Utilization and Occupancy Monitoring
Desk sharing, hotdesking and hoteling are all buzz words used by organizations who are interested in improving the utilization and occupancy of their workspaces. They help reduce an organizations overall real estate costs and make the existing workspace more efficient and useful for their employees. Organizations who are considering these options are asking themselves” if we are considering these types of workspace saving methods for our organization, how do we first justify the costs and second, how do we realize the benefits from this investment? “.
To truly understand whether your organization will realize costs saving from workspace improvements, it is important to understand how you are using the space now. I came across an interesting white paper called “The WCO Guide to: Utilization and Occupancy Studies” which defined four methods to determine how to measure utilization and occupancy of and organization current space.
- Swipe card/turnstile data
- People counters
- IP monitoring
- Sensor Systems
They go on to further describe the advantages and disadvantages of each method and also determining the usefulness and practicality of each method of measuring utilization and occupancy. They say it is dependent upon a number of factors some of which are:
- cost – the cost of setting up and completing the study;
- scalability – whether the method can be applied as easily to 1,000 as 100 desks and spaces;
- accuracy – how well the method reflects the actual occupancy of the space across the working year; granularity – the level of detail in terms of the frequency of measurement and/or the ability to pinpoint specific spaces;
- invasiveness – how much the method interrupts the occupant or infringes on perceived privacy.
This articles offers a lot of valuable information on utilization and occupancy and the conclusion I came to was, the best method to track utilization and occupancy is through an activity based recording solution. It records the types of activity at the desk for example, routine works, focused work (do not disturb) collaboration with others, away for the desk but the desk is occupied (in a meeting) on the phone or the desk is available.
For further information about our utilization and occupancy solution, Hotdesking | Hoteling Booking Product Suite and our entire Workspace Management Solutions Product Suite , go to our web site and click on our Resource Booking solutions section. We look forward to answering any Workspace Management questions you may have.