Ricoh Australia introduces 'Ricoh Spaces' for hybrid workplace efficiency

RICOH Australia has introduced RICOH Spaces, a dynamic platform aimed at promoting hybrid work models and streamlining businesses. Built on the Google Cloud Platform with a cloud infrastructure based in Australia, RICOH Spaces focuses on workplace analytics, empowering firms to make informed workspace choices using live data to enhance the working environment incessantly.

RICOH Spaces is a pivotal component of Ricoh's overarching hybrid workplace offering, with core functionalities like desk and space booking, visitor oversight, real-time interactive floor plans, digital signage and direction finding. These are all tuned to improve the employee experience. Research from Gartner suggests that a human-centric work design featuring adaptable work experiences, deliberate collaboration opportunities and compassionate management can boost employee performance by up to 54 per cent.

As Tina Economou, Chief Marketing & Sales Officer, RICOH Australia, puts it, "New ways of working demand new ways of thinking about how to achieve the most productive workplace." She adds that while the physical office is enduring, teams are increasingly banking on vibrant and malleable environments that encourage a seamless shift to hybrid working where collaboration can prosper both on-site and off-site. The challenge now is to design a workplace that evolves with the way your teams socialise and collaborate and adapts to future ways of working.

RICOH Spaces provides the necessary analytics and insights needed to remodel workspaces for full utilisation, enhancing productivity and overall workplace experience. Furthermore, it centralises all complex tasks concerning the way people engage with workplace facilities and how visitors digitally sign in upon arrival.

RICOH Spaces has been built from the ground up by RICOH, is fully cloud-hosted for scalability and provides support in multiple languages. It assists in reducing real estate costs, offers insights and data trends for better space utilisation and elevates team collaboration. What's more, being fully modular and scalable means enterprises only pay for the functionalities of RICOH Spaces they necessitate. Based on the specifics of individual customer requirements, these can be scaled accordingly.

The platform is available via a web application and a mobile app, enabling users to manage advanced bookings, check-in times, parking and booking slots. Employees can lodge room service requests and monitor their status, allowing teams to keep abreast of the progress of their requests, thus reducing wasted time. A report in the Microsoft 2021 Work Trend Index shows 40 per cent of workers squander up to 30 minutes a day looking for a space to collaborate.

Facilities managers now have the option of splitting the workplace into zones, allowing manageable insights and easy booking. It also permits capacity management, assignment and analytics at a zone level. The solution's deep analytics features give a real-time overview of how a floor is being used through sensor data, which is also able to track operational aspects, such as temperature, air quality and service requests.