Take control: Design your Office efficiently with Occupancy Measuring

Employee satisfaction

When you want your employees to visit the office, it is important to tailor the working environment to their needs. This is where office occupancy measuring comes in handy. With tools that accurately measure how your current office space is being used by your employees, you can analyse what their preferences are regarding workplaces. This information can in turn be used to redesign your office space, perfectly tailored to your employees’ needs, increasing their happiness at work.

Additionally, working with room and desk booking systems provides your employees with a sense of security. They’ll be guaranteed of a desk, and they’ll have insights into available workspaces and their colleagues’ whereabouts. This will directly increase collaboration, productivity, and the social cohesion on the work floor.

Cutting costs

Besides employee satisfaction, office occupancy management can also help reducing costs. When you measure your office’s occupancy, you know what space is actually being used and how much office space you need per person. Thanks to the uprising of flexible working, and the appeal to working from home, less people will come into the office on a daily basis. Measuring your office’s occupancy might help you realise that you have way too much office space for your employees’ modern ways of working. You can then decide to let go of this space, lowering real estate costs. Additionally, this will help you reduce your energy bill as well, as there is less need for heating, air-conditioning, and AV equipment. 

Sustainability

Reducing that energy bill is also beneficial for your sustainability goals. You are probably aware of the fact that every business needs to be carbon neutral by 2050, according to the Paris Agreements. It is therefore important you start investing in sustainable office set-ups. Occupancy management can help achieve this, by managing energy bills for lighting and other additions to your office.

How do you measure office occupancy?

Now that you want to measure office occupancy, logically, you need to know how. The key to accurate office occupancy management is a combination of both soft- and hardware. Desk booking and room booking tools can be used to assess your employees’ usage of respectively desks and rooms. Employees book their desks, after which this occupancy data is stored and processed in the form of analytics. A problem that arises, however, is that some people do not show up to a booking, or that others take a seat without having made a booking. This would mean that the actual office occupancy is not accurately measured.

To ensure 100% accuracy in your office’s reports, you can implement sensors. GoBright offers office occupancy sensors that monitor specific usage. Besides motion, desk sensors also detect body heat, so even if you stay very still, the sensor will still know you are there. If an employee made a booking, but does not show up, the sensor will communicate this to the platform and so the room or desk will be released for someone else to book. These room sensors can also be installed to control lighting and other additions to your room.

What types of data can you measure with office occupancy measuring?

The types of data that can be collected by using different soft- and hardware, varies. Firstly, it is possible to see which desks, rooms, and parking spaces are most / least booked. You might for example notice that desks next to windows get booked more often. Why would that be? Is it because your employees prefer to work in natural lighting? You can then use this information to add more desks near windows, to accommodate your employees’ needs.

Secondly, It is also possible to see check-ins (and outs) in rooms and desks, and conclusively the number of no-shows and spontaneous bookings. This will supply some more insights into your employees’ behaviour. For example, the occupancy data might show that your employees don’t organise many meetings with large teams, but much rather spontaneously sit together with a co-worker or two. A data-driven decision would then be to drop a few bigger meeting rooms and instead create smaller, informal seating areas for quick access.

What if I already use analytics tools, such as Power BI?

Some companies already use tools to analyse certain collected data. This is why GoBright has invested in creating an API-extension that enables users to extract data from the GoBright platform. The information from our software can then in turn be transferred to other external dashboards, including Power BI. With GoBright Analytics and your preferred tooling for analysing data, you can use factual evidence to support the decision-making process, suitable for a true data-driven workplace.

Is the privacy of my employees ensured when I measure occupancy at work?

One of the most important aspects of occupancy measuring is your employees’ personal data and privacy. Your employees should feel protected and safe within their working environment. GoBright therefore sets high standards with regards to data protection. This is internationally recognised, because we have proudly received the ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certificates. For any other legal documents, you can access our privacy terms and conditions.

To measure is to know

In short, occupancy measuring provides you with more insights into your employees’ behaviours and preferences. These statistics help you make data-driven decisions and create a working environment that is specifically tailored to what your employees need to collaborate most effectively within your organisation. Prepare for the future by taking care of the present. It is possible with GoBright’s solutions.

Implementing the full set of tools to optimise your office may be a big step. If you have any specific questions about efficient use of your office space, please feel free to contact us. We’ll gladly offer you a piece of advice.