How people use the office to get work done is constantly evolving. Workspaces need to support a wide range of activities like video calls, focus work, collaboration, and team events.
And the data shows most office space plans aren't keeping up: VergeSense's 9th Edition Occupancy Intelligence Index found that enclosed focus rooms make up just 8% of space out of 200M+ square feet of measured offices around the world but run at 77% average capacity usage — peaking at 81%.
The space mix in most offices was built for a future that never arrived, and the current space mix isn’t keeping up with modern ways of working.
Identifying what teams need to succeed in-person requires data collection, research, analysis, and experimentation. Occupancy Intelligence helps pinpoint exactly how space is being used so workplace leaders can make the right improvements — and apply the right office space planning strategies for their portfolio.
At the Occupancy Intelligence Summit, VergeSense customer Mark Bell, VP of Corporate Real Estate and Mobility at Raymond James, shared his experience utilizing data-driven insights in the workplace. Here are three examples of how he optimized the workplace with occupancy intelligence.
How To Assess Your Current Space And Identify Planning Opportunities
A good assessment combines three inputs: occupancy data (sensors, WiFi, badges, bookings), booking analytics, and employee feedback. Each one tells you something different:
- Occupancy data shows actual behavior
- Booking data shows intent
- Employee feedback shows the friction that data alone won't catch — the team that gives up looking for a meeting room and works from a corridor, or the desk neighborhood that's "fine on paper" but feels chaotic at 11 AM on a Tuesday
The strongest assessments also pull in industry benchmarks. But benchmarks are only useful if you can act on them.
That’s where Predictive Planning comes in. Powered by VergeSense's Large Spatial Model, trained on 200M+ sq ft of real-world workplace data, it lets real estate leaders model future space needs against actual demand patterns, not assumptions. You can run scenarios across headcount changes, attendance policy shifts, and hybrid work variability to see how your portfolio holds up before you commit to a decision.
The result: a planning baseline grounded in how workplaces actually behave, not just how yours did last quarter.
Conducting A Space Utilization Audit
The most useful audits draw on multi-source measurement across desks, meeting rooms, collaboration zones, focus spaces, and amenities.
Building-level averages won't get you there — they smooth out the patterns that matter most. A building running at 60% average capacity usage might have a third floor pinned at 80% while the fifth floor sits at 35%. A neighborhood at 55% average capacity usage might hide 30% of desks that go untouched all quarter.
Run the audit at the building, floor, neighborhood, and individual space level. Layer in time-of-day and day-of-week patterns. The goal is to see not just whether space is occupied, but how it's actually being used throughout the week — which is what predictive planning tools and occupancy intelligence platforms are built to surface.
Analyzing Workplace Efficiency Gaps
Once you have the data, the question becomes: where is your current space mix out of sync with how people actually work?
Workplace efficiency gaps usually show up in a few familiar patterns. Oversized meeting rooms frequently taken up by two-person calls. Quiet zones that sit empty while open collaboration areas overflow. Phone booths in IT-heavy floors that get ignored. Conference rooms that hit capacity by 10 AM while desks remain half-full.
These mismatches are the heart of most workplace efficiency problems — and they're rarely about square footage. They're about the type of space available at the moment of need. Identifying them is what separates reactive fixes (adding a few more desks) from strategic decisions that actually move the needle.
Identifying Right-Sizing Opportunities
Right-sizing isn't always about cutting space.
Sometimes it means reallocating it. Sometimes it means resizing oversupplied space types. And occasionally — when the data supports it — it does mean shedding a floor or consolidating a building.
The right-sizing opportunities most worth pursuing tend to share a few characteristics: they're tied to a trigger moment (a lease event, an RTO shift, a consolidation decision), they're backed by multiple data sources, and they have a clear business case the CFO can defend.
Look for the gap between what your floor plan says you have and what your data says you actually use, which is where the planning opportunity lies.
3 Office Space Planning Strategies That Optimize Your Workspace
Mark Bell and his team at Raymond James ran three structured projects, each addressing a different planning question, and let the data dictate the decision.
What follows is his playbook: how to right-size expensive space, how to plan for actual employee behaviors, and how to optimize your meeting room mix before throwing budget at the problem.
1. Right-Sizing Expensive Space In A Competitive Market
With the cost of real estate and the need to improve employee experience, getting office design right is crucial. Occupancy intelligence helps real estate leaders understand how space is being used, so they can get the most out of their investment.
But right-sizing isn't just about cutting square footage. In a CRE context, it's about matching supply to actual demand rather than headcount projections — and applying that data around opportunities such as lease events, RTO mandate shifts, and consolidation decisions.
For Bell and his team, the trigger was a consolidation, as they needed to understand how the office was being used so they could make key floor adjustments before committing to a long-term layout.
Challenge
Raymond James recently consolidated four smaller NYC offices into four floors on Park Ave, and they wanted to ensure the space was used effectively, while also addressing any perceived space shortages within team neighborhoods. They were using badge data to track attendance, but wanted to be more confident about occupancy within each neighborhood.
Solution
Bell and his team installed VergeSense occupancy sensors in every space, including meeting rooms, workstations, cafes, offices, and trading desks to better understand space utilization. They used the occupancy intelligence dashboard and usage maps to analyze usage of neighborhoods and shared spaces over time.
Findings
Data showed the actual space needs of each business unit or space group under desk-hoteling and non-desk-hoteling scenarios. They added another floor to accommodate teams and combat space shortages.
When To Rightsize Your Workplace
The right-sizing question doesn't have one answer, it has a calendar. Real estate leaders typically right-size the workplace in response to a few well-defined trigger moments:
- Lease renewals or break clauses — the highest-leverage planning moment, usually 12–18 months before the event
- M&A or consolidation decisions — combining offices, closing redundant locations, or rebalancing portfolio footprint after an acquisition
- RTO policy shifts — moving from 2-day to 3-day, introducing full-RTO mandates, or stepping back to a more flexible model
- Significant headcount changes — growth waves that require more space, or downsizing that frees up entire floors
- Repeated employee complaints about space shortages — a signal that demand is mismatched with supply, and forces you to look at the data to further understand what’s going on
- CFO requests for portfolio cost reduction — the moments where defensible occupancy data turns into multi-million-dollar decisions
2. Office Space Planning For Employee Experience And Productivity
When adjusting office spaces, it's vital to understand how employees use new areas.
Bell's team discovered that data can reveal unexpected behaviors — and that the gap between how a space should work and how it actually works is often where workplace efficiency breaks down.
This is where office space planning shifts from a pure cost exercise into a productivity and experience one. The same desk neighborhood that looks fine on a utilization report can feel cramped at 11 AM, frustrating to navigate at lunch, and uninspiring by mid-afternoon. The spaces designed for collaboration sometimes go untouched while the quiet zones overflow.
Without reliable occupancy forecasting and data, these patterns stay invisible — and the planning decisions made on top of them stay unreliable.
Tools like VergeSense’s Predictive Planning let real estate leaders go further than measuring usage. They quantify the impact or risk of proposed changes to employee experience, so you can model the effects across all aspects of the workplace. Policy shifts, hybrid schedule changes, neighborhood redesigns, and seating reconfigurations can all be tested against real behavior before any decision gets made.
A few workplace efficiency tips worth folding into this kind of planning:
- Validate badge data with sensor or WiFi data before drawing conclusions about how a space performs
- Track utilization at the neighborhood level, not just the building or floor level — averages mask the patterns that drive employee experience
- Look at peak-hour patterns, not just daily totals, to find the moments where space mix actually fails employees
- Pair quantitative occupancy data with qualitative employee feedback to catch friction the numbers don't show
Challenge
During a renovation project in St. Pete, Florida, Bell and his team wanted to understand space usage on busy and less busy days for future redesign strategies. They were already using Alteryx and Tableau to capture badging data from their security system as well as desk booking data from iOFFICE (now Eptura), but wanted floor-level insights.
Solution
Sensors were installed in all of the individual and shared spaces on renovated floors to capture passive and active occupancy. After data was collected, the team used the Space Usage Timeline to get a better understanding of floor-level usage data on the renovated floors.
Findings
The team discovered that open collaboration areas and phone booths on the first two floors, occupied by the IT team, were underutilized. Instead, teams stayed in their individual workstations or reserved office spaces. They are now intentionally communicating changes to the IT team, and educating them on how they can use new spaces in the office. They continue to monitor usage patterns and make adjustments as needed.
3. Meeting Room Planning And Space Mix Optimization
Meeting rooms are often inefficiently used. Despite room capacity, meetings have an average of 1.93 people per meeting, which means most rooms with a capacity of 7 or larger would appear to be underutilized. Noticing a need for updated meeting spaces, Bell and his team conducted an experiment with different types of technology.
The default reaction to meeting room complaints is usually to add more rooms — and it's usually the wrong call. Most portfolios already have enough meeting space; what they're missing is the right mix of sizes and the right configuration for how teams actually meet. A floor full of 8-person conference rooms is a planning problem dressed up as a capacity problem.
Getting the mix right means seeing what booking data alone can't show. A meeting room booked for an hour but used for 15 minutes still looks "occupied" on the calendar. A room held by a laptop and a coffee cup while its owner is in another meeting reads as "in use" to most measurement systems.
This is where passive occupancy detection matters — capturing whether a space is genuinely being used, not just whether someone has claimed it. Without that signal, meeting room planning runs on intent rather than reality, and the planning decisions made on top of it tend to overstate demand.
A few workplace efficiency tips for meeting room planning real estate leaders can apply right away:
- Look at meeting room demand by size band, not by total room count — the right answer is often fewer, smaller rooms
- Measure peak-hour demand separately from average demand, since meeting room friction is a peak problem, not an average one
- Track how often large rooms are used by small groups before adding any new conference space
- Test technology configurations (video-enabled vs. standard) on a small sample before rolling out portfolio-wide
The goal here is a meeting room mix that matches how your teams actually work — and the only way to find that mix is with measured behavior, not assumptions.
Challenge
After converting 30% of their conference rooms into Zoom rooms — video conference-enabled spaces — Raymond James wanted to understand how many Zoom rooms were required to accommodate teams. The renovations were expensive, so they needed to ensure efficient spending.
Solution
Bell's team monitored active usage of Zoom and regular meeting rooms in one of 8 buildings for 90 days, using VergeSense sensors in every meeting space. Findings were to be applied to the other seven buildings.
Findings
They found no need to retrofit additional rooms. The average capacity usage was low at 15%, with peak utilization at 53% from Tuesday to Thursday. They hit 100% utilization only for 1% of working hours. Based on these findings, they'll continue optimizing 30% of meeting rooms and tightly monitor adjustments as needed.
Office Space Planning Strategies: Common Challenges And How To Overcome Them
Even with the right strategies in hand, real estate leaders run into the same set of obstacles when they try to put them into practice. Knowing what those obstacles look like — and how to work around them — is often the difference between a planning project that sticks and one that stalls.
- Inaccurate or incomplete space data.
Badge data overstates attendance. Booking data overstates usage. Planning spreadsheet reports go stale within a quarter. The fix is to layer occupancy intelligence, booking systems, badge records, and employee feedback so each source validates the others. - Resistance to change.
Every workplace decision has detractors — finance pushing for cuts, department heads protecting underused space. Bring stakeholders into the conversation early with credible data, rather than presenting decisions for approval after the fact. - Budget constraints.
Consultant-led engagements can absorb a meaningful share of the planning budget before any decisions get made. Predictive planning tools let real estate leaders model multiple scenarios in-house and present finance with the strongest cost-per-outcome option directly. - Balancing cost reduction with employee experience. Shrinking the footprint without understanding the impact to employee experience frustrates employees. Preserving it burns cash. The strategies that hold up use Predictive Planning to surface where space is wasted and where it's constrained — then redirect the savings.
VergeSense's approach pairs the occupancy data real estate leaders already rely on with Predictive Planning that models the impact of changes before anything is committed. That means running multiple scenarios in-house, pressure-testing assumptions against real utilization patterns, and arriving at decisions that are faster to make and easier to defend.
The result: a planning process built around confidence, not approximation — one that adapts as conditions change rather than requiring a full reassessment every time they do.
Building A Sustainable Office Space Planning Strategy
Bell's team utilized occupancy intelligence and other data sources to guide their decision-making, leading to new findings and solutions.
New ways of working have introduced new workplace challenges, and companies around the globe are addressing them with data playing a critical role. Building office space planning strategies around data-driven insights ensures alignment with how employees actually work.
Key Takeaways:
- Occupancy intelligence makes it easy to identify space shortages, so real estate leaders can confidently right-size the workplace, whether that means adding or removing a floor.
- Understanding employee behavior allows leaders to understand what is needed in their office layout.
- Usage maps clearly depict which spaces are being used, and which are not. Knowing which spaces are being used allows leaders to conduct structured experiments based on specific, data-driven hypotheses.
The Occupancy Intelligence Summit is a quarterly event that brings workplace leaders together, so they can share their experiences and learn from one another. To hear from more workplace experts, watch the full recording.
FAQs about office space planning strategies
What are the most effective office space planning strategies?
The most effective strategies combine measured occupancy data with predictive planning. Right-sizing around real demand, planning for actual employee behaviors rather than headcount projections, and optimizing meeting room mix before adding new rooms consistently deliver the strongest outcomes — especially when applied around lease events, RTO shifts, or consolidation decisions where the cost of getting it wrong is highest.
How do you right-size an office without disrupting employee experience?
Right-sizing the workplace works best when it's guided by data on where space is wasted and where it's constrained. Cutting square footage alone tends to create shortages. The stronger approach is to redirect savings from underused space into fixing the friction points employees actually feel — overbooked meeting rooms, missing focus areas, or overcrowded neighborhoods.
What workplace efficiency tips matter most for space planning?
Layer multiple data sources before drawing conclusions, measure at the neighborhood level rather than building level, look at peak-hour patterns instead of daily averages, and pair occupancy data with employee feedback. These habits surface the friction points generic utilization reports miss — and they're what separate planning decisions that hold up from ones that get challenged.
How is data-driven office space planning different from traditional space planning?
Traditional planning relies on static formulas: square footage per employee, fixed desk ratios, and consultant studies that go stale within months. Data-driven planning uses live occupancy intelligence and predictive modeling to reflect how employees actually use space — and to forecast how they'll use it under different policies, headcounts, or layouts before any decision is made.
Do you need sensors to do data-driven office space planning?
Sensors provide the most accurate behavioral data, but they're not the only entry point. Real estate leaders can start with WiFi analytics, badge data, and booking systems for portfolio-wide visibility, then layer in sensors for high-value spaces where granular accuracy matters. Tools like Predictive Planning can also model unmeasured floors using only a floor plan.