Sustainability

The crossed business will be born at the heart of Smart Buildings

More and more employees want to be part of the logic of smart buildings: positive energy, high environmental quality, thermal regulation. Standards and labels have appeared for two decades in the construction sector. Technical batches now represent the majority of the works budget, pushing construction companies to accelerate the mutation of their ecosystem.

What if smart buildings did not just stay like today’s energy-oriented ones, but revolutionize the way we work?

Does the organization of new spaces, coupled with new methodologies, improve work efficiency and reinforce employee commitment? 

Smart Building

Born from the need to better control energy expenditure and beyond – the RT 2020 will require buildings to produce more energy than they will consume. These trends have drawn in their wake a technological innovation that creates value. For example, Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Building Management Technology (BMS) have taken advantage of technological advances to become indispensable components of any structured project.  

In a world of work where employees use Internet-connected applications, telecommunications are becoming a necessity, encouraging double connections of buildings to the optical fiber to ensure continuity of operation because the shutdown can cause direct and indirect damage very important.

As an example: for a simple cut of optical fiber repaired in less than three hours, 300 paid employees € 50 per hour represent a potential direct operating loss of € 45,000 for the company, without quantifying the damage collateral (loss of image, data, motivation, …). When we know that the average budget of a secure connection rarely exceeds 1000 euros per month, we quickly understand the need.

Smart Working

The job of ergonomists is to analyze our working conditions. They recommend products of the new generation: armchairs, desks, the organization of spaces to promote transversality and well-being or, at the very least, to favor positions allowing greater comfort for employees.

The smart building must reconcile the misuse of technologies (email, video …) with more direct relationships, therefore more human, by being the support of new management methods. And while it is obvious that quiet workspaces generate less stress and thus enable better employee performance, smart building thinks the building is an agile whole: that is, a system where all employees are invited to interact. What better than to create dedicated areas of innovation to favor a project approach through experimentation allowing rapid success in order to foster immediate team cohesion? He is the best-placed collaborator to express a need: to listen to him directly … 

All companies are concerned. Simplifying governance through technology must be a major issue. It contributes to the emergence of new human relationships: it is a wonderful opportunity to confirm the trust placed in millennials born with software. 


Smart Managing: decide live

This new way of working makes sense when it comes to scheduling meetings. Unfortunately, we have internal and external meetings of 8, 10 or 12 people that last for hours. Generally, it comes out in the middle of a plan of action, at worst with more questions. It would not be so much a problem if we did not spend 50% of our time in these same meetings: without removing all of them, a simple goal to reduce costs is to optimize 30% of the time consumed.

If employees can gather around a café in a collaborative space provided for this purpose, this is a useful time and used to solve operational issues that many meetings never overcome. 

The new management methods designed to boost productivity and encourage employee engagement must, therefore, make it possible to form thematic alliances, including internal populations, but also defining synergies with external companies. For example, at Jaguar Network, they aimed to position and fund a biotechnology research laboratory directly using our cloud resources and data-scientists at the heart of our Research & Innovation center. This model of external synergy accelerates the growth of companies, in sectors that are very different, but joined by the same digital issues. 

The Agile method, long reserved for computer scientists, is today valid for the entire organization. Let’s assume to be more efficient by focusing on short, focused meetings with reduced but precise focus. And to do this, it is the entire decision tree that must be reviewed, in order to leave a great autonomy to employees and more empower them, like the SCRUM methodologies: each project must have a tandem project manager + product owner where the project manager cadence planning, organization, and method while the product owner defines the fine features of the product. 

As each stakeholder is involved in a product development cycle, it is important to involve them in each phase of the project, for example by giving them intermediate recipes to encourage exchanges, often non-existent, with the engineering teams. Unusual new collaborations are possible and must be born to overcome traditional patterns. And contrary to what one might think, teleworking is still not an innovative solution in terms of decision-making efficiency.


Smart is Smarter 

The advantage of a smart building is that it can be controlled by means of a centralized application, allowing not only to reduce the energy footprint of the company but also to join the new values of the work: ecology, economy and social responsibility at the service of the necessary sustainable development. These concepts are at the center of attention in terms of recruitment for new generations, whose integration of talent in organizations is the only guarantee of sustainable innovation. 

These new employees require work for a responsible company. The company is responsible for ensuring the sustainability of its structure and its human capital and proudly displaying its values to its customers and partners. 

In these times of transformation and therefore of multiple questioning, the company must be able to respond to the quest for the meaning of employees while ensuring a certain form of profitability in the face of new challenges.  

The company, the engine of value creation, accelerates its hybridization, opening a new era of responsible and sustainable finance in the service of a more social economy.