LISTEN: How do you get 26,000 people back into their offices? A large part of the answer comes down to employing tech. And this is why British Land has decided to take digital action.
As landlords desperately try to cajole tenants back to workplaces up and down the country, the developer is set to launch a digital engagement app across all of its London campuses, initially at Broadgate, which – at peak occupancy – welcomes 26,000 workers each day.
The app, which British Land has launched with the help of tenant experience platform Equiem, is designed to help people working in and visiting British Land campuses to safely make the most of the amenities, facilities and events available. More importantly, it will also help tenants navigate their return to the office in a very different world to the one we were living in when many of them left back in March.
Launching initially at British Land’s Broadgate campus to coincide with the opening of 100 Liverpool Street, which is a smart building, the company’s head of strategy, digital and technology, Sally Jones, says the landlord has big plans to develop the app. “What we want to do is progressively make it a much broader platform.
“What you’ll see with the first phase of the app that we’re launching will be the classic things you often see – news, events, community – and that will already be bolted onto what we can already do, which is to book space in Storey [British Land’s flexible workspace offering], get in and out of the building, and get visitors in and out of the building.”
The landlord wants to grow the app to help tenants reoccupy their offices at Broadgate, providing a platform (should tenants want it) whereby information on lobby traffic, building occupancy and air quality can be accessed, and where people can book meeting rooms. “For example, the app will be able to tell you what temperature the room is at and you will be able to turn that up or down, and it might be able to tell you how occupied your spaces are,” Jones adds.
Understanding behaviour
In terms of the data insights British Land wants to see from the app, it is quite simple. “What we really want to know is how many people are doing what and what they like,” Jones says. “You can tell a lot from the way traffic moves through your places, the kind of retail offerings people are using, the events that they want and the feedback we get… It will help us much more readily to figure out what events we’re putting on that people like, and it will allow retailers to have a much better connection with people on our campuses.”
After launching and growing the app’s capabilities at Broadgate, British Land will then roll it out at Paddington Central and Regent’s Place. “We don’t yet have a timing for that – we want to see how the app is working at Broadgate first. We want to be able to walk before we can run.”
The launch of the app comes at a time when tech has become a business necessity, with companies having had to undergo a mammoth transition to operate virtually and swathes of the working population continuing to work from home. This drastic transition has led some tech heavyweights, including Pi Labs founder and chief executive Faisal Butt, to claim that proptech adoption has accelerated exponentially (Butt believes adoption will happen in two years instead of 10).
Jones remains sceptical about these claims, as she says the process of making smart buildings or installing new tech into buildings takes time. “You can talk a lot about tech adoption, but I think the pace is still pretty glacial compared to other industries where you don’t rely on putting anything into buildings,” she says.
“But if you asked me ‘have people’s attitudes changed?’, I would say ‘yes’, and if you talk to some people in proptech, what they would say is that people are much more interested now in talking about tech adoption, which was lower pre-pandemic.”
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