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As one of the world’s leaders in technology and innovation, this Silicon Valley-based company is known for placing a premium on employee satisfaction. The company consistently tops “best places to work” lists year after year, and its corporate headquarter campus sets today’s standard for a world-class workplace.
But keeping its 50,000+ employees (located across hundreds of offices around the globe) productive and happy is no easy feat—particularly for the locally-based facilities teams that are responsible for employee comfort.
Multiple U.S. offices in the company’s portfolio—including buildings in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Austin—have deployed Comfy with the goal of improving the employee experience. With Comfy, the company’s employees are empowered to control their own thermal comfort from an easy-to-use app on their phone or desktop. Meanwhile, local facility managers and the headquarter-based real estate services team glean valuable occupant data from the Comfy Insights dashboard.
The result? A streamlined comfort control system that employees love to use, and actionable data to help facilities teams better optimize their buildings. This tech giant has benefited from Comfy in a multitude of ways, by doing what they do best: investing in their employees and workplace experience.
Streamlined thermal comfort
The company’s L.A. office deployed Comfy in 2014. According to the local facility manager, they didn’t receive a lot of temperature complaints (measured by the number of tickets submitted to the onsite facilities team) prior to Comfy—but that didn’t mean employees were comfortable. An average of over 100 temperature requests per month were made through the Comfy app as soon as it was launched. “The users weren't taking the time to file a ticket previously but they quickly embraced the opportunity to adjust their comfort through the Comfy interface,” says the L.A.-based facility manager.
Today, the L.A. office sees over 94% of company employees using Comfy, with over 83% of users reporting increased satisfaction with their workplace since it was launched.
According to the real estate services team, Comfy has proven to be especially impactful in large group spaces, such as conference rooms, where a room can quickly go from being empty to hosting 25+ people. With Comfy, employees are now able to make temperature adjustments on demand. “Whenever we are in a conference room for more than 30 minutes,” says an employee in L.A., “someone will always use Comfy to keep the space cool for the rest of the meeting.”
Better visibility into building performance
At another site in the portfolio, a well-tuned building based in Pittsburgh under a performance contract, Comfy was launched as a tool to provide insights into the Building Management System (BMS) and energy performance trends, as well as to empower occupants to increase their comfort.
“We implemented Comfy as a way to give visibility to both our real estate services team and our users into a system that was primarily controlled by the landlords,” said the Pittsburgh facility manager. “Whether it is seeing who was putting in requests and how that was affecting the other users in the area or being able to remotely troubleshoot issues, Comfy helped us understand how people were using the HVAC system better.”
With Comfy, the Pittsburgh facilities team gained significant visibility into their building systems. “As we received tickets during the early phases of implementation, it helped us understand the design limitations of the HVAC system. In partnership with our building controls engineer, we were able to make adjustments that we might not have recognized otherwise.”
Data-driven decision making
Back in L.A., facilities used valuable data from Comfy to optimize the workplace for their employees. Prior to Comfy, moveable walls had been put up to create acoustic spaces around the L.A. office. With Comfy request data, however, the facilities team saw that a lot of employees using these spaces were simply too hot. Ultimately the facilities team decided to move away from grouped, closed offices into a more open office layout, prioritizing comfort for L.A. employees.
Increased energy savings
In Pittsburgh, Comfy has also delivered an estimated energy savings of 6.9%, allowing the facilities team to thoughtfully widen their temperature setpoints based on user requests and feedback. Similarly, Comfy has delivered energy savings of 13.9% at a building in Austin since it launched in early 2017.
Happy employees
Energy savings from a workplace experience app like Comfy is icing on the cake from a facilities standpoint. But the true value of Comfy has come from the employees who are excited to use it, and are more comfortable and productive as a result. To date, employees across the company’s Comfy-enabled portfolio have made over 30,000 requests through the Comfy app.
“I love, love, love Comfy!” one employee told us. “Before, I had to put on a heavy jacket every afternoon as the A/C ramped up. Now, my jacket lies ignored and none of my coworkers have complained. It's brilliant!”
Comfy: proving that simple investments in workplace experience are a win-win for workplace managers AND employees. Watch the Comfy overview video.
