Managing real estate in times of crisis: Communicating with your stakeholders

In part 4 of this blog series discussing smart building tech’s role in times of crisis, we explained how to adapt your building operations for sites that remain occupied even during an emergency.

Adjusting your building operations and encouraging your staff to work from home because of a global lockdown requires flexible and strategic planning. The process of reopening your commercial properties is equally challenging, and is largely dependent on the strength of your corporate communications.

Once you know when and how staff and customers should start to utilize their commercial spaces again, you will need to communicate these exact policies so that all occupants feel secure and trust in your brand remains strong. It’s essential to use building performance data to demonstrate transparency and provide a rationale for changes in policy. Therefore, commercial building management software plays a crucial role. Below are 5 tips for using the Switch Platform to communicate next steps:  

1. Your occupants or managers are probably curious about site operations and asking questions like ‘how many people are currently occupying my floor?,’ ‘when was the last time it was cleaned, and how often?’ or ‘how much outside air is being brought in?’  The Platform provides standardized metrics on building usage, lighting systems, HVAC and more. You can also analyze site trend data with standardized or custom Workspaces and report this to your staff and customers to help bolster transparency and maintain trust at this sensitive time.
   
   
2. Switch Alerts identify patterns in your building performance data to pinpoint the sites and equipment experiencing issues in real-time. A lockdown is the perfect time to audit and refine your Alerts to ensure the right notifications are going to the right people with the correct ‘low,’ ‘medium’ or ‘high’ severity and next steps. This will ensure additional operational efficiency moving forward.
   
   
3. Use Switch Events to assign tasks to specific users with clear priorities and due dates to support ongoing projects or work orders. This portfolio-wide project management tool enables you to delegate actionable projects, clearly indicating the responsible party, status and next steps to ensure that each team member is fully aware of their role in returning to the ‘new normal.’ We also recommend conducting a weekly meeting with your site teams to review the status of each Event and keep team accountability high.
    
4. The Switch Automation App gives your team access to your portfolio data wherever they are, as well as the ability to communicate about and resolve issues in real-time. Ensure that your operations staff have downloaded the app and are comfortable with using it to monitor, update or resolve Events even when away from their laptops.
   
   
5. Work with your marketing team to create a case study detailing your operational handling of the lockdown, the results you’ve driven to date and the key findings that you want to action moving forward. This is an excellent opportunity to demonstrate your organization’s efficiency and flexibility in the middle of a crisis both internally and externally. The Switch Platform enables access to all your building and equipment information in one central, easy-to-use dashboard; include the relevant data to lend additional precision and credibility to your case study.

We understand this is a challenging time, so please reach out if we can help in any way. We’re here to ensure that you can use the Switch Platform to remotely monitor, manage and optimize your buildings – even during a global crisis.

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