Space Utilization Metrics: Optimize Workplace Efficiency & Productivity
What are space utilization metrics, and why should organizations learn to measure them? These are yardsticks that let you analyze how you currently use every square foot of your office space and make the necessary adjustments.
As workplaces adopt hybrid work settings and other modern trends, organizational leaders should create cost-friendly office environments that meet all employees’ needs. To do that, they must measure how well they utilize their office spaces.
This guide reveals the most crucial metrics to track and measure to ensure effective use of the available office space. These can help foster employee collaboration, productivity, and fulfillment.
What is Space Utilization?
Space utilization refers to how efficiently an organization uses its workspace. It computes the density of office occupants and tracks the time that people enter or leave the building. Space utilization also tracks the estimated office overheads of every workstation, the available free space, and whether workers require additional areas to operate in.
Space utilization metrics get you the data you need to assess how efficiently you manage the available office space. They reveal if you have the correct workspace structures to support your workers’ needs. If you apply various metrics, you will identify underutilized, overused, and unused office spaces and rearrange them to reduce overheads and improve productivity.
Top 10 Office Space Utilization Metrics to Track and Measure
Space utilization metrics enable managers to check if the organization meets the current demand for office space. Employees no longer need to stay in one space from morning to evening.
The flexible hybrid designs allow them to come and go, operate from home, and share different workstations. If you fail to track office space usage, you might have several workers looking to use the same area simultaneously.
This situation may cause conflicts among workers, lower their productivity, and inconvenience others who want to use the same space later in the day. Another problem that can arise is that you can sometimes have several empty spaces that will be underutilized and costly to run.
Thus, office space utilization metrics provide you with data that reveals how effectively or ineffectively you use your workspace. Below are the top 10 space utilization metrics you should track and measure:
Office Capacity and Occupancy
The capacity reveals the highest number of people your workspace can accommodate. On the other hand, occupancy reveals the actual population that currently uses the office space.
This metric can highlight underutilized or overcrowded office areas. If your occupancy rate is always lower than your office capacity, you have more space than your occupants require.
To compute and compare your capacity vs occupancy rate, track how your workers and visitors enter and leave the office all day. If the traffic is lower than your building’s capacity, there could be space and money wastage to deal with.
Total Workspace Usage
Do your employee behavior and office design match? You should use the total workspace usage metric to investigate this matter. A VMS (visitor management system) can help you study the attendance and utilization of office resources throughout the day.
It can show overcrowded and underused workstations to help you make office reconfiguration decisions based on actual data.
Specific Office Space Utilization
Among the most important space utilization metrics is a metric that lets you investigate how every workstation works. Each workstation serves a unique purpose, and you need to know if its current layout enables optimal usage.
If visitors always book the small conference rooms, it means the larger halls are underutilized and uneconomical. You can create small meeting spaces within the large conference hall to increase its bookings.
Workforce Mobility Ratio
How flexible are your employees? If you operate under a hybrid office setting, you need to understand how mobile your workers are throughout the day. When do they enter the room in high or low numbers?
You need these figures to measure if you have adequate office capacity for peak attendance. To compute your mobility ratio, divide the sum of workers by the total office desks. A ratio of 2 workers per workstation is often enough for hybrid settings.
Number of Users per Square Foot
Office density is among the most crucial space utilization metrics to track. You want to know if your workspace is adequate for all workers. If you have many employees per square foot, it means they feel squeezed, cluttered, and unhappy.
On the other hand, if you have too few workers per square foot, you are wasting office space. If your open office space usually gets packed, you can improve it by adding breakout areas.
Conversely, if the total number of occupants per square foot is small, find other ways to use the extra space.
Immediate Occupancy Rate
This is one of the space utilization metrics that no company should ignore. The immediate occupancy rate tracks the speed at which new people occupy a workspace soon after it becomes vacant.
Filling the area quickly means setting up efficient cleaning schedules and user-friendly office booking systems. To calculate your occupancy rate, you need to measure the interval between the workspace becoming vacant and its next reservation time.
Use this data to set aside adequate time for cleaning and preparing the space for the next meeting session. This buffer time will ensure your spaces are always ready for the next activity or session.
Room Occupancy Rate
Another of the top space utilization metrics is the room occupancy rate. If you track your room occupancy rate, you will understand how frequently occupants book. You will gather data on rooms that your guests or workers prefer the most and those they barely use.
After that, you can convert underutilized rooms into the more demanded stations. For instance, you can create a hot-desking station from an underused hall. Before you make key decisions and changes, check each room’s peak and off-peak times by analyzing the booking data.
Open Space Utilization
Each workspace in your premises should count, including open spaces. Tracking the performance of your lounges and other collaborative spaces can let you identify underuse and increase their value to users.
If you have a barely-used lobby, for instance, you can convert it into a conference area as long as you have many occupants going in and out. You can gather data on usage and comfort from your staff before you turn your uneconomical open space into something more lucrative.
Cost Per Seat and Person
Cost per seat and person are some of the space utilization metrics you should always measure. The Cost per Seat metric allows you to calculate the average occupancy cost for your workplace.
You compute it by dividing the total overhead costs by the number of seats in your premises.
If the Cost per Seat outcome is too high, you should reconfigure the space to make it more efficient. The cost per person metric lets you compute your occupancy rate based on the number of workers you have.
You should divide the total overhead costs by the sum of your employees. The outcome will let you know if you have fewer or more workers than you need for your office capacity.
Office to Workstation Ratio Metric
Among the most crucial space utilization metrics for your organization is the office-to-workstation ratio. The ratio compares all your offices to the sum of all your workstations. Do you have adequate workstations in each office?
Computing the office-to-workstation ratio can help you figure out if you need additional workstations in some offices while meeting the needs of every employee.
Conclusion
Space utilization metrics can let you use your workspace more productively and economically. These metrics will enable you to gather valuable space utilization data that shows overcrowded and underutilized areas. You can track this data with software that can integrate with different Internet of Things sensors. You can then use this data to repurpose the less efficient office spaces.
