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SALTMINE’S GUIDE TO THE FUTURE OF WORKPLACE

(AND ITS 4 COMMON ROADBLOCKS)

WHO AND WHAT
IS SALTMINE?

Saltmine is an all-in-one workplace optimization platform that helps workplace and real estate teams plan, design, and strategize the workspaces of the future.
We believe the future of workplace is about fully understanding how people are actually using a real estate portfolio in order to evolve it to our ever changing and dynamic office landscape.
Our platform is all about helping customers have a complete grasp of this understanding, so they have all the crucial information they need to evolve spaces as well as improve employee effectiveness, efficiency, productivity, and most of all, happiness.
On top of helping you gain a better understanding of your real estate portfolio, our platform enables customers to develop a dynamic and data-driven workplace strategy. From its ability to capture all architectural plans and workplace data under one roof, to its immersive 3D design module, the Saltmine platform is built to empower customers to:
  • Plan, strategize, design, and execute agile and
    flexible workplaces.
  • Intake, track, and interpret relevant data–creating
    actionable next steps.
  • Cut project costs and timelines.
  • Empower users to build workplaces people will love. 

HOW SALTMINE
HELPS MANIFEST
YOUR FUTURE OF
WORKPLACE

THE 4 ROADBLOCKS GETTING IN THE WAY
OF YOUR UNIQUE FUTURE OF WORKPLACE

While achieving the workplace of the future can seem like an ambiguous journey, from our experience there are four common roadblocks that get in the way of planning the offices of tomorrow.
These roadblocks include:

1. Determining agile ratios
2. Knowing whether or not to drastically alter space
3. Collaborating and engaging stakeholders
4. Eliminating time consuming and costly manual design processes

Here’s a helpful guide to provide visibility into these four roadblocks as well as
how Saltmine’s platform helps customers navigate around them.

ROADBLOCK #1:
DETERMINING AGILE RATIOS

Prior to the pandemic, when everyone was coming into the office everyday, it was all about 1:1 seating–i.e., one person will always have one seat.
Companies struggle with determining what the correct “agile ratios” are for their Return to Office (RTO) in the hybrid era. They’re unsure what types of spaces are needed to ensure employees are productive and happy.
For example, here’s a common question we’ve heard quite a bit:
“If we don’t know how many people are going to be in our hybrid office, how do we figure out how many seats we need?”
Predicting office usage in our hybrid world is difficult because we can no longer rely on 1:1 seating as it assumes that one person will always need one seat. In today’s hybrid environment, some groups of people will use the office with regularity, some might occasionally and irregularly come in, and others will never come into the office.
While those who are coming in with regularity will likely need places to do individual work, one of the biggest reasons why people are using offices again is to socialize and collaborate–two activities that don’t need 1:1 seating.
The only effective way to fully understand how and why people are using certain spaces is through data.
It’s all about data:
  • Your current space. The first step is to take inventory of all your current architectural spaces. This gives you an overview of the different space types you currently have available–e.g., “me,” “we,” and “us” spaces.
  • Trending utilization. Occupancy data that indicates how many people are coming into the office, provides clarity on what they’re using different spaces for.
  • People’s perception of space. Just because people are coming in, doesn’t mean they like it. By asking employees how they feel about their space, you gain the critical qualitative data necessary to ensure spaces are reflective of how people actually work.
With quantitative and qualitative data at your disposal, Saltmine users will be able to make systematic decisions regarding future design proposals–empowering them to determine and accommodate their unique, agile ratios.
Using Space Temperature, see what spaces are most heavily used in a given location.
Post-occupancy, make data-driven decisions to evolve space.
Gather qualitative feedback within Saltmine that captures and analyzes valuable insights from employees.
Optimize your workplace by refining and adjusting for different workstyles, occupancy trends, and evolving spatial demands.
For example, one of our customers–a global financial services company–wanted to “energize” their real estate portfolio and pursue a hybrid working model that uses a neighborhood strategy.
They wanted to switch from their pre-pandemic 1:1 ratio and try out an 8:10 ratio. However, after they rolled out their new plan, empty desks were still abundant. They still had more space than they needed and having workers so spread out was not conducive to team building.
They realized that going from one drastic change to another wasn’t going to work and needed to experiment before determining what ratio was right for them.
This is where the Saltmine platform comes in.
Using Saltmine, they discovered that their ratio sweet spot was actually 5:10.
Here’s how:
  • Uploading all of their architectural plans and utilization data into Saltmine to create a Digital Twin of their real estate portfolio
  • Digitizing all the furnishings in their portfolio and creating an interactive 3D model of their neighborhood strategy
  • Generating high definition renders and 360 panorama views to get a better sense of the future built environment–resulting in a more engaged project team and stakeholders
Experience live changes in 3D and collaborate in an immersive environment.
This iterative and visual way of determining ratios allowed the customer to experiment with different ideas, configurations, and furnishings to reestablish their global corporate standards–all before modifying the physical built environment.
The ability to fully leverage actual utilization data to run various scenarios and test different floorplans allowed this customer to get a better understanding of what would actually work in the built environment.
And the best part? This customer is forecasting that they will save approximately $1.4 billion dollars in global CRE costs over the next 10 years.

ROADBLOCK #2:
KNOW WHETHER TO DRASTICALLY
ALTER SPACE OR NOT

While the offices we left at the beginning of the pandemic aren’t conducive to the present, it’s important to recognize that drastic alterations could fail at a large scale–i.e., we shouldn’t over index.
Many companies we talk to and work with recognize this but are still lost. They see the need to alter the spaces they’re offering to employees but want to limit the construction and permits they’re committing to. Many have asked:
“What can we do in the meantime?”
Rather than knocking down walls, workplace and real estate teams should leverage Saltmine to seek out more immediate wins and iterate chunks of space over time. This provides occupiers a better grasp of how spaces could be radically changed in the future–if they need to change them at all.
Organizations are eager to attract people back to in-person spaces, making the understanding of what is and is not working, paramount when it comes to workplace strategy.
Are rows of individual work stations largely unoccupied? Are collaborative spaces usually at capacity and booked? If so, perhaps those rows of desks need to be altered to facilitate more “we” space.
Once this incremental change is done, our platform can help you measure the performance of the space by accessing utilization and employee sentiment data which allows you to critically evaluate space iterations, experiments, and test ideas.
Data plays a huge role in all of this. In order to know what to change, all your various data points have to be centralized in one place and fed into a solution that provides actionable insights.
Which is exactly what a multi-billion dollar technology company did with Saltmine.
The first thing this customer did was use Saltmine as their single source of truth for all workplace data, including the architectural plans of their entire US real estate portfolio. Not only was this customer able to house their entire real estate portfolio in Saltmine, but Saltmine’s unlimited user structure made that information available to any team member, at any time.
Once their entire real estate portfolio was digitized in Saltmine, they were able to:
  • Benchmark their space and get an understanding of how their portfolio and
    current spaces compare against other companies in the industry.
  • Integrate workforce survey data into their RTO planning to have a better
    understanding of how their offices should function for their employees,
    post-pandemic.
  • Measure how spatial needs have changed since the pandemic and how a hybrid
    strategy would affect their architectural space.
  • Test their spaces to ensure they were up to not only industry standards but their
    own, unique-to-their-company standards.
Get an overview of how specific teams are using collaboration spaces.
Understand how employees feel about furniture, spaces, ergonomics, etc.
Determine whether or not employees believe various work experiences are enablers or obstructors to their work.
Establish a baseline for employee experience parameters by comparing the employee experience in terms of utilization and sentiment. This allows you to track changes over time and by space type.
Most importantly, this customer was able to establish a framework for making data-driven spatial decisions, before making any drastic alterations to space.
To properly prepare for the future of workplace, companies need to incorporate all facets of their real estate portfolio, and analyze it with the intention of answering specific questions. These answers will give them the data and confidence they need to make decisions about what changes they’re making to their workplace.

ROADBLOCK #3:
COLLABORATING WITH AND
ENGAGING STAKEHOLDERS

Visually collaborating with and engaging stakeholders in the design process is key when it comes to the workplace of tomorrow.
However, many of the processes and procedures we depended on before the pandemic for collaboration, cannot be used for new projects or renovating areas of a real estate portfolio.
Designers and stakeholders used to physically gather together to evaluate space, floorplans, furniture, etc. Now, in our more digital-first world, this type of visceral experience isn’t possible which places a lot of pressure on designers to find new ways to engage stakeholders–who may not have a design background–in an immersive way. As a prospect once inquired:
“How does Saltmine provide realistic context in digital realms?”
Currently, Saltmine is working with 20+ customers who are actively iterating space. By leveraging the Saltmine platform, workplace and real estate teams can better engage in collaborative scenario planning to determine how working styles should influence spatial design.
Collaborative scenario planning is key in designing your office of the future. From your own workplace/real estate colleagues, to other business partners and stakeholders–modern workplace design must be a seamless collaborative endeavor and design tools should provide contextual, immersive visuals to ensure everyone is “seeing” the same floorplan.
Zoom in and out to see all pending approvals and threads of communication.
When leveraging an immersive platform like Saltmine, those with and without design backgrounds can more intuitively catch discrepancies in a floorplan–discrepancies that can often lead to costly project overruns down the line.
For example, in a recent pilot with a large pharma company, the contracted architect sent a link to the 3D floorplan they had designed to the Senior Capital Project Manager (PM) for review.
From there, the PM shared the floorplan to an executive–a key stakeholder who doesn’t have a design background–for approval.
Upon their review, the executive discovered an area with $150k worth of unnecessary furniture and brought this to the PM’s attention, eliminated it from the floorplan and more importantly, the project’s budget.
Catching an error like this using a static 2D floorplan would have been incredibly difficult–especially for someone who doesn’t have a background in design.
Details like this are expensive when missed, making captivating visuals for anyone involved in a modern CRE project, a must for the future of workplace.

ROADBLOCK #4:
ELIMINATING TIME CONSUMING AND
COSTLY DESIGN PROCESSES

Much of workplace design is unfortunately dependent on manual activities. From cleaning up CAD plans to drawing polylines, workplace teams spend hours upon hours of time–and money–on things that should be streamlined for our modern times.
One of these processes is updating polylines and CAD plans. Each year, endless amounts of time and money are spent on creating polylines and updating them each time a floor layout changes–often times after the fact.
As noted by a customer:
“Our floorplans are not correct and we’re struggling to maintain a single source of truth for our CAD plans.”
In Saltmine, all spaces are tracked at the room boundary or block level inside of the floor model.
Using this digitized model, we completely automate the floorplan polylining process, allowing users to export a drawing straight from a design file with a room boundary polyline–automatically placed on the CAD plan to BOMA standards.
This streamlines the space planning process by digitizing and automating the space programming, as well as the polyline process. Once a new or revised plan has been finalized, our platform generates an DXF file that is ready to be ingested into the desired IWMS system through AutoCAD.
Automating the polylining process saves not only time but money. For example, consider the following scenario:
Company A contracts Vendor X to trace, clean, and connect polylines for their 1 million square foot real estate portfolio. Vendor X charges a common .06 cents (USD) per square feet.
To do all of the above for an RE portfolio with 1 million square feet, the cost of Vendor X is calculated at around $60,000–i.e., 1 million square feet x .06 cents / square foot = $60k.
If Company A were to use Saltmine’s auto polylining for their million square feet RE portfolio, the cost could drop by approximately half. Using the same formula above, the cost drops to $30,000 (1 million square feet x .03 cents / square feet = $30k).
Automating this part of the design process empowers designers to:
  • Perform space strategy and design in a single platform. This reduces the
    number of steps it takes to polyline and ultimately reduces the time it takes to
    design a space.
  • Increase the accuracy of design. Polylining is often done by hand, which can
    leave a wide margin for inaccurate drawings and errors. Automating the file
    generation immediately reduces the potential for human error.

KICK THE STATUS QUO TO THE CURB

TAKE CONTROL OF
YOUR FUTURE OF WORKPLACE

It is an established fact that how we work is changing. We live in a new era, radically disrupted by the WFH movement induced by the pandemic. The status quo of merely having an office isn’t enough to incentivize office engagement.
Every organization is unique. The trends you see on social media probably don’t apply to your workplace or more importantly, your people.
Companies everywhere have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be leaders in our global economy by way of the workplace.
By taking control of the performance of your workplace ecosystem, you are simultaneously taking control of your brand.

WE WANT TO HEAR YOUR STORY.

Saltmine would love to hear about how your workplace team has approached the shifts and challenges of our dynamic and evolving times.
Let’s connect–click the button below to schedule time with one of our workplace experts:
Request a demo