Office managers are responsible for much of the planning, support, and coordination that enables successful teams. If you’re an office manager, you know that you’re constantly moving between tasks, from handling employee issues with the building, to organizing meetings, to planning travel arrangements, to even restocking supply cabinets.

It’s exhausting! So how can Mesa Help?

Mesa by Sidewalk Labs is an easy-install kit that makes managing the electricity and HVAC at the office easy. Mesa was designed to be affordable, uncomplicated, and impactful. The result is a system that makes employees more comfortable, provides you remote access to devices in the space, and cuts costs. It usually pays for itself in about two years and can be installed by anyone without professional help.

Advancing the Company’s Values

Office managers are often ‘the face of the franchise.’ They can be the first person a guest sees when they enter the space and/or a primary point of contact for employees. As such, it’s practically part of the job description that they celebrate and embody company values.

Mesa can show employees that your company values environmental responsibility. Buildings are significant emitters of greenhouse gases in cities. In Austin, buildings account for nearly 50 percent of city emissions. In dense cities like New York, it’s over 70 percent. Mesa measurably reduces your building’s emissions by optimizing electricity use — and exemplifies how your company lives by its sustainability values.

Are you an office that celebrates frugality? Mesa helps you make budget-friendly energy decisions by automatically reducing the cost of electricity, HVAC, and other office-related expenses.

Operating with Compassion

Being treated with compassion and empathy is not only how much of us want to experience our workplaces, but studies also show that “employees who show more empathy are viewed as better performers in their job by their bosses.”

A key component of empathy is “sympathetic concern.” Mesa can help contribute to a culture of “sympathetic concern” because it provides employees with feedback buttons and an app that solicits their feedback about their comfort level in your space. A common office temperature model still used today was created in the 1960s, when offices were predominantly male and workwear was defined as a full suit. As a result, offices were set to be colder. However, a 2019 study from USC showed a gender spread in optimal temperatures: “Women performed better at temperatures between 70 and 80 degrees, whereas men performed better at temperatures below 70.” With Mesa, if people are too hot or too cold, they can report that feedback, and the information will help Mesa’s algorithm learn about patterns in heating and cooling preferences to make the environment more inclusive for all comfort preferences. Mesa generates visualizations, too, so employees and employers can see the hot and cold spots in their space.

Installing Mesa signals that you are an employer who is concerned about your employee’s experience at the workplace and actively works to improve their experiences. (Plus more comfortable spaces mean more productive employees!)

Sharing The Workload

While strong organizational skills allow for more efficiency, one person cannot handle all of the unexpected things that may crop up during a day.

Mesa helps with delegation because its dashboards and data can be shared within your company as well as with your landlord’s team. For example, you, your managers, and building maintenance could each have logins, receive usage reports, and have any alerts pushed to your devices. The tenant team could then focus on electricity use and monitoring employee feedback, say, while the landlord team takes on actioning on HVAC data. Multiple people using Mesa allows for varied responsibility and easier delegation.

And the system helps to reduce everyone’s workload do to Mesa’s automation features. Mesa automatically adjusts workplace conditions, without the need for manual interventions for configuration or fine-tuning. So you and your landlord won’t be running around based on hot/cold complaints or making sure the heating or cooling was adjusted at the end of the day to save energy.

If you’d like to learn more about Mesa and how it can help your workplace click here to get in touch.