PacificSource is a not-for-profit family of companies providing health insurance plans for individuals, families, and employers. They employ more than 1,700 people, with offices in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington.
Learn more at pacificsource.com
While the return to office was daunting for everyone, the facilities team at PacificSource had a particularly formidable challenge: rapidly introducing a complex new hybrid strategy across 12 locations and hundreds of desks. Leadership asked employees to work a minimum of one day in the office, but otherwise wanted to give them the freedom to choose when they work from home or from the office. But with all employees previously having an assigned seat in all their workplaces, Laurie Kidd, Director of Real Estate & Facility Operations, knew implementation would be no easy task.
“How do we set up our workplaces so that we can look at our footprint and quantify how many desks we need at each location?” she asked. “How many shared desks do we need, and where should they go?”
Before the pandemic, PacificSource was a traditional workplace, without any remote or hybrid workers. But today, thanks to a deliberate rollout using space management software, about 60% of staff now work a hybrid schedule, sharing desks and workstations.
“We were looking for a solution that would help us not only have a visual of all of our locations and floors, but that would also provide data about our occupancy and vacancy to help us understand what percentages of growth we were seeing, and how much capacity we still had,” says Laurie.
Laurie and her team had already been using OfficeSpace for workplace management, relying on the data within the platform to make their space decisions. Working closely with their OfficeSpace Client Success Manager, they used real-time data to support their new strategy and even fuel more growth. Coupled with user-friendly tools for the end-user, this enabled an incredibly successful transition for everyone on the team.
Laurie Kidd Director of Real Estate & Facility Operations
Using real-time data helped Laurie and her team easily overcome their biggest challenge: ensuring they always have the right number of seats for hybrid workers, especially as more and more employees embrace hybrid working. The facilities team did an analysis of each department to determine the optimal number of shared seats needed for their hybrid staff. They also continue to look at monthly reports from a capacity standpoint by location, and reservation percentages by week and by day.
Better still, since OfficeSpace data is real-time, Laurie’s team can access their dashboards anytime. “It’s great to have that live dashboard,” she says.
While OfficeSpace data helps the PacificSource facilities team in their day-to-day operations, they’re also using this data to help leadership make more informed long-term real estate decisions. By continually diving deep into department data, they can see how many seats they need now—and predict how many they’ll need in the future. This allows them to strategically plan and budget for years down the road.
“Especially if we’re going to invest in new property or build out a new location, having this data allows us to project out and make those recommendations and put those budget placeholders in,” says Laurie. “It makes us look really good to be able to present detailed insights on how our space is being used.”
While many companies struggle getting employees to adopt new working strategies and give up their private desks, PacificSource has enjoyed 100% buy-in from everyone in the organization. Laurie credits this in large part to user-friendly OfficeSpace tools and the mobile app, along with ongoing communication about the importance of using them.
“We made it as painless as possible,” Laurie says.
Staff in particular enjoy using the OfficeSpace Visual Directory® for wayfinding, and to help ensure they’re sitting near the right people when they come in—especially helpful for new hires trying to navigate such large offices.
Throughout their hybrid rollout, PacificSource has been able to lean heavily on their support team in OfficeSpace, deepening an ongoing working relationship.
“I’ve always enjoyed how responsive and attentive OfficeSpace has been, whether it’s uploading a floor plan or making a change to something, or even just answering a question. They’ve always been very timely with those responses,” says Laurie.
Laurie particularly appreciates how quickly they’ve seen OfficeSpace rollout new features, and how much the support team welcomes feedback—noting that they’ve even seen many of their suggestions come to life within the platform.
Like so many companies, PacificSource is in a state of flux regarding their hybrid workplace. But their reentry was seamless, and Laurie and her team are confident they have tools employees will use, giving the workplace team the data they need to drive reliable decisions.
Laurie insists that without their partnership with OfficeSpace, it would have been a bumpy road.
“Our process is so easy to maintain, now that it’s in place,” she says. “If we didn’t have OfficeSpace and the data or the Visual Directory® for all our floor plans, it would have been a totally different story, and probably pretty painful.”
As they continue to test and learn what works best, the team at PacificSource is still refining and adapting to how employees are using their spaces. Employees are moving back and forth between hybrid and in-office work, and some teams are growing. But with OfficeSpace, they have a partner every step of the way.
“We keep getting better at understanding what our capabilities are with OfficeSpace, and the dashboards and reporting modules have gotten really robust over the years,” Laurie says. “It has made my life so much easier!”
See what’s happening across your portfolio in real time. Critical metrics like cost per employee, occupancy, and operational costs are easy to access and all stored in one place.
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Give employees intuitive desk and room booking software that works on any device. Use any combination of flexible seating, creating tailor-made setups to help your people do their best work.
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