By Tim Clapham, director at Planon
The borders between business and personal lives are continuing to blur, with employees increasingly searching for a seamless integration between their personal life and their work life. As a result, it is estimated that 65% of employees now use their own smartphone devices in the workplace.
To benefit from this ‘bring-your-own-device’ (BYOD) phenomenon, businesses are now looking to provide their employees with smartphone-enabled tools that can help to improve the efficiency of their day-to-day work routine, whilst also making sure that the organisation is utilising its own resources effectively.
Applications like Planon Apps have been created to provide employees with increased flexibility and interaction with their workplace using their smartphone devices. Such applications can make use of smartphone capabilities including QR code scanning, RFID tag identification, high resolution imagery and location-based services. By using business-to-employee applications like these, employees can now book meeting rooms, find a colleague and report a malfunction – all at the touch of a button.
It’s currently estimated that only 30% of maintenance problems are reported; workplace applications can make these maintenance requests easier to report. For example, employees can use their smartphones to report a malfunction such as a faulty computer, broken air conditioning, or an empty cartridge in a printer, and provide the maintenance team with a photo as well as details of the issue. After a request has been reported, employees can then monitor the status of the repair on their mobile device and see when the request is being dealt with by the maintenance team. The interactive nature of these communications leaves employees free to work on other tasks, knowing they will receive an alert when the maintenance issue has been resolved – thus increasing employee efficiency.
Business-to-employee apps can enable employees to carry out a variety of workplace tasks that would have been unthinkable just five years ago. From applications monitoring the availability of workspaces in a building, to programmes that can be used to monitor desk usage in a hot-desk environment, business-to-employee mobile apps can revolutionise the way that companies operate.
More and more organisations are starting to see the benefits that apps like these can provide, and are already using this technology to support their everyday business needs in a way that delivers real value back to the business. Ultimately, business-to-employee apps can help improve employee satisfaction, revolutionise the way that companies operate and transform how employees interact with their workplace.
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