The Future of Smart Buildings: Case TietoEVRY

TietoEVRY wanted to offer more flexibility and freedom for their employees by creating different types of workspaces for different types of tasks. In the modern office, people tend to have different needs for their working spaces depending on their task: for focused work, you need quiet and privacy, for conference meetings well-equipped meeting rooms and for group work well well-planned collaboration spaces. Often, people can switch working spaces throughout the day or the week. In order to create these spaces without needing to add several square meters of space, the TietoEVRY Helsinki office decided to move from a traditional, dedicated seating arrangement to activity-based working.  A workshop was set up to find out how people felt about activity-based working and if they had any problems with it. The aim was to create a solution that would not only solve the most common issues people had with activity-based working but also make everyday tasks easier and erase barriers to working at the office. In the workshop, it was discovered that the most common issues included things like finding the right workspaces and meeting rooms, getting all the equipment to work, and difficulties in communication between different teams and other departments.  In addition to making the everyday lives of TietoEVRY workers easier, TietoEVRY’s facility management team wanted an opportunity to get real-time data on how, when, and which spaces were used to further develop the office spaces and answer the needs of the employees.  

Empathic Building digital twin visualized TietoEVRY’s Keilatalo office, showing things like free/occupied desks and meeting rooms; people’s status and whereabouts, and different tabs for environmental information like temperature, air quality, and light levels. From there, people can choose the right working area for their needs.  For facility management, Empathic Building offers extensive reports on space utilization and the way people like to work. With his data, facility management can make informed decisions on what type of spaces are needed more and what spaces are seldom used.  “Us at TietoEVRY’s facility management have always adapted the offices according to the spaces that are needed at the time, but now the way we work has changed globally and forever. And now we need to adapt to the new super mobile world.” Tomas Elken, TietoEVRY Head of Facility Management and Chief of Procurement says. “When we have data over how people use the spaces, we can make an informed decision quickly and continue to provide the best possible working spaces.”  Another important aspect of creating great employee experiences in offices is, of course, the feedback from the users themselves. Empathic Building gives its users a chance to share their moods, add messages to their profiles, and add service tickets directly from Empathic Building.    The IoT data from the building is gathered with Haltian environmental, occupancy, and air quality sensors, and the location data is gathered with Quuppa location technology.  

The transition from assigned seating to activity-based working has gone smoothly at TietoEVRY with the help of Empathic Building.  Once the office was transformed into activity-based working, space was freed for more innovative ways of creating working spaces: if people want to do quiet work, they can search Empathic Building for a free desk in the focus workspace. Similarly, people can look for their co-workers and free collaboration spaces if they want to do group work.