In the face of a rapidly changing workforce, corporate real estate executives (CREs) who want to maximize the value they bring to their organization must stay ahead of the technology curve, particularly when it comes to managing workspace. Effective CREs are able to increase the ROI of real estate without sacrificing workforce productivity — and they can demonstrate the potential cost-saving benefits to C-level executives. They leverage emerging real estate management technology to make informed decisions about workspace changes, thus ensuring that those changes are both cost-effective and meet the needs of the changing workforce, now and in the future.
In the past, CREs and facility managers could design a workspace using a few simple guidelines, such as ratios between core, common and dedicated space along with square feet per employee. Once a space was filled, monitoring it was usually a simple matter of keeping track of the number of available seats and maintenance costs. The matter is no longer so simple.
Changing Times Beget Changing Workspaces
The growth of the mobile workforce, including the growing number of employees who regularly work remotely, has necessitated workspace changes. A greater emphasis on collaboration has led companies away from the traditional model of cubes, offices and conference rooms. Floor plan designs now include a lot less personal space and a lot more collaboration space, and the number of employees who utilize a location exceeds the number of available seats.
The economic pressures of the last five years have compounded these changes, making workspace density — that is, the ability to grow headcount without increasing space — a higher priority. Further complicating the picture are the many new types of spaces for employees to utilize: for example, drop-in space, huddle spaces, and mixed-use spaces such as cafeterias that double as meeting spaces. All these changes have influenced the way CREs and facility managers design, monitor and track the performance of space.
Planned vs. Actual Usage
In order to understand whether space is being properly utilized, CREs must look beyond the number of occupied spaces and collect data depicting actual usage.
Pulling data from reservation and scheduling systems is a good start to understand how employees planned to utilize the space, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate how the space was actually used.
It can also be difficult to judge the use of nontraditional space. For example, companies are increasingly providing huddle spaces where small groups can meet, and as a general practice these spaces cannot be reserved in advance.
Technology Supports Monitoring and Measurement
To find out how spaces such as these are being used, many companies are turning to pyroelectric or passive infrared (PIR) sensors — similar to those used in automated lighting systems — to monitor and track usage. They can also be used in traditional conference rooms to collect actual utilization data to compare against a reservation system’s schedule. This provides insight into more than just how often the space is occupied: It also provides insight into what percentage of time organizers fail to show up for a meeting or whether meetings tend to run long or end early.
In a similar fashion, technology is being used to track employee usage of a location. Because CREs and facility managers can no longer simply count the number of employees assigned to a seat, they are using traffic-counting sensors (long utilized in the retail sector) to count the number of employees on a floor or within a building.
Trends Help Illuminate Future Needs
Such data allows management to perform long-term analysis of a location’s effectiveness.
Trends are revealed as they develop over time; for example, which days of the week are the busiest, or which months of the year experience the highest occupancy rates. Having this knowledge provides objective data on whether a space needs to be expanded or could perhaps be reduced in size — thus producing significant cost savings.
It also provides a means of comparing locations between portfolios without relying on the subjective analysis of a local resource.
Collecting the data is only the start. Once reservation data, sensor data, traffic counts and other traditional facilities maintenance and costing information is collected, it must be combined and stored in a common repository for analysis. As a result, innovative data-analytic platforms, already common in financial and operations analysis, are beginning to appear in facilities and corporate real estate departments.
Business Intelligence Helps Makes Sense of Copious Data
The volume of information being collected dictates the use of these types of emerging business intelligence technologies to help analyze the data and view trends in a visual format. The combination of a data repository filled with objective data and a powerful analysis tool gives CREs the ability to look at the performance of their space in ways they could not in the past and to communicate key cost-saving measures to other C-level executives.
When collecting data for analysis, it is important for CREs to understand how the data is being collected and to recognize any limitations of the method or technology being used. When companies pull reservations from a scheduling system, they will often find inaccurate information in the system. For example, employees who have left the company may still have future meetings reflected in the system.
This underscores the importance of simultaneously leveraging sensor and analytic technology to obtain a comprehensive, accurate view of the space-utilization landscape.
Correctly Collecting and Analyzing Information to Manage Workspace
When utilizing data captured from traffic counting devices — whether those be sensors, traditional badge entry systems, or even digital room displays — CREs must be sure to understand any possible limitations. For example, does the traditional badge entry system allow multiple people to pass through on a single badge swipe? Are there unmonitored entrance and exit points that will throw off counts? Could PIR sensors be picking up stray activity outside of the space being monitored?
It is also important to understand events that might impact the accuracy of data being collected. For example, do large groups tour the facility on a regular basis? Is there a major renovation taking place that affects space usage? Keeping records of activities that might have an impact on data (something technology may not be able to do alone) will help explain anomalies that appear during analysis. Anything that compromises the quality of the data being collected also compromises the data analysis.
Turn Collected Data Into Meaningful Visualizations
Oftentimes collected data is neither easily accessible nor in a format that makes it immediately available for analysis. For example, sensor data needs to be cross-referenced with spaces. Reservation data is pulled from one system, while maintenance and costing information comes from other sources. Information technology controls data warehouses and analysis tools, but CREs may have to coach them on this technology so that they understand the data that is being collected and how it should be combined. Once this process is complete, it is much easier to use a good business intelligence tool to analyze the data and create meaningful visualizations.
Though, in the past, the cost of business intelligence tools was prohibitive, the emergence of multiple high-quality offerings has brought the cost down dramatically. Similarly, such tools reduce the level of technical skill required to create meaningful visualizations.
Avoiding Analysis Pitfalls
Perhaps the two most important things for CREs to do is to monitor utilization trends over time and to compare the operational metrics of all facilities against one another. When doing so it is also important to understand the impact different ratios of mixed-space types may have on the analysis.
To meaningfully compare the efficiency of diverse locations, the locations should have similar operational models. Analyzing traditional assigned space against high-density collaboration space may be useful for understanding the impact that making the switch would have on the organization’s portfolio, but it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison and so is not a good indicator of relative efficiency.
The Time Effect
The importance of collecting data over a long period of time stems from the need to account for the effects of seasonality. For example, doing a short-term study over the summer will most often result in inaccurate analysis, since so many employees take extended vacations during that period.
Over time, trends will emerge showing how space is utilized during hours of the day, days of the week and months of the year. Having this data enables decision makers to build out the most effective space when redesigning or repurposing space.
The Payoff Comes in ROI
This is where the cost savings comes into play, because when CREs are making objective decisions based on usage patterns, it drives the decision to sell off property and lease a smaller space or redesign a floor plan using a high-density collaboration model instead of traditional dedicated seating.
Yes, the workforce is changing rapidly, but happily the technology, tools and techniques exist that enable CREs to make informed decisions. Leveraging emerging technology makes it possible to create and maintain efficient, effective workspaces that enhance employee productivity and increase real-estate ROI.
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