Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, commercial buildings such as office towers, retail malls, and hotels sat unoccupied for months at a time, building owners and corporate tenants wondered how to entice people back to their premises. These strategies heavily rely on technology.
In regards to the objective, companies have started incorporating return-to-work plans with smart building designs. The resultant profits and benefits demonstrate that these structures might become the future of the commercial real estate, thus ringing exponential boom to the Smart Buildings Market. This is because they offer highly customized interactions between a building and its occupants.
Smart buildings refer to those structures that provide a real-time feedback mechanism regarding changing environment and the needs of the occupant. Such architectural designs result in making the occupants part of the source of the feedback. They are the beneficiaries of the technology; however, their presence and existence within the building is the primary feeding source for the technology. This is done by a system of data collection and analytics.
The idea has been recently played with only a few European banks. They have decided to integrate technology with employees' work. This has been done by smartening their work stations wherein under-desk sensors have been placed to optimize office occupancy.
The technology works akin to the system that manages parking spots. Using sensors to remove the problem of office occupancy seems like a harmless idea. However, it won't take much to create harm in this manner either.
Technologies that aim at monitoring all actions of employees behaviours while at work are already in existence. Employers can look into the number of hours a given employee was productive, whom they interacted with throughout the day or even how they are feeling. The list grows to a pretty intimate level where employers can wholly capture human behaviour through ad-hoc technologies developed by property technology companies. Such technologies are referred to as background or calm technologies denoting that they capture a user's attention only when absolutely necessary while remaining in the background otherwise.
These technologies are rather pervasive and can at times be invisible to users who are oblivious of their existence. For instance, employees working in an office or customers entering a grocery shop cannot possibly decipher that they are surrounded by sophisticated technological software that constantly interacts with them.
The problem that arises is that although smart buildings have extraordinary abilities, they can also result in the invasion of the occupier's privacy and pervasive control from the side of the employer. However, the issue can be improved through strict regulation of the technology by the government, which will eventually occur as smart buildings gain more popularity.