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5 Ways to Enhance Agile Working in Your Office With Hot Lockers
The introduction of agile working environments has been a game-changer for office productivity. Hot desking, nature-conscious designs and agile project management have all played a crucial role in transforming office culture across the Western world.
The steep decline in private desks has also caused a surge in the need for manual lockers, with hot lockers becoming an increasingly popular storage solution in flexible working environments.
However, intelligent hot lockers can be much more than a storage solution: they can trigger huge performance and financial growth for your business. Here are five reasons why:
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1. Secure Storage
One of the biggest challenges of agile work environments is that hot-desking employees have no secure desk space to store their private possessions. These range from family photos to important files and the spare clothes needed after the cycle to work.
Hot lockers give your employees a personal space to keep their belongings. They are fully wireless and blend perfectly into the agile environment. Your staff will have their own personal locker, though the security team can accommodate swaps and changes at the touch of a button and you don’t even need to change your key card!
Across the board, using contactless hot lockers adds another element to your agile environment, and can contribute to heightened productivity and job satisfaction.
2. Superior Logistics
Agile working is all about dynamic action, intuition-based technology, and constant resource optimisation. Hard-wired lockers defy all three of these constructs. For a start, 25% of people lose their keys every month. When a key is lost, businesses frequently have to call in an engineer, visit a locksmith, and have a lengthy ‘responsibility’ conversation with the employee.
All the while, the employee has no access to their belongings and the company is losing resources and profits. There’s the downtime experienced by employees, but also ongoing costs of repairs, replacements, and reallocations.
With a hot locker system, your security manager can log into the system, deactivate the old key, and assign a new one for the same locker. The whole process takes a couple of minutes or less.
In a dynamic, agile environment where the lockers are used by different employees every day, manual key allocation becomes a time-consuming logistical nightmare. Keys are lost, employees get their lockers mixed up, and productivity suffers as a result.
Hot lockers use intelligent management systems which reallocate every locker, update every card, and all without a single minute of lost time.
3. Powerful Analytics
Most businesses that commit to an agile framework are big advocates of data and analytics to foster workplace improvements. With smart lockers, the entire locker fleet is managed digitally and provides yet another source of valuable data for your analytics team.
You can see which lockers are used, how often, for how long, and by whom. You can monitor the data to discover trends in employee behaviour, which lockers are most popular, and so much more. Our engineers can see whether lockers on certain floors are more popular, and redistribute lockers to reflect that.
For businesses reaping the rewards of big data and analytics, using hot lockers is a no-brainer.
4. Security
We are now carrying more and more expensive devices and possessions with us at all times. Smart hot lockers feature enhanced security compared to old-fashioned manual lockers, so staff can feel confident leaving these expensive possessions in their work lockers whenever they need to.
Less secure storage (e.g. traditional lockers) might put employees off using expensive technology on the commute, and concerns about workplace theft may distract them during the day.
It is also possible to deactivate a locker key in seconds if you think it might have been stolen. You can track the precise time the locker is opened and match this with security feeds or eyewitness accounts. This provides full accountability and reduces workplace theft.
5. Real Cost Savings
It’s hard to overestimate just how heavy the cumulative cost of locker repairs and upkeep can be. Even for relatively small businesses, the cost of operating an entire fleet of hot lockers can be offset by just a handful of manual malfunctions.
Since hot locker systems can be retrofitted into existing locker units, the initial investment is small – from there it’s a simple matter of enjoying the return.
There is also a less direct financial benefit. Implementing a smart locker system results in more motivated staff, slicker operations, improved agility, and a significant reduction in necessary management resources. Combine all of those things with a strong business model, and it can only lead to improved profitability!
Bottom line
From increased individual productivity to powerful analytics and major cost savings, hot lockers can have a transformative effect on your agile business. Get in touch with the eLocker team if you would like to discuss how smart lockers can support agile working in your office.