There are very few things that drive me a little crazier right now than all the talk of Workplace Occupancy, Utilization, Attendance, Capacity and most of all, how both the media, and the industry, seem to be using them all interchangeably. (Ok end of rant!)
These are all terms we’re seeing, hearing and probably talking about on a weekly if not daily basis right now. But are they al the same? Or are they actually very different? Each are important metrics and definitions to understand as you gather data to make decisions on the future of your portfolio.
Attendance
Attendance is the most basic level of anything you can really measure in your space. It’s also the most common one people both use and get confused today because it’s almost exclusively done using Badge Data.
It’s a measure of whether or not a specific individual entered some space that you manage, or they were at a certain spot where you are taking a measurement, at some point in time.
Now while badge data can tell you if someone visited the exact place, they swiped it at a precise time, it lacks a lot of contexts that you really need for any type of portfolio planning.
Occupancy
Occupancy, on the other hand, is a real-time measure of the status of a certain space, usually a seat or an office, at any given point in time. If you’re interested in understanding ‘how occupied is the cafeteria’ as an example, you’d likely want to know, how many seats are currently in use out of the total number of seats you have.
You have 100 seats, 80 are taken, you are 80% occupied. You have 100 enclosed offices or meeting rooms, and right now at least 1 person is sitting in 50 of them, your enclosed spaces are 50% occupied.
Occupancy can also be used as a reference to a current # of people on a floor or inside a building. Our current occupancy on floor 23 is 214.
Now don’t get that confused with capacity, which I’ll detail next. But before we go there, I also want to call out another variation on occupancy, which is max occupancy.
Max Occupancy
Max Occupancy is the highest occupancy you recorded during at any given point in time over a time period. You can also think of it as the highest number or % of seats (or whatever it is your measuring) that occurred concurrently, at any given point in the period. That’s Max Occupancy.
Capacity
Capacity is a measure of how much of a given space that is occupied, is actually being consumed. As an example, a meeting room for 4 people, with one person in it is 100% occupied, but only operating at 25% capacity. It’s not available for anyone else to use (occupied), but it’s got the capability to have more people in it (capacity).
This is more used to measure efficiency of space allocation than consumption or demand for space, but I thought it important to call out.
Utilization
Utilization is a measure of total consumption of all available space/seats etc. over a period of time. Let’s again use a simple desk analogy.
Say you have 10 desks.
5 of them have someone sitting in them for the whole hour between 10–11am. The other 5 have people sitting them in them for only the first half of the hour, from 10–10:30.
In this scenario, your max occupancy during that hour was 100%, but your utilization, was only 75%.
Why?
Because 1/2 of your desks were available for use for ½ of the time during the period you were measuring.
Other than Attendance, which I continue to argue has very little value on its own, all the other measures can provide a great deal of value to you in understanding what’s going on in your space, how people are using it in one form or another. More importantly, they can provide very accurate inputs into your reporting and future portfolio planning.
The key here though is, to have clarity on what you’re really measuring and what it’s actually telling you.
Don’t confuse occupancy for utilization. Or utilization for capacity. Or max occupancy for utilization.
Doing this will only steer you wrong in your portfolio planning and likely leaving you with too much, or too little space!
I go into this topic more details with other examples in Episode 4 of the Creating Smarter Spaces podcast.
