海角社区

Nathan Thomas, Director of Innovation at 海角社区Europe Technology & Innovation, has focused on addressing the everyday challenges faced by people and organizations. To overcome those challenges, 海角社区Spaces was created as a human-centric platform that streamlines tasks, optimizes both digital and physical environments, and enables companies to adapt to the future of work.

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Work is not just a place, insists Nathan Thomas. It’s an experience that connects people, ideas and purpose.

He is equally adamant that the workplace strategies introduced by RICOH Spaces help to transform everyday workplaces into dynamic environments that learn and adapt. And by connecting spaces, devices and data, it helps organizations to design workplaces where technology quietly enables people to do their best work, not distract from it.

Nathan is Director of Innovation at 海角社区Europe and is helping to reimagine how technology serves people at work. His team’s mission is simple: make the workplace effortless. From that belief came RICOH Spaces, a human-centered platform that connects people, places and technology to create workplaces that adapt to everyone.

By blending digital intelligence with thoughtful design, it helps organizations streamline their day-to-day operations while empowering employees to thrive in the evolving world of work.

To make that breakthrough, however, he had to start with the fundamentals of any business.

During one client visit, Nathan spent hours in the company’s reception area, quietly observing how people moved, interacted and solved small problems that technology could easily overlook.

He noticed something telling: every time the receptionist received a call, she jotted the message on a notepad, then phoned or emailed the right person to relay the request. It was a simple act of coordination repeated dozens of times each day, invisible, yet vital to how the workplace functioned.

For most organizations, these everyday moments pass unnoticed. But for Nathan, they represented the heart of workplace design, the small frictions that, when removed, give people back time and clarity. "If we can solve that," he recalls, "we’re not just making the office more efficient, we’re making it kinder to the people in it."

In human-centered design, Nathan emphasizes, it is essential to understand what people do, not just what people say they can do. The two are vastly different, he points out, and true problems can go unnoticed.

Based at Ricoh’s offices in Birmingham, Nathan has been with the company for 12 years, heading a 45-strong local team. It is a broad — and challenging — remit.

"I’m responsible for trying to create things that do not exist and trying to imagine the future as much as possible so we can make things that are relevant," he said.

First conceived eight years ago, RICOH Spaces is arguably the most successful example of that mission, at least for now.

A cloud-hosted integrated workplace experience platform, RICOH Spaces is designed to optimize how companies manage their digital and physical workspaces. It provides a whole host of tools that can be utilized across an organization that has offices in different time zones around the world and operates in dozens of languages.

Some of the most popular features are Space and Room Management — everything from an individual desk to a parking space or the board room — as well as a streamlined visitor management system, the use of IoT sensors and data analytics to deliver data on space occupancy, service requests for everything from catering to maintenance and support for flexible and hybrid working models.

Little has escaped the eagle eyes of Nathan’s development team. Another clever function monitors carbon dioxide levels in any given office space, enabling the company to intervene before staff become drowsy and, consequently, less productive.

And while other solutions are available elsewhere, Nathan says RICOH Spaces has the edge on its rivals.

" 海角社区has unique elements that others just can’t compete with," he said. "We have the global availability of the SaaS — Software as a service — platform and we think slightly differently. The approach that we take is human-centric. From the very start of my career, I have been focused on ensuring that we built the right things to solve problems, not just to build things."

That is a trap that other companies have arguably fallen into, he said.

"It’s easy to make things just because you can and if you don’t continuously look at the problem, you can easily find yourself just making things because you want to or because someone thinks it’s a good idea or because you can," he said. "Or maybe you look at a competitor and think that if they are doing something, we should too."

That is not how Nathan likes to work.

"You have to go on-site, communicate with real people and make a point of not just speaking to management layers, because when you do that you get an interpretation of what they think is happening instead of the exact thing that is happening," he said.

Yet another element that makes RICOH Spaces unique is the company’s global availability, Nathan said, along with supply chains with a worldwide reach and the ability to ship hardware and operate effective partnerships around the world.

Developing RICOH Spaces has not always progressed smoothly, Nathan admits, with the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic in the early months of 2020 requiring the team to build out the system more rapidly than originally anticipated, working on customers’ "real-world problems" while 海角社区itself was impacted by the health crisis.

"We had everyone working at home and it was hard to collaborate sometimes, but we had to move quickly, be really agile and figure out how we went from our small idea to serving Ricoh’s huge enterprise customers," he said. "We were not getting small companies with 50 employees; we were getting huge customers with 20 buildings across the world and operating in 20 languages that needed support immediately."

Nathan's approach was to visit sites to speak directly to customers and determine precisely what the enterprise needed, to listen to those actually performing the workplace tasks — and then working "incredibly hard" to create and implement the solutions.

And that experience has stood the project in good stead as RICOH Spaces continues to grow and evolve in a business environment in which workplace management is becoming increasingly critical to a corporation’s success.

That goes beyond merely being able to determine how much space in an office is being utilized, the company’s carbon footprint and identifying waste, Nathan emphasizes.

"There is a lot you can do around that, but I think the focus has to be on ensuring that employees have somewhere they love to come and understand and work together," he said. "If you can really focus on bringing people to a workplace, you can really get the best out of everyone. You can get a better workplace culture, you can get better productivity and you can ensure that things like retention numbers are higher."

The aim, he adds, is to give people the tools "to do what they can do best."

RICOH Spaces has the potential to fundamentally change the way that people work, he said. Employees should not be wasting time laboriously booking meeting rooms or completing repetitive administrative tasks.

"I think there is a way that we can truly help people to focus on their creative elements and the things they can bring as humans," he said. "There are a lot of things that machines can do that should not be our focus. If machines can do that, we can focus on work that is of a higher value. We can unleash their creativity and make a different way of working."