As businesses navigate the post-pandemic landscape, one question looms large: what to do with our office spaces? While the return to the office is underway, occupancy levels have not rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, leaving many office spaces underutilized.
This situation presents both a challenge and an opportunity. On one hand, underutilized office space means wasted resources. On the other hand, it presents an opportunity for significant cost savings and optimization.
In this blog, we outline everything you need to know to properly evaluate your office space before you renew your lease. We’ll delve into the key factors to consider and provide practical steps to help you make informed decisions. Whether you're looking to downsize, rightsize, or simply optimize your office environment, we’ll give you the knowledge and tools you need to maximize efficiency and minimize costs.
Evaluating office spaces before lease renewals is more important than ever. Here’s why:
To make informed decisions about your office spaces, it's crucial to evaluate key metrics that provide insights into space utilization, layout efficiency, and overall effectiveness. By analyzing these metrics, you can identify areas for improvement, optimize your workspace, and ensure you're getting the most out of your investment.
Here are three critical metrics to look at:
Understanding the number of people present in your office space at any given time is essential for optimizing capacity and usage.
The Occupancy Intelligence Platform lets you capture people count, giving you insights into peak occupancy times, and average utilization rates. Customers can effortlessly connect occupancy data from existing WiFi infrastructure to gain a holistic view of trends across buildings and floors.
With this data, you can compare actual usage with workspace capacity. This helps you identify and shed underutilized spaces or make updates to office policies. It also enables you to make confident decisions about expanding or shrinking portfolio footprint to accommodate actual space usage.
Beyond counting people, it's crucial to differentiate between active and passive space usage.
VergeSense's occupancy intelligence provides insights into both active and passive space usage, allowing you to identify areas of high activity and areas that may be underutilized. With this data, you can pinpoint opportunities to optimize layout and design, such as redesigning existing spaces to better support employee needs or implementing new booking protocols.
Evaluate whether your office space is being used to its full potential or if there's excess capacity that could be repurposed or eliminated.
The Space Usage Timeline allows you to analyze the usage of space and availability through the lens of space types like buildings or floors over time. This data can be used to pinpoint potential office breaking points, like space shortages, and can inform important portfolio decisions like:
We know how much is on the line when making important portfolio decisions. The Space Usage Timeline allows you to back major office decisions with real data, and create a seamless workplace experience that aligns with employee needs and expectations.
Ultimately, your goal is to evaluate your office space to see if you should shed space. Here's how to approach the decision-making process:
Start by analyzing occupancy rates and usage patterns throughout your office space.
Before making a decision to downsize or move locations, consider implementing space optimization strategies to make the most of your existing space. Some actions you can take include:
If certain areas of your office space are simply going unused, consider the cost savings that could be achieved by eliminating them altogether. This could involve downsizing to a smaller office or consolidating floors.
Before going this route, you must consider factors such as lease terms, rental rates, and operating expenses to determine the financial impact of downsizing or consolidating. Work closely with your finance team or real estate advisor to conduct a thorough cost analysis and evaluate the long-term financial implications of each option.
Occupancy data is a powerful tool that can drive informed decision-making and unlock key insights into your office space. By analyzing occupancy rates, usage patterns, and other metrics, you can gain a deeper understanding of how your workspace is utilized and identify opportunities for optimization.
Before making impactful choices like eliminating a floor or office, it's crucial to ensure that your team has what they need and that you're not inadvertently removing essential resources. By taking a data-driven approach, you can make strategic decisions that maximize efficiency, minimize costs, and create a workspace that supports your organization's goals and objectives.
To learn more about using AI to make data-driven decisions and optimize your workplace, visit our blog.