With hybrid work becoming the new normal, businesses are under pressure to reevaluate the efficiency of their office spaces. While this may appear to be a mammoth task for many, effective occupancy monitoring can help create a seamless transition to a hybrid workspace. In addition, technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) boost these transitions’ accuracy, ease, and success, providing the means for well-adjusted, data-backed decisions.
Diving Deeper into Occupancy Monitoring
Understanding the dynamics and uses of occupancy monitoring is crucial for businesses looking to adjust to the hybrid working environment. In summary, occupancy monitoring involves collecting and processing data surrounding how a space is used, including tracking metrics such as footfall, how much employees use meeting rooms, and desk occupancy. Sensors placed throughout an office can detect metrics such as temperature, proximity, and motion to pinpoint space utilization during the workday.
Occupancy monitoring provides the groundwork for several important business decisions, including the overall utilization of office space, increased productivity, and the improvement of employee well-being. Each of these decisions is vital to transitioning to hybrid working.
Conducting occupancy monitoring is increasingly recognized as a core foundation for making specific, actionable, data-driven business decisions. In the rapidly evolving areas of employee habits and office design, businesses should endorse data-based monitoring to develop a more profound, more applicable understanding of the physical and mental space employees occupy in their working life.
How Does Occupancy Monitoring Encourage an Understanding of the Workplace?
Every business knows productivity, revenue, and sustainability are crucial to success. However, behind these factors lies an in-depth understanding of the workplace and its dynamics. As hybrid working continues to rise in popularity, these workplace dynamics will inevitably evolve, so businesses must use methods such as occupancy monitoring to understand these changes.
Shifts in the workplace environment range from subtle to highly impactful. For example, having transitioned to hybrid work arrangements, employees may arrange their time to prioritize meetings when they are in the office. As a result, meeting rooms may become overcrowded and inundated with high demand, making it harder for employees to carry out their roles. Without adjustment, there is an increased risk that efficiency and productivity will decrease.
By monitoring the frequency of meeting room use, businesses can identify which times have the highest demand and whether increased space is required. Designating additional meeting areas can ease pressure on employees, giving them the space and time necessary to hit company targets. Overall, evaluations and adjustments like these create a more seamless transition from office to hybrid work.
Another example of occupancy monitoring is tracking desk occupancy. Small temperature sensors can be placed at desks to monitor when employees are using personal desk space; hybrid work may decrease the time employees spend in more isolated working environments. Tasks employees can complete alone are more likely to be tackled in a work-from-home environment, so businesses can repurpose certain areas to increase efficiency if space is underutilized.
The Importance of Applying Data to Decision-Making
Some companies believe they can make decisions about hybrid work without data collected through occupancy monitoring. For these organizations, simple observation may initially appear adequate to inform these modifications. However, this perspective needs to pay more attention to the benefits of applying data to decision-making.
Collecting data allows actionable, trackable, and achievable goals to be set and closely monitored for results. Instead of making approximations or assumptions surrounding changes in employee behavior, these transformations within workplace culture can be pinpointed. As a result, tailored action can be taken and recorded, and the results can be monitored. In addition, the comparison of the efficiency of office design both before and after changes take place provides more insight on the success of different projects.
The impact of data-driven decision-making in corporate HR has become so significant that it has led to the coining of “Intelligent HR.” Basing vital decisions surrounding employee productivity, efficiency, and well-being on data insights is widely promoted as the future of the HR role. This promotion is well founded in the results after increased data awareness in the field.
Addressing Privacy in Occupancy Monitoring
Certain aspects of the process may initially appear invasive to those unfamiliar with occupancy monitoring and its resulting data. For example, tracking employees’ time at private desks could be viewed as overly intrusive—even a potential method of generating an overbearing work environment. However, the balance of occupancy monitoring and employee privacy is in the execution of data collection.
Businesses must understand that monitoring metrics such as desk occupancy is not a way to gain influence over employees. Instead, it is purely a method of understanding employee behavior.
Collecting data through IoT networks, with wireless sensors providing the best example in the occupancy monitoring context, maintains the anonymity of those monitored because of the absence of cameras and other direct imaging systems. Instead, sensors detecting temperature, motion, or proximity can collect information without identifying the individual triggering the data collection.
This method results in data equally as comprehensive as that collected through older surveillance methods. Beneficially, the information is non-intrusively obtained and easily corroborated.
Employees maintain privacy with this occupancy monitoring method also because of its noninvasive nature. While the presence of old technology holding the stigma of absent privacy is likely to be distracting, new discrete technologies such as sensors are virtually undetectable. Furthermore, with the capability to connect to vast IoT networks, these wireless sensors can be as small as a postage stamp while still relaying the required information.
Privacy in occupancy monitoring is critical when planning and executing any form of data collection. Businesses can explore new, exciting technologies that provide fresh opportunities for informed decision-making, with minimal employee disruption.
Transformations are occurring in employee behaviors, habits, and routines, impacting how, when, and why office space is utilized. The rise in hybrid working has prompted businesses to reevaluate office environments in the face of this transformation. Exploring new data collection and application opportunities will open doors to data-informed HR decisions, increasing the success of employee-focused adjustments with minimal disruption.
Bengt Lundberg is the CEO of Disruptive Technologies. He holds an engineering degree from Vestfold University College and has more than 20 years of international business experience. He also has decades-long experience with international team leadership, building cross-cultural, high-performing teams.