May 07, 2021
By Kate Camerlin

What Is Workplace Management? Understanding the Basics

Working in management or organizational roles within a successful company, no matter the size or industry, goes hand-in-hand with making a number of workplace-based decisions.

These decisions span a range of choices—from determining where new equipment and assets should be stored to debating how to cut costs while automating workflows.

But how exactly do you cohesively manage all of these decisions, requests, inquiries, and choices? What is needed to ensure a frictionless workplace where employees are safe and happy, overall execution is seamless, and the general management of your workplace is as productive as possible?

This is where workplace management can make an enormous impact.

When done correctly, workplace management can help you tackle all aspects of your workplace’s functions—from morale and space management to maintenance and moving (and everything in between).

This article will dive into some of the basics of workplace management to help you gain a stronger footing in the topic—then, we’ll tackle a few simple ways you can optimize your own workplace management strategies.

What Is Workplace Management?

Let’s start with a simple definition. Workplace management is the process or strategy put into place by companies—of any size, industry, or scale—to zero in on efficiency, productivity, cost-cutting, and overall management in a workplace or office setting. While many people think this falls under the category of real estate and facility management, it extends into its own entity, reaching into categories like employee morale and satisfaction, security logistics, optimal space utilization, financial analysis, asset management, and beyond.

Workplace management covers an incredibly broad range of workplace considerations, like:

  • Equipment layout and space management
  • Employee space optimization
  • Future space planning
  • Employee satisfaction and workplace environment
  • Safety and security
  • Automation and seamless workflows
  • Overhead and cost

Ultimately, if a category falls under the overall well being of a company—both physically and beyond—it can be considered a facet of workplace management.

Understanding Workplace Management & How It Benefits Your Work Environment

Effective work management practices are—in our opinion—essential to any productive and efficient business. And now, with a foundational knowledge of workplace management in your back pocket, we’re willing to bet you might agree with us.

Some of the benefits of workplace management are pretty obvious. With a system in place that helps you monitor and manage your workplace’s ins and outs, you experience advantages like:

  • Improved data that shows how employees are using your workspaces, so you can make decisions more quickly
  • Easier energy tracking and carbon footprint monitoring, so you can achieve next-level sustainability and efficiency
  • Improved ability to focus on customers
  • Consistency in how you manage data and track facilities equipment

Workplace management systems—whether it’s a manual process or cutting-edge IWMS software—should ideally provide you with the end-to-end solutions you need to ensure each and every cog in your company’s machine is running smoothly.

The list of benefits could go on—but for now, we’ll just tackle a few of the specific, leading benefits we believe workplace management strategies and systems can bring to companies of any size, scope, or specialty.

Provides a Single, Comprehensive Portal for All Requests

Imagine all of your assets, data, work orders, employee information, project analysis, and more in a single place—that’s cohesion. If you’re currently operating with a workplace management system that isn’t comprehensive and compressed into a single software platform or tool, you’re likely moving from one system to another, increasing the risk of error along the way. With a single portal (or a single strategy) for all your workplace management needs, you can easily manage, maintain, and collaborate on all of your company’s requests.

Enhances Asset Management

Track life cycles of your assets, create work orders and manage your technicians’ work orders—with a workplace management system in place, you could simply and easily monitor and maintain your equipment to ensure that you’re cutting costs, improving your efficiency, and getting the most out of your assets.

Creates Understanding of Workspaces

Better understand and manage the space you do have—and see how you could optimize it in the future, too. Workplace management strategies typically help you find better ways to create space, design a workspace, and manage facets of that workspace. This isn’t just a benefit for your physical space, but also for your employees’ morale and overall take on their working environment.

How You Can Improve Your Workplace Management Skills Today

Believe it or not, every business has a workplace management strategy—even if that strategy is scattered and unorganized. The best way to improve your workplace management process is to take a good, hard look at how you handle it now, and then honestly evaluate what it would take to enhance it, step by step.

Here are a few introductory moves you can make to begin evaluating your own workplace management skills and move toward improving them.

Identify Pain Points

It’s nice to take note of the things you’re doing right, but you’ll learn the most from what you’re doing wrong. Take a good, hard look at the problems, the pain points, and the issues you’re facing. For example, is it time-intensive to track real estate costs, leases, or equipment maintenance? Or do you need an easier way to know how your employees are utilizing their workspaces? Where are your current strategies failing you and why? What needs to be changed before you can improve as a whole?

Collaborate with Teams to Brainstorm Issues

Even if you are in the primary workplace management role, it’s impossible to come up with solutions for an entire company on your own. You need to understand all of your departments’ pain points, their ideas, and what they think needs to change within the workplace. You can’t enhance your workplace management solution if you’re not receiving feedback from your entire team.

Invest in Tools & Software that Make Key Differences

If you’ve invested time and analysis into your current business processes, have collaborated with your teams, and have come up with actionable plans without seeing the results you’re looking for, it might be time to consider a workplace management software solution. These tools are designed to be all-in-one portals that provide end-to-end solutions for your workplace management needs. Whether you need to manage your assets, create time slots for employee room rentals, or deduce new ways to cut overhead costs, these functional and intuitive tools can typically help you come up with creative and effective solutions for your workplace management issues.

Nuvolo—Your Workplace Management Software Solution

When it comes down to it, your business deserves tools that will make your workflow more seamless, your employees happier, and your productivity as streamlined as possible.

Without a software solution that helps you identify, monitor, and manage your workplace (and all the small but crucial facets within it), you’re missing out on key tools that could help you create a happier, healthier, and more efficient workplace. That’s where we come in.