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IT, HR, and workplace leaders are under a lot of pressure to get their return-to-work strategies right. As more organizations begin to return to the office, managers are rushing to find solutions that can help them manage the job.
Overseeing the systems that help the office function smoothly is challenging, and adding the increased element of human health and safety as employees return makes it an even more complex task. With so much at stake, dev teams are reconsidering a long-standing question when it comes to their workplace tech: Build or buy?
Before you start developing your own application, make sure you understand the risks. Here’s how a build-your-own workplace app could hurt your organization’s return to work.
Businesses are under tremendous pressure to reduce costs, avoid delays, and overcome obstacles. Now, as they begin to reopen, workplace leaders are relying heavily on technology to help manage the post-pandemic workplace.
While it may seem like the most cost-effective solution, building your own workplace app can come with several unpleasant surprises and costly risks. These are some of the major pitfalls to avoid.
Stakeholders have different needs when it comes to managing the organization’s return to work. Leaders need to gain visibility, offer new solutions to meet changing circumstances, and forecast future needs. Employees are looking for tools that make work safe, productive, and are easy to use.
You may have good intentions when building your own workplace app, but trying to solve too many challenges at once can mean builds that don’t go the way you planned and result in an application that doesn’t meet its intended function. Too many features can be overly complicated for users, and overwhelming for everyone involved.
The good news? You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Selecting a proven third-party application can provide a quicker solution with greater scalability, and leave your team free to support core business objectives.
It’s difficult to calculate the amount of time and resources building your own workplace application will take. Before you undertake an in-house build, consider the long-term requirements of testing, implementing, maintaining, monitoring, and updating the app.
Perform an honest self-evaluation to determine if your company truly has the capacity to continually improve a workplace application. Third-party solutions designed to address workplace needs have teams dedicated to maintaining and enhancing their apps, and the ability to automatically roll out updates so your team doesn’t have to shift focus.
Consider how often new application have bugs. Are your internal teams prepared to dedicate the necessary time and resources? Reliable third-party applications have already gone through multiple rounds of development, testing, and are scalable by design.
After implementation, your employees will have important feedback. Any workplace app needs to adequately address the needs of all stakeholders, so the tools you use need to be designed with all parties in mind.
Consider what needs your employees will have when they return to work, and seek their input throughout the process. Make sure you deploy a workplace app that can accommodate critical functions like desk booking and visitor management in a way that makes it easy for staff to adopt, such as through native integrations with the calendaring tools they already use.
You need a fully functional solution that helps you accomplish several different tasks — from identifying specific objectives and creating an efficient workplace, to reducing total costs and maximizing performance.
When you build your own workplace app, you run the risk of having an additional tool that doesn’t integrate well with your other tools. That can result in data silos, inaccurate data, and difficulty seeing the big picture.
A robust solution should integrate smoothly with your existing workplace tools, offering powerful insights and more efficient management solutions.
Beyond the time costs that could slow down your return to work, building your own workplace app can be a costly investment. In addition to the initial costs, it can be difficult to predict the total costs of development, maintenance, quality assurance, training, and updates.
You need to get the workplace running efficiently, safely, and securely. But choosing the wrong third-party workplace application can slow you down, come with hidden costs, or have poor quality. When you’re ready to invest in a workplace app, here are the top features to look for.
To keep your workplace safe, leaders are reducing capacity in the workplace. That means lowering the maximum number of employees in meeting rooms and making desks reservable to track occupancy.
Digital wayfinding apps can help employees feel more comfortable returning to the workplace by immediately notifying them when an area is at capacity, and reducing the amount of time they spend wandering around the workplace.
Using a third-party solution frees your IT team to work on core business operations rather than creating an application and working out bugs that could slow your business down.
Upfront spend is only a part of the total cost. As workplace needs evolve, the application will need to keep up. As your business needs grow, your application needs to be scalable and reliable.
In your future office, you need workplace apps that can connect with your existing solutions. Robust workplace apps like Teem’s wayfinding software integrate with sensors, giving employees and visitors the ability to easily see real-time availability of rooms and desks. Plus, they connect with room scheduling displays, so employees can find and book a room at any time.
Moving forward, employees and visitors expect a touchless experience. One way to accomplish this is to use mobile apps for room and desk booking. Another solution is using conference room scheduling displays to show room capacity limits and the type of equipment in each room.
Wayfinding tools allow employees to save time as they locate people, places, and resources in the workplace. You can use them to display important announcements — such as capacity limits, mask requirements, or upcoming changes.
Given the unpredictability of the post-pandemic workplace, navigating the new normal is already a significant challenge. By leveraging a third-party solution, you can implement your application faster, reach your objectives more easily, and spend less in the long run.
Our workplace apps can also help you consolidate resources, unlock business analytics capabilities that you need, automate business processes, and deliver long-term value to your organization.
Ready to learn more about how Teem can help you return to work? Request a demo today.
News, tips, and product updates.
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