Workplace analytics, or office space analytics, is an umbrella term for measurement of office space usage. Developments in technology has made it easier than ever to measure whatever comes to mind, so it is no understatement to say that statistics is the new black. Today, workplace analytics is applied to optimize office space after resource usage, bookings, and popularity – all to enhance employee satisfaction. However, it is one thing to gather general data, and quite another to collect data for a strategic purpose and understanding the benefits. In this blog post, we will go over the advantages of workplace analytics, and how it can greatly enhance your facility and office.
What is Office Space Analytics?
Like any type of analytics, office space analytics revolves around data and measurement and refers specifically to measurement of the usage of your various office resources. Office usage can be measured for areas in your office, like specific floors, zones, and even entire buildings. But also, more specific resources like desks, meeting rooms and parking spaces. The reason for measuring is often to gain insights on what resources are used, and how much they are used.
Many organizations tend to use manual analysis of their office utilization for specific periods to monitor the number of employees working in the office each day. But there are some limitations to this approach. You only cover a brief period without taking seasonal trends into consideration, and it is challenging to observe the difference before and after any office changes. Therefore, the collected data will not be sufficiently reliable for the business to make
strategic property decisions.
Because of this, modern sensor technology is now used to measure office usage more accurately. Sensors can be deployed easily, run independently and over long periods of time. Together with analytics software, it can give easily understood and insightful data.
In summary, Office space Analytics is an umbrella term for all the measurements that can be made regarding your office resources and is most commonly conducted with sensor technology connected to analytics software.
Why do we measure Office Space usage?
One of the key reasons to adapt an effective office space analytics tool comes down to
one basic fact; “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it”. Very few companies have insights on how their offices are utilized which in effect makes it difficult to know which office resources that are used, and which are not. It is also difficult to enhance employee experience based on what resources they actually enjoy.
Office Analytics can for example indicate to you if an additional collaboration space should
be added based on the usage of the ones you have. You can also gain insights about desks or rooms to optimize equipment present – maybe desks with dual screens are fully booked while desks without are rarely booked? Then you might have a reason to add that equipment to other desks.
But most importantly, after the Covid-19 pandemic, many companies are now moving towards a flexible working model, which creates a whole new set of issues. Low utilization is not only a waste of space, but also an immense economic loss to any business as the cost of a desk in a typical large city is about €25,000 per year. The Covid-19 pandemic has permanently revolutionized the way we work, with employers realizing that a decentralized mode of working is not only practical, but also more economical.
In the future, office space will evolve into a space designed to facilitate collaboration and teamwork, while other aspects of work will be conducted from home or from a shared office space. Office design and office space requirements need to change to reflect this shift from centralized to decentralized working, which represents a real opportunity for substantial cost savings. Only by collecting utilization data for every desk, room, and zone, can a business fully understand how their office space and resources are being used.
For example, if you have 10 meeting rooms, it is likely that they are not fully utilized, maybe some of them are only used 30% of the workday. In these cases, some of the meeting rooms can be changed to something else, like a collaboration space or a quiet work area, or maybe it could be rented out to another company in the building.
The key benefits of Office Space Analytics
Gain Insights on which office recourses you should reduce, and which you should keep.
The statistics provided by sensors and booking software lets you know how office resources are used. With that information, you can adapt your office and enhance it after resource popularity instead of presuming.
Reduce you facility costs.
It is possible to reduce floors, and even complete buildings by using office analytics. This will be especially important when more and more people work from home.
Enable Covid-19 safety measures with guidelines for peak occupancy and advanced contact tracing.
Office space analytics helps you more effectively control office density to make sure that spread of disease is minimized. You can also enable advanced contact tracing to alert employees that were seated close to an outbreak zone. Cleaning staff can also be alerted to clean popular areas more often.
Review and improve your booking systems for Rooms and Desks.
If you have already adapted a booking system for your rooms and desks, office analytics
can help you greatly enhance your booking solution. You will be able to measure how often your booked desks are actually used, and from that, create new and effective guidelines. You can also gain insights about your room bookings and how many truly use the room after a booking is made. You can even see which booked rooms or desks that are the most popular, investigate which qualities that are appreciated and adapt those qualities to other desks and rooms.
Read more about Desk Management and Room Booking.
Fully understand how your office is used and when.
People tend to think and act the same, and what we want to avoid when adapting flexible working is that everyone comes into the office at the same time, especially if we have already reduced office space. With office analytics, you don’t need to directly control when your employees come to the office, you can simply measure it continuously and create guidelines after what you observe. In this way, you can give employees more freedom and at the same time, keep your office spacious and avoid crowding. One example is that if you see that many people like to work in the office during Wednesdays, you can change your desks to only bookable, and through that minimize crowding.
Increase popular spaces while only decreasing unused spaces.
We all want employees to be satisfied with the office layout, and we want them to use all spaces! With advanced analytics, you will be able to see which areas that are the most popular, maybe the desks at the quiet area are always used while 2 meeting rooms are almost never used? Then you can create more quiet areas instead without having to worry about employees being dissatisfied.
Looking for a Workplace Analytics solution?
Flowscape’s solution uses wireless battery-operated sensors to collect accurate, granular real-time data about the precise utilization of every single resource throughout the day. You can observe changes, trends, and utilization to create a thorough understanding of your office environment. Sensors have proven to be the most economic option to monitor utilization, with the annual cost likely to be less than a month of manual measurement.
It is also simple to deploy Flowscape’s analytics solution. Register the desks and rooms in Flowscape’s admin portal and then connect the resource with a sensor by scanning the sensor’s QR code. Simply affix the sensors with adhesive tape, screws, or with the supplied ceiling mount. The sensors are battery-operated so there is no need for additional
wiring.
Feel free to contact our experts for guidance about how office space analytics can be implemented in your office!
Read More
- A guide to Colleague Finding in a hybrid workplace
- Pulling the Plug on your office space? – Trends from San Francisco
- Sensors for Desk Management - What you should choose and why
- Desk hoteling vs. Hot desking - what is the best solution for you?
- What should we do about empty offices and increased flexibility?
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