If right-sizing your office spaces, minimizing carbon footprint, lowering your energy costs and minimizing risks on your lease commitments are on the agenda, you've come to the right page. Leasing decisions, workplace redesigns and office relocation projects all have costly consequences - so business cases based on facts and data are an essential part of the input for planning. Professional organizations collect data continuously, but those without data typically start by doing it on a project basis - at regular intervals across a year.
EG Optimaze offers two types of solutions for project-based space utilization studies. Use battery-driven occupancy sensors, or our tablet-based observational tool Active for collecting data - or combine the two. Both methods automatically collect the data to visual dashboards and reports in our software.
When your organization isn't quite ready to use smart office solutions for sharing space, and workplace analytics is all you need - occupancy studies may be enough, for now. To make the case for change. There are at least 10 +1 reasons to measure office space utilization.
Our tools have been used to measure utilization rates in offices, hospitals, universities, schools and laboratories, among others. Although the 'new workplace' is not static anymore, and snapshots of space use don't give the full picture anymore, short-term measurement data can work well as a wake-up call for creating change.
Introducing sensors to your spaces provides an easy and fast way to do more with real-time data than just collect workplace statistics. You can make the data actionable to space users, and help them make the best of it on a daily basis. EG Optimaze Worksense is a world-class smart office solution designed to serve two main purposes:
Worksense empowers choice for employees and supports sharing resources with real-time and booking data on available desks, rooms, parking spaces and more. Employers can promote flexible, hybrid and activity-based working while lowering real estate costs and carbon footprints. One smart office solution for making a better workplace experience, while easily collecting IoT data for continuous workplace management and improvement.
During the space utilization study, you can also gather real time data on the daily activities taking place in your organization. Combining workplace occupancy information with the activity observation results allows you to see how fit for purpose your workspaces actually are. You can then use these results to develop your work environment to better support daily work.
Use our tools to collect the "hard data" on space utilization for your workplace analysis. The method and the duration of of data collection are some of the factors to consider, as are the availability of human resources. For any organization, we recommend to conduct at least four 1-month long space utilization study per year (one per season/quarter) to get a better picture of office use across the year.
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In the past, we used to do workplace consulting too, so we know what we are talking about. Our partners who use our software and sensor technology still do. Here's what we know.
Change can be hard - especially in the initial stages of change, when possibly needing to give up assigned desks or rooms, and begin sharing spaces and resources. So being part of planning change, through involvement in workshops and through surveys can give employees a voice and a feeling they have been heard. Workshops are good for building visions for the future ways of working and to design the intial set of new office guidelines and/or remote work policies.
By eg. conducting employee surveys, you can find out how your staff views their working environment and how satisfied they are with it, but also to gain an understanding of the various degrees of mobility different roles have or allow for. We suggest you collect information on things like:
Use this kind of soft data together with space utilization analytics, to define your optimal, possibly flexible and distributed working environment. Allowing the employee voice to be heard from the beginning supports the communication and change management processes.
If you don't have the skills, tools, time or resources to conduct surveys and workshops in-house, or know-how to create baseline space plans and new work policies - we strongly recommend that you turn to a workplace consultancy that offer these services.