It’s more important than ever for businesses to be environmentally conscious. First and foremost, of course, it’s important because we need to take care of the environment. With global warming and multiple environmental challenges, it’s important that everyone does what they can to take care of the planet. However, it is also important in terms of the company’s profile in the market. Consumers have become very environmentally focused and are more likely to shop with companies that are doing what they can to reduce their carbon footprint.
At MyDesk, we help companies streamline, create better working conditions and implement flex-seating. However, we also help companies become more environmentally friendly. Below you can read more about some of the different places where we help companies take care of the environment.
Reduced transportation time and fuel consumption
When a company has implemented flex-seating and it’s okay for employees to work from home as many days a week as they want, it saves a huge amount of travel time back and forth to the office. This also means that large amounts of gasoline are saved. Gasoline is still one of the biggest environmental culprits, and MyDesk combined with flex-seating helps minimize employee fuel consumption.
As well as being better for the environment, it’s also better for employees – especially in these times when gasoline has become very expensive.
Working from home is nothing new in itself, but what we’re seeing here at MyDesk is that our software is helping to support its legitimacy. The days of employees being measured by whether they are the first to clock in and the last to clock out are long gone. In places, you are measured on your results. The feedback from MyDesk users is that MyDesk helps to support this, and that being measured on your results – instead of how many hours you physically sit in the office per week – gives you an incredible amount of job satisfaction.
Optimizing office needs
The combination of flex-seating and MyDesk also gives companies the data they need to optimize their office. For example, you might find out that 40% of jobs are vacant on average, which many of the companies using MyDesk have found out. Of course, there are peak periods where the numbers look different, but we also take these periods into account when making our optimization recommendations.
If it turns out that there are also large amounts of spare capacity in your business, this data allows you to cut back on capacity. This also allows the company to minimize its costs – both for the premises itself, but also for heating, cooling, cleaning, etc. So there are significant financial savings to be made. At the same time, this efficiency also benefits the environment by not using energy to heat empty workplaces.
When you find that you have 40% empty workspaces, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to sell premises. The data can also be used to optimize the space in other ways. For example, instead of having 40% vacant workstations, you can use the capacity to build other beneficial zones in the office environment. For example, if there is a shortage of meeting rooms, you might as well use some of those empty workspaces to create more meeting rooms instead.
Accommodated the growing number of electric and hybrid vehicles
As the green transition continues, more and more people are driving electric and hybrid cars. Since these cars run on electricity, they need to be charged, and an obvious place to do this is at the workplace. However, there are typically only 2-4 charging points at a workplace, which means that only 2-4 employees can benefit from the charging points at work.
Through MyDesk, it is possible to book a charging station at the workplace for a certain number of hours, after which you can move the car to a normal parking space. This way, many more people can make use of the charging stations at the workplace. Employees are automatically notified when it’s time to move their car from the charging station.
Optimize your cleaning
MyDesk collects large amounts of data about how your business premises are used, when and by how many people. This also offers great opportunities to optimize cleaning at your business. Instead of constantly paying for the entire company to be cleaned, you can simply ask the cleaning staff to clean the rooms that have actually been used. For example, there may be a meeting room that hasn’t been used all day long. Of course, it makes sense that cleaning staff don’t have to spend time on this room and you don’t have to spend money on cleaning the room.
It also has the environmental benefit that you no longer use a lot of detergents and electricity to clean things that weren’t actually used.
You can make it even smarter with our micro sensors that can be installed around your business. Using these sensors, you can get even more data about how the space is being used, in addition to the data that employees help push into the system. The sensors can also be used by cleaning staff to mark when they have cleaned a room. After they’ve cleaned, they can press the sensor and you can get concrete data on when cleaning has been done around the company.
Screens for meeting room booking
Many booking systems require you to purchase their meeting room monitors in order to use their software. These screens should only show if a meeting room is booked and provide the option to book a room. Of course, they do this because it’s a smart way to retain customers. At MyDesk, we can connect our system to almost any type of monitor on the market. We believe that if our customers decide to use a different system than ours, they shouldn’t be forced to replace all their monitors.
We do this by enabling our application to talk to all your screens. If you need new monitors, we would of course be happy to provide them. We have a wide range of different screen types that we can offer you, but we don’t lock the screens to be used by MyDesk. For example, you can use Microsoft Teams Rooms Panel in collaboration with MyDesk, so that it is not MyDesk you see on the screens, but that MyDesk is the underlying software that ties it all together.
Often, we don’t even think it’s necessary to have a screen in front of a meeting room to show whether it’s booked or available. Instead, through MyDesk, we offer the option of simply hanging a QR code on the door of the meeting room. Employees can easily scan this code with their phone to see if the meeting room is available or not. If it’s available and you want to book it, you can quickly and easily press "book" on your phone and you’ve booked the room. This saves a monitor, but also avoids the need to run cables, power, etc. to that monitor, as well as the maintenance and replacement of these monitors.
MyDesk can be configured to your exact needs and wishes. If you want screens, we can provide them. If you already have monitors, MyDesk can be connected to them and if you want to avoid spending money on monitors, we have a solution for that too.