ease of use’ when traversing the physical office too. The need is to design workplace experiences that integrate both the physical office and the digital workplace, that are easy to navigate and are relatable. This is where EasyWork stems from.

Great workplace experiences can be crafted by following a data driven approach. The post Covid workplace is no more about the office alone, but a combination of home, offices and the ether. Hence such workplace journeys need to integrate both the digital and physical mediums.

Analysis of data derived from a variety of exercises during the conceptualization stage, allows an organisation to derive a blueprint for the future. Such analysis ought to enable alignment of business needs with personal aspirations of people. This goes against the quick approach of ‘jumping to a solution, without understanding the problem’, and results in workplaces that work for its users. Workplaces that can flex with time.

Once the workplace is operational, the efficiency will be high if the infrastructure is able to respond on the basis of dynamic occupancy and work styles. Efficiency will be high if an organisation uses and pays for only the used infrastructure. This is possible only when workplaces are IoT enabled, and the infrastructure is able to respond automatically on the basis of occupancy, lighting conditions, temperature, etc. An IoT enabled workplace acts upon real time data to bring about real time flexibility. Doing this helps reduce the carbon footprint and also optimize the real estate portfolio.

Workplaces need to be reconfigured with the times. Such reconfigurations can be evidence based only when there is supporting data. A combination of big data from sensors installed in workplaces, office user apps and data from a variety of exercises like surveys and interviews become credible data sources for analysis. Such analysis allows easy reconfiguration, which is in tune with the changing times.