A smart office is a smart workplace in which workers move freely from desk to desk to engage in meetings and messengers at work and at home. It might sound simple but it is complicated when it comes to building a smart office, and the company running it successfully. This is because each type of work and business requires each different environment and network.

Building customized smart offices

Starting as a furniture company in 1986, Nefs Lab transformed as a smart office design company in 2018. Seeing many smart office builders carelessly repeat the uniform system without studying the types of the work and business, Jisoo Kang, CEO of Nefs Lab, was determined to bring a fresh wind to the industry. 

“A smart office is not about autonomous seating, video meetings and smart work center. It is more about streaming the work flow seamlessly and effectively whether at work or at home. And this requires analysis on the type of work and business before getting into designing. Nefs Lab focused on this and I and my team have built a strong presence in the field with this differentiated consulting and building services.” says Kang.

The analysis also covers corporate culture and atmosphere of the work. Each space of the office is designed according to its purpose and the people working in and the individual space is organically layered and connected with other spaces and teams to make an overall smart office of the company.

Attention to detail

Nefs Lab goes through 4 attention to detail steps to build a perfect and customized smart office: 1) consulting 2) design 3) installation 4) corporate culture. Making the most of its former profession as a furniture company, Nefs Lab boasts unparalleled skills in arranging the furniture according to its purpose and usage. The IT installation, on the other hand, brings efficient layout of the devices such as seating, touch screen, wireless connection, smart board where meeting documents are shared, and many more. The video conference system, in particular, is designed to focus on productivity as well as convenience whether homeland meeting or overseas communications. One of the most popular items, however, is the smart green wall. The plants on the walls naturally purify the air by removing the fine dust and they also look good and calm the mind of the workers. With these advanced smart office tools in hands, Nefs Lab is blowing a new wind to the stereotypical industry. 

Proven effectiveness from Chong Kun Dang, GS Energy, Dow Technology, Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education

Nefs Lab is revolutionizing not only the way we work, but also the culture of organizations with smart work. The company is transforming its vertical organizational culture horizontally, helping employees understand the work of other departments, increasing efficiency and minimizing intergenerational conflict. The company provided smart office consulting to over 30 large corporations and public institutions, including Chong Kun Dang, GS Energy, Aekyung Industrial, Dow Technology, and the Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education Northern Building, and relocated and remodeled office buildings for 10 companies. In the case of Chong Kun Dang, consulting was conducted for approximately 6 months and a smart office was systematically built over 3 years. The company conducted a survey of employees, derived statistical analysis and placement strategies, and built a smart office sequentially, one floor at a time, further improving its completeness. Nefs Lab designed the space by carefully analyzing the company’s work-from-home situation and the working patterns of each department, including researchers and sales staff, and maximized work efficiency by building an open conference room and configuring a lounge for flexible communication between departments. In the case of the Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education, the company built a smart office with the concept of preparing for the next 10 to 20 years. Due to the nature of the work, there is a lot of remote work and business trips, and frequent visits by external parties were taken into account to increase the utilization of space, and even suggestions for lectures and IT introduction were designed to fit the three beats of ﹦ space ﹦ culture ﹦ IT. 

Maximizing smartness of office

“A smart office is about ways to preserve a company’s unique DNA and maximize its advantages. An autonomous seating system cannot be called a smart office unless it is designed to suit the circumstances of the company.” says Kang. Nefs Lab builds a system that can best utilize the company’s unique DNA. The core of a smart office is to create a space that improves work efficiency, communication, and collaboration, and to create and design a sustainable space. The cost of building a smart office is also competitive because Nefs Lab adopts the space and ways of working that are actually needed. Having worked at the United Nations, diversity, equity, and inclusion are key words for Kang. Rather than wasting budget on construction or interior design, employee satisfaction is high because space can be used most efficiently by improving working methods. In addition to the increased efficiency of individual work, employees’ interdepartmental understanding and collaboration rate increased, and the closeness between departments increased, which in turn increased the competitiveness of the company as a whole, and resulted in a very high level of employee job satisfaction. 

▲ Nefs Lab / CEO Jisoo Kang

Pioneering overseas market

Smart offices can help companies reduce costs and maximize work efficiency by increasing time efficiency through optimized office space, and help establish a flexible and creative organizational culture through space innovation. In addition, it can also help companies operate their workforce efficiently by actively utilizing telecommuting and contactless work, which in turn leads to increased productivity. Nefs Lab is transforming the space to enable this sustainable development. “We believe that space should not only play a functional role, but also become a creative space that answers the values and vision of the organization and enables employees to grow further. We are making great efforts to practice this, and in the future, we plan to develop overseas markets as a PM company specializing in the modular market, workplace market, and global corporate culture and interiors.” says Kang.