HubStar
Informing and Guiding Hybrid Strategy with a Dynamic Workplace Platform

The rise of hybrid work has put significant pressure on organizations to re-evaluate how much office space they need and how it should be designed to elicit people’s best work.

Shedding underutilized space to optimize costs and reduce emissions increases the employee-to-workspace ratio, as multiple employees share the same space at different times, for different purposes. As a result, effective space management has become a critical element of business performance.

Most organizations, regardless of whether they plan to reduce or expand their offices, are reconfiguring their spaces to meet rising employee expectations, strengthen culture and improve results.

The complexity of modern work patterns and the need to achieve greater workplace ROI - by leveraging physical connection as a performance enhancer – presents challenges that cannot be managed by yesterday’s antiquated tools.

Imagine if hybrid strategy and portfolio adjustments were not just a guessing game, but informed through a comprehensive Dynamic Workplace Platform. This is where HubStar comes in: a revolutionary platform designed to inform and guide workplace leaders.

“Our vision is to accelerate the world’s transition to smarter ways of working. We achieve this by equipping workplace leaders with technology that leverages the power of machine learning to remove guesswork from decision-making,” says Jane Young, Vice President of Growth. “Workplace leaders who believe in a people-first approach can use HubStar to multiply their impact across three dimensions: people, organization and planet. Firstly, by building human connection to achieve new levels of wellbeing, collaboration and productivity; secondly by delivering workplace experience ROI to unlock growth; and thirdly by reducing excess carbon emissions to hit sustainability goals.”

Bid Adieu to Underutilized Workspace

One of the primary concerns in developing a workplace strategy today is determining the amount and type of space needed to achieve business objectives. Asking people what they want is not sufficient, it is crucial to measure actual behavior and use of space. Space was underutilized before the pandemic, yet focus on the issue has intensified as leaders grow intolerant of underperforming offices weighing heavy on their balance sheet.

HubStar balances occupancy and experience to elicit the best individual, company and societal outcomes by providing real-time measurement, occupancy prediction and optimization of space; while encouraging face-to-face get-togethers.

Its patented algorithms generate and consolidate data from multiple sources, including WiFi, sensors and scheduling, to provide an accurate and comprehensive view of actual occupancy over time. This is especially valuable as companies struggle with data quality and accuracy, reverting to unreliable sources like manual counting and badge data. Some have vast amounts of dispersed data without the means to unify it and extract insight. By providing actionable insight and intelligent suggestions, HubStar empowers companies to make informed decisions and avoid costly mistakes, accelerating business lifecycles.

Beyond measuring actual utilization, HubStar enables clients to predict future occupancy based on historical patterns. In some instances, clients use HubStar’s predictive analytics to shut down underutilized floors on Fridays or Mondays to reduce energy costs and emissions; and predict how much food to order for their cafeteria.

Threshold alerts can be set up to notify when spaces are nearing full capacity then corrective action can be taken in HubStar to divert people into alternative spaces.

Intelligent space management that’s future-proof

A key challenge introduced by hybrid work is matching the supply of space with hybrid demand. Space planners, until now, relied on systems built for the old world of work, unable to cope with today’s ever-changing workspace requirements and complex, dynamic assignment of people to space.

With some organizations adapting floor plans on a daily basis, pre-pandemic space management and space planning tools are no longer suitable for today’s dynamic work environment.

HubStar’s patented algorithms accelerate and simplifying the process of keeping rapidly changing floor plans up to date, ensuring consistency across applications and unrivalled accuracy at any point in time.

This new approach to space management not only reduces errors and increases agility, but handles the complexities of assigning people to spaces amidst ever-shifting hybrid work patterns such as shared desks, building or neighborhood assignments, shift work and assigned seating.

By enabling supply-demand matching and gathering valuable data on preferences, behaviors and work patterns – combined with the ability to measure what actually happened versus the plan – organizations can create and optimize flexible space configurations with speed, ease and accuracy like never before. Space planners can automate manual tasks and bring new strategic insight and change management capability that significantly improves workplace experience ROI.

Streamlined Booking and Purposeful Connection in the Office

The quality of employees' workplace experience determines whether they return. People should be guided towards spaces that are neither too crowded nor too sparse to meet their expectations, with access to the colleagues, desks, spaces and equipment they need to be productive.

This is where HubStar’s scheduling and workplace experience capabilities come in, enabling any resource to be managed, measured and booked, with easy-to-configure automations and frictionless check-in. Employees can schedule rooms, desks, parking, focus booths, yoga classes, sleep pods and more.

Workplace leaders who believe in a people-first approach use HubStar to multiply their impact across three dimensions: people, organization and planet

HubStar leverages machine learning to eliminate friction, making the reservation process quick, easy and efficient. By understanding individual habits and preferences, team dynamics and the availability of resources, HubStar intelligently suggests the best time to come in, the best desk or space to use; and will even book everything for the employee to reduce remote-working inertia, while increasing the probability of an experience that justifies the commute.

HubStar facilitates social events by suggesting which groups employees should join, sending invitations, tracking attendance, coordinating catering or specific rooms layouts and simplifying the process of bringing people together at the right time and place to create camaraderie and belonging.

Leading with Proven Success

Numerous customer stories attest to HubStar’s remarkable success record. A case in point is a Fortune 500 company that chose HubStar because they wanted to adopt a data-driven approach to designing their spaces and optimizing their real estate portfolio. HubStar helped them by measuring utilization across 13 buildings and providing a clear picture of occupancy to 63 floors, to understand occupancy and support decision-making.

Unifying utilization insights, using data from WiFi and sensors, HubStar enabled them to redesign major hubs, increasing collaborative spaces; and drive lease renewal decisions, including decommissioning an entire building, saving them 86,000 square feet of space.

Another case involved one of the UK’s largest universities, Sheffield Hallam. They used HubStar to determine how to improve utilization and timetabling efficiency by measuring classroom occupancy to inform decisions on the type and size of space needed for each class.

HubStar’s success stems from its team’s unrivalled experience in workspace management, coupled with a culture of innovation that is reflected in the company’s commitment to machine learning and automation.

This expertise, coupled with insights from customers, has ensured that HubStar delivers unbeatable time-to-value, ease of implementation and future-proof flexibility that de-risks the buying decision.

The platform is engineered for performance at scale, eliminating concerns around reliability and adaptability, enabling clients to achieve rapid results. Combining its configurability, rich out-the-box functionality, plug-and-play integrations and options for single point solutions or an all-in-one platform, clients can get up and running with ease and start evolving their workspaces of the future.