Office occupancy

How to measure real office occupancy.

Desks, bookings and badge data tell you who could come in. To know who actually comes, you have to count. Here’s how, what to look at and what you find when you measure.

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The methods

Five ways to measure it. Only one counts people.

Almost every company already has some occupancy data. The problem is that it measures something else.

MethodWhat it tells youWhat it misses

Surveys and walk-through countsWhat people remember, or a snapshot of one moment.How use changes by hour and by day. And people don’t always remember accurately.

Badge and access card dataWho enters the building and when.Which floor, zone or room each person is in, and when they leave.

Desk and room bookingsWho intended to come.Bookings nobody turns up to, and people who sit down without booking.

Wi-Fi and connected devicesHow many devices are connected.One person carries two or three devices, and the signal can’t tell one zone from another very well.

Occupancy sensorsWhat Orpheus usesHow many people are on each floor, zone and room, all day long.They have to be installed. With Orpheus, there’s no building work and nothing touches the network.

What to measure

Four numbers that explain a building.

01
Occupancy at the daily peak
Not the daily average: the average includes eight in the morning and seven in the evening, when nobody’s there. Space is sized for the peak.
02
Occupancy by weekday
A Tuesday and a Friday look nothing alike. If you only look at the whole week, you miss the days when half a floor is surplus.
03
Real meeting room use
How many people are in each meeting compared with the room’s capacity, and how many bookings end up empty.
04
Occupancy by floor and zone
Where people really sit. There are usually packed zones and whole floors that sleep.

Orpheus Space · Analytics

Average open-space occupancy through the day. Each line is a weekday.

MonTueWedThuFri

People in the building at each day's busiest moment, against the open-space desks.

PeopleAvailable desks

How it’s calculated

Occupancy rate =people presentavailable desks× 100(people present divided by available desks, times 100)

If a building with 240 desks has 154 people at its busiest moment, peak occupancy is 154 ÷ 240 = 64%.

Real data · the average Orpheus building

What you find when you measure.

It’s the average across our hybrid-working clients’ buildings, measured with sensors before they changed anything. Not even the busiest day gets past two thirds of the desks.

Occupancy at the daily peak · and what each person costs

Real client data

100%

of desks occupied

What the plan says: every desk taken. Each person costs what their desk costs.

Cost of rent, cleaning and energy.

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How would your building compare?

Leave your name and email and we’ll tell you how to measure it: which sensors, where, and when you’d have the first data.

How to start

From not knowing to deciding, in four steps.

01
Choose where to start
One building, a few floors or a handful of rooms. You expand when you see it working.
02
We install the sensors
No building work: some run on batteries and others plug in. The Hub sends the data over the mobile network, staying off your network.
03
Measure for a few weeks
From the first few days you see how each floor is used. After a few weeks, there are patterns you can defend.
04
Decide with the data
Reconfigure, consolidate floors, adjust rooms, cleaning, heating and cooling. If you like, we analyse it with you.

See the full process

Keep reading

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Measure your building before you decide.

Leave your name and email and we’ll tell you how to start measuring yours.

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