A big trend over the last couple of years was every CRE Tech vendor building out their app to be the operating system for the workplace. They loaded in desk booking, conference room booking, wayfinding, social capabilities, amenities ordering, events announcements, security integration, and anything else they could think of. The goal was for employees to have this app on their phones and interact with it every time they came to the office. On paper, this sounds great, but in practice, it never worked as expected.
Friction is anything that makes it more difficult to do something you are interested in. Requiring employees to complete a task before granting them permission to the office does only one thing: reduce the number of times employees want to come into the office. Adding friction to the workplace process does not make the employee’s life easier. Mandating daily use of an app that they did not choose themselves is not going to engender compliance and participation – even if the app performs perfectly without ever causing a complication. The app itself is the complication.
The irony is that many companies bought into these CRE Apps believing they would increase the number of employees coming into the office. They hoped that the marketing blurbs were true that these apps would increase employee engagement, drive new collaboration, and generally draw employees into offices. I can only imagine the meetings six months after deployment when none of the data – quantitative or qualitative – backed up that hope.
Hope as a strategy is more common in CRE than it might seem on the surface. And technology is a great way to sell hope that there is a magic bullet that can solve a big problem for those CRE leaders. Unfortunately, life is never so clean or easy. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.