The Corona pandemic has further strengthened the long-standing trend toward home offices and shared desks. Dedicated workstations and compulsory presence will soon be a thing of the past. This saves costs and protects the environment. However, the shared office needs to be well organized and secured. A flexible digital identity can help.

Working from home is booming: For infection control reasons in particular, home offices were even compulsory¹ in Germany for a time. However, this regulation was by no means inconvenient for the majority of employees: In a study by IBM, 75 percent of those surveyed said they wanted to work at home at least occasionally, and 54 percent would even like to relocate their office to a home office for the most part.²  In any case, the environment benefits from the new trend, because fewer trips to work also mean fewer CO2 emissions.

Employers also welcome the new trend, as it brings tangible cost benefits when combined with flexible office space concepts. In the shared desk office, there are no longer any permanently assigned workstations and therefore no deserted areas whose users are on vacation, on a business trip, on training, sick or even in the home office. Office chairs and desks are constantly reassigned as needed. Around one in five people already work this way, and no negative effects on motivation or well-being have been observed.

However, the new office concept requires sophisticated building technology and forward-looking, networked resource planning. If the space required is calculated too generously, the cost savings will be reduced; if too little space is calculated, not everyone who wants to work in the company office will be able to find a place there. Access control also needs to be tailored to the shared desk concept. That’s because as workstation assignments keep changing, social control diffuses toward people outside the company. The constantly changing conditions prevent a permanently optimal configuration. The system must constantly adapt. If identity management is distributed over several instances, this can quickly become a burden for personnel, office and security management.

evolutionID offers the appropriate answers to the challenges of the shared desk age. This already starts with the booking of the workstation via an IDfunction process: Those who want to work in the company can conveniently reserve a seat online with their browser and receive a confirmation email. This prevents overcrowding, and the booking figures can be used to calculate exactly how many workstations are really required.

From the information stored in the digital identity, the allocation system can directly deduce whether, for example, a workstation suitable for the disabled is required or whether the employee needs a garage parking space. A locker can also be provided on a temporary or permanent basis, which the employee can conveniently open with his or her company ID card. Of course, access to the office is then also open – and only in the areas that the respective employee really needs and only at the times when he is registered and logged in. These application examples could be continued at will.

Every time the company office is used, a large number of systems are involved. However, there is no need to fear a Babylonian confusion of data and rights in modern systems. This is because the booking system, locker, access control and all other authorization-relevant systems access one and the same digital identity. If an employee loses his or her company ID or leaves the company, all issued authorizations can be revoked with a single mouse click.

Of course, dynamic workstation assignment with its accompanying functions is just one example of the complex uses of digital identities – and the potential of IDfunction. At evolutionID, we always configure and customize our product so that it integrates into the customer’s IT and HR landscape. Because our conviction is: The software has to adapt to the business – not the other way round.

Whoever creates clear conditions saves unnecessary additional work – not only in the shared desk office.

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¹Quelle: Juris.de | ²Quelle: IBM | ³Quelle: Fraunhofer Institut