The Space Crunch: Why Your Office Feels Full Before It Actually Is

You’ve heard the complaints before: the calendar says rooms are booked, employees say the office feels crowded, but when you walk the floor, empty desks are everywhere. As a workplace leader, you’re caught in the middle, trying to explain why utilization reports look fine, while employees insist the office isn’t working for them.

That disconnect is the focus of our 7th Edition Occupancy Intelligence Index, built from Q2 2025 data across over 200M+ square feet, 200+ global enterprises, and 50 countries.

Download the full report or watch the webinar replay to explore the findings.

What the Data Shows

Midweek, midday is crunch time. On Tuesdays at 2 PM, nearly 1 in 5 enclosed collaboration spaces face shortages.

But high use doesn’t always mean shortages. Open focus spaces average 90% occupied capacity when in use yet show just a 5.8% average shortage rate. Meanwhile, some spaces run out even when underused—open collaboration areas see only 19% total time usage but still have a 9.8% average shortage rate.

Enclosed rooms, on the other hand, show a different kind of pressure. Enclosed focus rooms average 77% occupied capacity when active and carry an 8.8% average shortage rate, punching above their weight despite being used only 21% of the time. Enclosed collaboration spaces see the highest active use of any space type (23%), but average just 27% average occupied capacity, suggesting they’re often repurposed for quick syncs, solo work, or informal huddles rather than large meetings.

Together, these enclosed spaces tell a broader story: employees are gravitating toward rooms with structure and boundaries, even if they don’t always use them as designed.

Why This Matters

Picture the office on a Tuesday around lunchtime. The building isn’t at its busiest—desks are open, the floor doesn’t look “full”—but employees are still frustrated. They can’t find a focus room for a client call or a collaboration space for a quick sync.

That’s what a shortage really represents. It isn’t just a crowded moment—it’s a breakpoint: the turning point when the right space becomes harder to find, meetings get delayed, and valuable connections are missed. As the report notes, “Most people won’t notice a shortage at 8 AM or 6 PM. But at 11 AM on a packed Tuesday, it’s a blocker. A moment of missed connection.”

Or as Kelby Green, VergeSense CTO & Co-founder put it: “Employees don’t feel 80% capacity; they feel the pain of not finding a room. Shortages give us a way to measure what people actually care about when they come into the office.”

What the Best Teams Are Doing

The best workplace leaders aren’t guessing or relying on outdated ratios. They’re using data to uncover invisible blockers and redesign spaces around real behavior.

Some of the strategies we’re seeing include:

• Auditing how enclosed rooms hold up during peak hours
• Rebalancing space mixes when underused areas don’t match demand
• Getting ahead of bottlenecks before they appear

But that’s just the headline. The real difference comes from how these strategies are applied and the surprising tradeoffs teams are making to reduce friction without adding more space.

As Brad Golden, VergeSense’s Workplace Insights Lead, put it: “Friction isn’t about being busy—it’s about being misaligned. If you’re running out of one type of space while another sits empty, that’s not a utilization problem, that’s a design problem.”

Get the Full Index

If your office feels full before it actually is, you’re not imagining it, and you’re not alone. The gap between what employees feel and what your dashboards show is one of the hardest challenges workplace and real estate leaders face.

This blog gave you a snapshot of what we uncovered in the 7th Edition Occupancy Intelligence Index. But the full report goes deeper—covering how we define shortages, the introduction of normalized space types (NSTs), a first look at Breakpoint Analyzer, and more insights we couldn’t fit here.

📊 Download the 7th Edition Report
🎥 Watch the webinar replay 

See where the crunch is happening, why it matters, and how to fix it—before it slows your teams down.