With more organizations increasing the requirements for their employees to spend time working in the office, workplace leaders must take a proactive, data-driven approach to optimize for both cost and experience. Maintaining excess office space that is not used consistently is financially untenable, but providing the right amount of space and an optimal design is a requirement if you want to create a commute-worthy experience for your employees.
This leaves enterprises grappling with important decisions about striking the right balance between cost savings and providing employees with a good in-office experience.
After working with over 200 companies who have already adopted occupancy intelligence to optimize their portfolio and spaces, we’ve distilled their process into a blueprint that you can apply to your own workplace. There are three key elements to consider:
For each one, we’ll provide guidance on the steps you can take to get started right away, including:
And with that, let’s get started.
This is often the most daunting aspect of any real estate leader’s job after bringing their teams back to the office because:
Here’s where VergeSense comes in.
The data you must collect includes:
VergeSense Entryway Sensors allow you to capture this data, and are deployable across the ingress and egress points of each floor within your offices. These sensors anonymously capture data about people entering and exiting your space with 95% accuracy. This raw data is processed on-device by AI and translated into trends, insights, and recommendations to help make your decision-making more straightforward.
Note: You may have badge data available to you today, which can serve as a helpful starting point, but it’s worth noting that while badge data is directionally correct, “badge tailgating” and the absence of “badging-out” diminish badge data accuracy.
Once you have people count data, you’ll be able to understand hybrid working behaviors and patterns throughout the days, weeks, and months across two dimensions: the building level and the floor level.
With this data, you’ll be able to evaluate granular building and floor usage vs. your target utilization rates and answer the following questions:
These insights will allow you to accurately identify how many people are using each office and floor, when they’re using them, and how often.
With these insights, you can ultimately identify excess capacity across each building and floor within your portfolio. Your decisions will be unique to your workplace strategy, but here are a few examples of how VergeSense customers have used these insights to make decisions:
We often hear that employees are frustrated with the lack of available collaboration space. After commuting, the last thing they want to do is deal with the frustration of ghosted-meetings and meeting-room-squatters. It’s enough to make them never want to come back.
We speak with workplace leaders who lack insight into the scale, frequency, and locations of these meeting room space shortages. It’s this lack of information that leaves them unable to make optimization decisions.
Here’s where VergeSense can help.
The data points that you’ll need to collect are:
VergeSense Area Sensors are the only occupancy sensors on the market that are able to capture and analyze this kind of data for two reasons:
VergeSense AI processes these data points and helps you identify actual space shortages vs. perceived space shortages.
The VergeSense Space Usage Timeline gives you the intelligence you need to identify ‘breaking points’ that occur when you’re running out of meeting spaces:
VergeSense provides all customers with Usage Maps, which allow you to visually identify:
Additionally, VergeSense integrates with many of the leading space booking platforms, such as Google Calendar, Teem, Robin, Office 365, Condeco, and FM Systems so you’re able to:
There are multiple ways that these insights can be used to increase space availability to align with your workplace strategy, but there are three common decisions our customers make:
Enabling automatic room release & automatic room booking By integrating your space booking platform with VergeSense, you can immediately increase the availability of your bookable spaces.
Example: A global management consulting firm used VergeSense to uncover that 40% of booked meetings were ghosted, and by using this functionality to return those spaces to the calendar, they avoided building new conference rooms to solve the same problem - a cost avoidance of $50k/month.
Empowering employees with real-time space availability for frictionless booking Finally, you can put the power of real-time space availability data into the hands of your employees in two ways:
Example: A global pharmaceutical customer used VergeSense to push real-time space availability data into their custom wayfinding app. With a large campus, this data greatly improved employee experience with finding and reserving bookable spaces.
As we’ve written about in the Occupancy Intelligence Index, the way employees use spaces today is different. Companies have different in-office policies, employees work differently within the spaces they’ve been provided, and leadership is handling requests for more space..
Without actual space usage data:
Here’s where VergeSense comes in.
The data points that you’ll need to collect are:
As we mentioned in the previous section, VergeSense Area Sensors are designed to capture all three of these points due to their wired and wireless capabilities, as well as their ability to detect and capture passive space use.
By evaluating the time and capacity usage by neighborhood, workplace leaders can identify which neighborhoods are over or underutilized. This includes understanding peak times, the average number of users, and how space is utilized on a day-to-day basis. This will help you understand popular areas, how efficient spaces are, and opportunities for repurposing space.
The Space Usage Timeline will help you uncover space shortages by neighborhood. It’ll even help you understand time, frequency, and location of shortage by team. This supplements insights around space efficiency and availability by neighborhood.
Adding or removing space from one team often comes at the expense of another team’s space. By looking at the floor holistically, you can understand how different neighborhoods perform to make informed decisions about where resources should be allocated. This comparison can reveal which areas require more space based on actual usage and which can afford to downsize.
With historical, team-based data and insights now at your fingertips, you’re ready to start making decisions that lead to optimized neighborhoods.
With neighborhood level insights, you can utilize the historical space usage data to engage in factual discussions regarding space requests from different teams and as appropriate, reallocate space more effectively within the office. This approach moves the conversation away from anecdotal or emotional arguments to data-driven reasoning.
Example: The VP of Real Estate at an investment banking firm needed data to facilitate conversations around additional conference room space requests within a particular neighborhood. Many space request discussions were emotional, anecdotal, and not centered around data. Using VergeSense data, they benchmarked conference room usage within a neighborhood to understand the threshold for employee complaints (70% conference room usage) and developed a data-backed system for evaluating space requests.
Similarly, neighborhood-level data and insights will allow you to develop a framework for neighborhood planning that is based on actual historical usage and projected workforce plans. This could involve setting sharing ratios for common spaces based on past data and adjusting them as your team sizes and working patterns evolve. This system should allow for flexible changes to neighborhood plans based on ongoing data collection and analysis. This ensures that the workplace can adapt to changing team sizes, work patterns, and space requirements without significant delays or disruptions.
As you’ve seen, occupancy intelligence empowers you with the ability to collect granular occupancy data and insights so you can make impactful decisions to right size your real estate portfolio, increase space availability, and improve neighborhood planning. If you’re ready to get started, consider a consultation to discuss your specific workplace priorities and strategy, and learn from the experiences of other companies that have successfully implemented these insights to optimize their office space and realize significant returns on investment.
Whether you're looking to enhance employee satisfaction, reduce costs, or both, a tailored approach based on solid data can help you achieve your workplace objectives efficiently and effectively. Want to learn more?