You want employees and visitors alike to feel comfortable and confident on your campus. That’s why office wayfinding is so critical. It empowers everyone to navigate to any room in any building, whether they’re going there for the hundredth time or the first time. Done well, wayfinding alleviates employee stress, reduces lost time, makes traffic flow more manageable, and helps optimize your workspace.
But to enjoy the benefits of effective office wayfinding, you’ll have to do more than put up some well-placed signs—especially on large campuses or facilities with many distinct spaces.
Here are four ways to improve wayfinding in your office.
1. Combine wayfinding with office booking
Increasingly, corporate offices are utilizing a hybrid workplace model, where the on-campus workforce is dynamic and office space is more flexible. Hybrid businesses are more reliant on office hoteling, which lets employees reserve whatever space is available instead of having assigned workstations. As a result, employees are much more likely to find themselves working in offices, neighborhoods, workspaces, and conference rooms they’ve never used before.
An unfamiliar work environment can leave your employees feeling anxious about heading into the office, increase the time it takes to get situated, or cause them to be late. Alternatively, they may decide to just reserve spaces they’re more comfortable with—spaces they’ve used before—which can cause your office space to be underutilized.
But what if every time your employees used your desk booking software, they automatically got directions to the space they reserved? Nobody would have to worry about where they were going. As people get used to receiving directions with their reservations, they’d grow more comfortable reserving unfamiliar spaces, helping you make better use of your space.
With Tango Reserve by AgilQuest, automatic wayfinding goes hand-in-hand with office booking. When an employee reserves a space or piece of equipment, the app tells them how to get from Point A to Point B with ease.
2. Consider your visitors
Your employees will naturally become familiar with your campus over time. But you can’t expect the same from visitors. Whether your facilities maintenance team needs to coordinate with contractors, family members stop by for lunch, or you have an important meeting with a client or partner, you want visitors to feel right at home on your campus.
When you see your building and spaces through the eyes of a visitor, it changes how you think about wayfinding. Clear, prominent signage is obviously critical, but it’s also worth considering things like visual cues, color coding types of spaces, and numbering systems to help identify spaces. Your floor design can have a huge effect on how easy it is for guests to get oriented as they walk around the building.
While you won’t have visitors wandering around campus alone, you want them to be comfortable. And that means adding a level of design clarity and wayfinding beyond what your employees need.
3. Establish wayfinding stations
The bigger and more dispersed your campus, the more critical it is that employees and visitors have a designated place to get the lay of the land. Whether physical or digital, you should have kiosks that display a floor plan, so people can see where they are and identify where they’re going (this is where numbering your spaces is especially handy).
Digital wayfinding stations may even have advanced features that let people do things like search for specific places and get directions.
It’s nice to imagine your campus is always full of bright, smiling faces who are eager to help someone find their way around. But you shouldn’t assume that’s always going to be the case, or that it’s the best experience for everyone. Wayfinding kiosks provide an excellent self-serve solution. Ideally, you should have one kiosk per floor in each building, but at the very least, you’ll want one near the entrance.
4. Make it yours
You want your signage and wayfinding cues to be clear and visible. But that doesn’t mean it has to clash with your design or be an eyesore for the people who see it every day. Wayfinding should look and feel like it’s incorporated into your design.
Naming your spaces is a fun way to bring your brand to campus and make your buildings feel unique. You could give each floor or building a theme—something related to your local community, your industry, your brand, or even the building’s history. You may even want to let departments take ownership of the spaces they tend to occupy, and give them the privilege of choosing names of their own.
In addition to naming your spaces, you should also consider ways to make memorable visual cues. This could be as simple as signage and icons that fit your brand guidelines, steering away from generic-looking signs. But you could also design more elaborate ways to visually communicate how you intend a space to be used, or give each room a unique icon people will come to associate it with.
Bring wayfinding to your office booking
Wayfinding is a vital component of the modern corporate campus. And with Tango Reserve by AgilQuest, it’s built right into your office hoteling solution. As employees look at the available spaces that meet their needs, they don’t have to think about which ones they’re familiar with—they can trust that you’ll tell them how to get there.
Want to see what Tango Reserve could do for your business?
