After employee compensation, office space is the second biggest expense for enterprise companies — which opens up a lot of risks and rewards for today’s corporate real estate leader.
Over the last year, companies have reported on the profound negative impact of being cut off from physical offices: ineffective training, poor employment engagement, poor morale, the list goes on. Employee survey results from companies like Salesforce and Dropbox show that employees miss the office.
This is the moment for corporate real estate leaders to demonstrate that a dynamic workplace that meets the new needs of the new way of working is a competitive advantage and critical to a company’s overall success.
Types of Workplace Analytics:
A holistic approach to workplace analytics involves understanding the key business investments, and how each of those is providing a return on investment for the business.
For most companies, the biggest investments are people investments and salaries, followed by real estate and office space, followed by capital investments.
A full view of business productivity and return will bring on analytics to evaluate and monitor each of these cost centers to ensure successful returns are generated. Workplace analytics platforms provide strong workplace insights for improving the bottom line.
- Workforce Analytics & Productivity Analysis
- Workplace and Workspace Analytics/Spatial Intelligence
- Capital Investment & Asset Measurement & Monitoring
4 ways a workplace analytics platform can help optimize both real estate and employee investment
1. Provide analytics to reframe the workplace as a business value creator, instead of a cost burden
Research has shown that companies delivering a great employee experience outperform the S&P 500 by 122%. And companies with highly engaged workforces are 21% more profitable than those with poor engagement.
A workplace analytics platform powered by accurate, anonymous data collection provides global enterprises with quantitative insights into how employees are using the workplace and collaborating with each other. For example, with the VergeSense Meeting Analytics Dashboard leaders can understand the amount of meetings scheduled and the frequency in which employees attend meetings over time.
In addition, the VergeSense Workplace Analytics Platform integrates with leading meeting management and scheduling tools like TEEM, Robin, MS Outlook 365 & Google Calendar to identify no-shows and auto-release unused rooms for booking.
By creating a frictionless experience for employees to book ad-hoc meetings and on-demand seating, companies can boost employee productivity and engagement.
2. Workplace analytics help enable a successful migration to agile seating
As more companies consider a hybrid workplace or distributed workforce, agile seating holds a clear economic benefit. Whether you call it agile seating, hot desking, or hotel desking, having a pool of desks that hybrid (or any) employees can reserve without having it always reserved is an efficient way to approach office seating. After all, why pay for dedicated desks for every single knowledge worker when they are spending half the week working from home? The new dynamic workplace is not just a warehouse of assigned desks, but a haven where employees choose where and when they want to socialize and collaborate with their colleagues.
Easier said than done. Adopting an agile seating strategy is rife with landmines. How do you ensure there are enough seats? What if everyone wants to come in on the same days? How can you reassure employees that they’ll be able to sit near their teammates, if they need to? How do you address concerns around adequate social distancing? How do you prevent your company from unintentionally creating two classes of haves and have-nots?
A workplace analytics platform enables an effective agile seating strategy by connecting accurate real-time desk availability with existing employee-facing desk booking tools. Every employee is empowered to find the right space at the right time.
3. Workplace analytics help validate workplace design decisions
Typical office build-outs costs range anywhere from $50 to $250/ sqft and require months (or even years) to build. After all that effort, prove that you made the right decision building the brand new $1.3 million dining area because thousands of people are actively using it throughout the day.
With a workplace analytics platform, you gain a quantitative report on exactly how many employees are using the spaces you built.
Workplace design doesn’t have to be guesswork. With data you can trust and insights curated to your business, VergeSense can help you design for better productivity and satisfaction.
4. Right-size your corporate real estate footprint to your company needs
While building and creating corporate offices is expensive, maintaining corporate offices is also a huge business expense. A key way to improve the overall return is to get more out of what you have. The typical cost of office space in a major city is close to $12 per sqft. What if you could fit more employees in your existing real estate footprint without sacrificing workplace experience?
With a workplace analytics platform, you can identify underutilized spaces and surface opportunities to meet growing needs within your existing real estate portfolio.
For example, with VergeSense, one of our clients was able to save $30 million annually by identifying underutilized spaces in its corporate campus and redesigning them to safely fit 30% more people, while improving the workplace experience. Another client used information on underutilization in their main office to reallocate seating more effectively and end the need for an additional coworking space, a cost avoidance of $250,000 per year.
What’s Next for Workplace Analytics?
COVID forced companies to shutter their offices and for knowledge workers to work-from-home, whether they were ready or not. After a year of working remotely and paying for empty buildings, employers are asking “where do we go from here?”
By making decisive, data-informed decisions today, employers can leverage a forward-thinking approach to workplace strategy & design that achieves a sustainable long-term competitive advantage.
Now is the time to invest in a workplace analytics platform. Reach out for a private consultation with one of our workplace analytics experts to embark on your workplace transformation journey.
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For more examples of how the VergeSense workplace analytics platform helps companies achieve a competitive advantage, register now for our upcoming webinar 10 Data-Powered Strategies to Transform Your Workplace and check out our latest guide The World’s Most Inspiring Workplace Transformation Stories.