Happy Holidays from your friends at InnerSpace!

Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells,

Hybrid’s here to stay

Oh what fun it is to design

An office for today HEY!

Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells,

InnerSpace helps you tell

How space is used (beyond occupancy!)

Like where employees dwell...

It’s been an exhausting, stressful year for many of our clients and friends, and with the Omicron variant looming – well, a much-deserved holiday break is in order for everyone.

December 8 happens to be Pretend to be a Time Traveller Day – 2019 anyone? But seriously, spending time with loved ones and revisiting cherished traditions feels more meaningful than ever this year. Given that it’s also National Giving Month, there’s no better time than now to think about how we can not only reconnect with family and friends, but give back to our communities, too. At InnerSpace, we’ve always made a point of putting together care packages filled with snacks, socks, beanies, mittens and other necessities for our neighbours in need.

ICYMI!

While this is the last issue of InnerCircle for 2021, before we sign off, let’s return to a few hybrid work highlights that we’ve explored this past month.

First up: the delicate element of productivity. What role does a dynamic office play in guiding companies out of the COVID fog when it comes to adapting and managing the changing needs of employees? In the plan to embrace hybrid workstyles, it’s necessary to reimagine the workplace. Read our key considerations here.

We often key in on certain metrics that the InnerSpace platform offers. One is dwell times, which reveal how long employees stay in a space, and for what purpose. Going beyond occupancy data alone, this level of analysis can promote both employee comfort and efficient use of space. Read more about the benefits of this metric here.

Employee:Desk Ratio is something we wrote about even pre-pandemic, but now it’s more important than ever before. That’s because knowing how people use a space is vital in best using your existing office space, and importantly, best serving your employees. The bigger the office and the bigger the space, the harder it can be to figure out an accurate employee: desk ratio, especially in hybrid scenarios. This is where indoor location technology can help companies see exactly how space is being used in real-time, and offer quantitative data to inform decision making.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE...

There’s still more content to come on the blog during the month of December, including 2022 predictions from our CEO, James. Here’s a sneak peak of his thoughts:

The Hybrid Workplace: The transition from hypothesis to reality will begin in earnest. But 2022 will be just the beginning of a long-term transformation of the office.
Moving beyond “People Counting”: Real estate and facilities teams will start to recognize the limits of an understanding of ‘how many’, and start to ask about ‘who, when, how, how often and where’.
Sensor frustration: Early adopters of occupancy sensors will experience new challenges related to scaling across larger facility footprints and reconfiguring to accommodate changes to space design.

WHAT'S THE PASSWORD?

We’ve talked a lot about the importance of privacy recently. At InnerSpace, privacy is crucial to our technology. That’s why we found this data from NordPass on the 200 most used passwords from 2021 so interesting as it seems, well – some folks aren’t getting the message about the importance of protecting their data.

Some interesting facts from their findings:

The most commonly used password is "12345" across all countries
Many, many people love using their own name as a password.
Swear words are often used as passwords (by men more than women).
Dolphin made a strong appearance in animal-related passwords across many countries.
Ferrari and Porsche may be excellent cars, but they’re terrible passwords – and they are the most popular cars chosen for them.

NEW IN SMART TECH

It’s always fun to take a trip around the world of Smart tech. Here are more of the innovations changing how we live, work, learn and play – and some gift ideas, too!

Home offices are now the new realm for smart tech, as remote work continues to play a role in the hybrid landscape. In this Washington Post article, more than 77 percent of households with WiFi have at least one smart home device, with many actively using such devices for work purposes such as video calls or for connecting work-related software. But with such evolution comes increased security risks. More here.

Deck the Halls with Smart Home tech! Lots of great ideas to wrap up for the holidays are making the rounds– even smart home gyms to help kick off those New Year’s resolutions once the egg nog is gone.

Climate change is of course an omnipresent concern, and AI may play a key role in everything from reducing emission to promoting smarter, more efficient agriculture, to detecting illegal deforestation.

On the Smart infrastructure front, the recently signed U.S. infrastructure bill sets aside significant dollars for investment in sectors where startups will likely play an active role, including spending earmarked for cybersecurity investment, broadband internet expansion, and several clean energy and climate tech initiatives.

IN OUR SPACE

We are thrilled to announce that we are officially achieved SOC 2 compliance! SOC 2 is a voluntary compliance standard for service organizations, developed by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA), which specifies how organizations should manage customer data. This certification will open exciting new opportunities for our tech and for our clients, and we’re so excited to be able to help empower organizations in their return to work plans with this latest certification. More details in our latest news release here!
Have you downloaded our latest guide, a Blueprint for a Hybrid Workspace? Learn how to build, manage and measure a more efficient, more functional, more strategic hybrid office model in our free guide.