The companies part of the Smart Office consortium doing development cooperation with Shirute included Are, Elo Mutual Pension Insurance Company, Ensto, Fujitsu, Inspecta (now Kiwa), Martela, Ramboll and YIT. These partners embarked on a joint programme of the ecosystem with the mission to gather ideas for smart work needs and opportunities. Together, the parties developed new thinking, ideas to be implemented, and concepts related to the theme.
The development project created an inspiring, ecological, healthy, efficient work environment that enables changing ways of working and helps generating innovations, with facilities and services designed for various work communities. The move from technology-centricity to thinking first about the office space’s user-centricity and workday experiences was conducted through the study of values and modelling of personas.
At the beginning of the project, a large-scale round of interviews was conducted with experts in the construction and real estate sectors. As the development project focused on the customer experience, end-user interviews and involvement of employees also played an essential role, e.g. in the form of co-creation workshops with a visual facilitator. The interviews were used to map the course and content of the participants’ workdays in different roles, different industries and organisational levels. The aim was to find out what kind of daily work tasks a so-called “Smart Office” should be able to support.
As a result of this research, it was concluded that “Smart Office” means to people their own environment wherever they perform their work tasks at different times. As multi-site or non-site-based Nomad work has become more common, solutions and practical concepts for the phenomenon were considered. One of the key outcomes of the project was to build thought leadership around how a smart office should first and foremost be designed to support the well-being of employees. This thinking was concretised with concept drafts.
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