Guiding Lines: Controlling the Office Climate

Implementation of automated life support management systems in office centers helps reduce maintenance staff, considerably saves costs and increases security levels. As a result, the enormous investment in office intellectualization – running as high as 50% of the total cost of the project – pay back within five years and start to bring dividends.

Such buildings are equipped with several codes of access, the highest being available only to the company’s executives, the landlords, dispatchers and security officers. That principle, combined with the strict hierarchy at most corporations, results in the rank-and-file employees finding themselves being held hostage to mandatory centralization.

Often, the grudge that office workers have against advanced systems originates from not being able to open the windows; as a result, they are forced to resort to different methods of tackling the problems of office climate control. For example, employees at the TNK-BP head office have to file a request to their superiors, who then decide whether or not to forward it to the dispatcher. Hours can elapse before the problem is solved.

Similar difficulties may arise for office tenants in business centers that are not fully owned by a single corporation and where the building is occupied by several smaller companies. Such is the case at the Tsaryov Sad business center on Sofiiskaya Naberezhnaya [embankment]. The need to maintain close contact with the landlord’s maintenance service makes life harder for the tenant.

Developers of automated systems for office centers are optimistic. They believe the problem lies not so much with the technology but in the lack of skill on the part of office employees. Many Western offices are equipped with similar systems, with employees able to operate them through computers installed on their desktops and adjusting the necessary parameters themselves.

The systems designed to optimize building maintenance operate successfully in residential and countryside sectors but sometimes create difficulties for commercial property tenants. Still, developers do not intend to give up on their “smart offices”, and each year, as new offices equipped with state-of-the-art intellectual systems crop up across Moscow, the number of workers complaining about poor climatic conditions at their desks is growing.