How JLL built a tool to make workers happier

Not all offices are created equal. As the second largest real estate company in the world, Jones Lang LaSalle has year of experience optimizing the way work environments can make employees happier. These improvement span from the obvious - people like having control over their temperature - to the less obvious, such as how much of an effect sound privacy has on moral and productivity.

JLL had channeled this knowledge into a widely-distributed book, the SMART Green + Productive workplace, but wanted a more efficient way of delivering personalized recommendation to their clients. We worked with JLL to turn this book into personalized recommendation tool.

There were several challenge involved with this task. How could you turn the advice into a standardized set of questions and recommendations? Not all clients needs are equal - some are more interested in the environmental improvements that are possible for office space while other prioritize worker productivity.

Working with the authors of the book, we designed a report that explained how to implement workplace improvements; summarizing findings, comparisons to industry averages, and implementation cost vs productivity benefits.

We also needed a way of analyzing large numbers of office environments and picking out specific spaces that could stand to benefit the most from there improvements. We built an interactive report that could drill down from a high-level, birds eye view executive summary of a portfolio all the way down to a detailed implementation guide that could be delivered to each building manager.

Happy employees are good business

Among most organizations, payroll is the leading expense. Eliminating the barriers to employee productivity can be one of the best bang-for-the-buck optimizations a company can make. It can be hard to understand exactly how much money can be saved with these optimizations, which is who a lot of effort was spent on finding a way to calculate and present estimated cost savings.

Another challenge was getting data into the system. Empathy built a questionnaire platform that allowed managers to specify the areas that mattered most for their needs, along with helpful features such as bulk date entry, templates, and a robust permission system and simple contributor invites.

The end result was a tool that helped JLL customers find incredible value and optimizations. Since it's launch the Green & Productive assessment has assessed over 1000 office environments and processed over 190k data points.

Our tech stack has allowed us to deliver the assessment tool for years with minimal maintenance and downtime, all the white meeting JLL's privacy and security needs. We have leveraged the technology from Green & Productive to held the launch another valuable tool, the BEMA emergency resilience assessment.