Industry: Financial

How A Financial Services Company Used Utilization Study Data to Rightsize their Workplace

“We were thrilled with the results of the workspace utilization study conducted by Relogix. Their insights were truly valuable in helping us make important business decisions. By studying how we used our workspace, we were able to put together a compelling argument for downsizing our office space and ultimately saving money. We couldn’t have done it without the expertise of the team at Relogix, who made sure to keep employee satisfaction front and center throughout the process.” Director of Workplace Strategy and Planning

About the Company

Industry: Financial Services

Company Size: 281,160 sq ft

The Baseline

  • Lease renewal in Q2 2024
  • 1320 employees with an 8% growth trajectory over the next 3 years
  • Desks and offices are 100% assigned
  • Rentable cost per sq ft $65
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Key Insights

  • On average, desks were occupied 55% of the time; and peak day occupancy never exceeded 63%. Average utilization was 42% with a peak utilization of 51%
  • Offices were occupied 41% on average and 52% at peak. Average utilization for offices was 35% and at peak 47%
  • Meeting Rooms and Collaboration areas were occupied on average 75% and 83% at peak. Meeting Room and Collaboration average utilization was 52% and 64% at peak
  • The meeting and collaboration seats were only 25% occupied and 43% at peak (i.e., fullness of the rooms and areas)

Challenge

The financial services company faced the challenge of understanding the usage of its office space post-COVID so it could reduce its real estate footprint. While there was no formal mandate for employees to return to the office, it was communicated that employees should make an effort to visit the office 1–2 days a week whenever possible. The day-to-day management of days in the office was up to the team manager but the objective of team days was for collaboration and connection.

With their office lease being up for renewal in 2024, their goals are as follows:

  • Rightsize the office — they want to quantify how much space they need to keep and how much they could comfortably exit when their lease comes due
  • Optimize the remaining space which includes consolidating floors where possible, to re-energize the office
  • Increase the amount of meeting and collaboration spaces available and ensure they meet the sizing requirements
  • Future proof their plan to also account for planned future growth based on a 3-year plan

Solution

The financial services company installed battery-operated sensors and people counters supplied by Relogix in their workplace to anonymize data on employee behaviors in various work settings available including desks, private offices, meeting rooms, open collaboration areas, and support spaces like cafes and lounges where it was suspected that people were conducting informal meetings.

Workspace usage data — which included occupancy, utilization, and fullness — was captured every minute over 6 months, between 8 am and 5 pm, Monday to Friday only, and excluded holidays. The volume of data points collected each day provided a level of precision that enabled the company to make decisions with confidence.

Outcomes

The impartial data collected by the sensors installed enabled the company to:

  • Identify an opportunity to reduce their costs with a potential to exit 8–10 floors leaving between 6 and 8 floors to accommodate current need and future growth
  • Make decisions about the role of the office with high confidence, resulting in a cost avoidance of $45,000 and potential savings of $5.5M to $7.8M beyond 2024 by exiting 8–10 floors of their office footprint
  • Increased the provisioning of meeting and collaboration seating by 30% to align with newer use

With this data, the financial services company will be able to improve the availability of meeting and collaboration spaces in their HQ to meet new post-pandemic demand and minimize wasted space. Room sizes will be adjusted to reflect new behaviors which included more private solo work with virtual participants.

They will also be able to re-energize the space by reducing the span of floors to make the space more inviting for people who came to work in the office, so it didn’t feel so unwelcoming and uninviting. The savings that were projected will allow them to budget for better technology tools to implement for their employees, improving the employee experience regardless of where they were working.

Finally, they will be able to use the key insights to guide their hybrid work policy and their office designs, and the associated workspace etiquette to align design intent with the insights gained regarding validated user behavior.

How A Financial Services Company Optimized their Workplace Thanks to Data Analytics

“Working with Relogix has exceeded our expectations. From placing a purchase order right through to the implementation and training, the team were excellent to work with. Conexus is a fantastic solution which has provided us with all the information we need to plan for the future.” – Workplace Transformation Lead

About the Company

Industry

Financial Services

Company Size

2,000 Employees

Team Size:

5-10

The workplace team at a major financial services company partnered with Relogix to ensure data-informed decision making. The team started work with Relogix in 2021 to capture data to inform their future workplace design, following the uncertainty that came with the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a result, the workplace team has been able to determine office occupancy and utilisation, dwell time of spaces, and the differences between employee intentions and employee behaviours.

Key Outcomes

  • Learned about the peak and average utilization and occupancy rates in their workplace
  • Drilled into granular data by department thanks to data filtering
  • Monitored office occupancy remotely using Live, during the height of the pandemic
  • Determined no-show rate of meetings booked (about 5%)
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Challenge

With multiple offices in the UK and no objective property data available, COVID-19 spun this workplace team into a whirlwind looking for answers about what was coming next.  Pre-pandemic, employees were working in a traditional workspace environment with assigned seating, private meeting spaces, and minimal collaboration zones. The workplace team had a good idea of how space was and wasn’t being used, thanks to data previously collected via manual studies, access control systems, and occupancy sensors. However, that data wasn’t granular enough, and wasn’t presented in a way that allowed them to discover important insights. They were missing the ability to view full data stories, in order to inform new ways of working and the future workplace design.

The team identified key areas to a successful transformation journey:

  • They needed to collect unbiased occupancy and utilization data on how various workspaces in its offices were being used, while also respecting individual team member privacy.
  • They needed to extract key insights to engage in meaningful conversations with business unit leaders.
  • They needed to understand how the employees’ intended behaviours compared to their actual behaviour through comparisons between the desk booking data and sensor data.
  • With the spotlight on return to office and new ways of working, the team had a need to collate data to drive decision making in relation to sharing ratios, neighbourhood sizes, the types and numbers of spaces as well as number and size of meeting rooms.

Solution

The workplace team partnered with Relogix for its data analytics and insights platform, recognising that while some sensor technology on the market is similar, it’s the analytics which are crucial.

Relogix successfully deployed over 700 state-of-the-art version 5 proprietary desk sensors to measure occupancy, utilization, and dwell time of seats, alongside a desk booking integration and dashboard to capture employee intent vs employee behaviour. Within hours of installing the sensors, the organisation was able to begin accessing the data it needed.

The team chose to measure three main metrics that were most relevant and actionable:

  • Occupancy (whether or not there was presence at a seat)
  • Utilization (how long the seat was continually in use)
  • and finally, through a desk booking integration, data insights were captured regarding employee intent vs employee behaviour.

The data collection is ongoing, and to date has enabled key learnings and decision making. Through segmentation, the data collected assisted in space planning and the design of department neighbourhood zones. The team was able to observe and segment occupancy and utilization data by floor and business unit, providing the level of detail necessary to facilitate discussions with each business unit owner about how their space was being used and the safety protocols in relation to return to office.

The ‘Spaces’ data visualisations informed the workplace team of the peak and average utilization and occupancy, highlighting that Wednesday at 11am was the peak for utilization (381 desks), and each desk used had a dwell time of 18 minutes.  This data helped to build psychological safety for employees that there were enough desks available for them to remain social distanced where they chose, as well as the sanitisation of spaces in line with average dwell times being shown within the data.

Data filtering allowed the workplace team to dive into granular data and inform the sizes of the neighbourhood zones for each department. As an example, the team itself utilises 8 seats on average, with a peak of 12 seats taking place on a Friday at 9am.

With ‘Live’, the workplace team can view office occupancy in real time, which was operationally helpful during the pandemic when the team were not always in the office themselves due to the restrictions in place. Here is an example of the live view highlighting the spaces which are available:

The desk booking technology adoption was initially low, due to a lack of demand on the spaces. As space utilisation increased, employees began to adopt the technology to drive their experience. Below is an example data set comparing employee intent (desk booking) vs employee behaviour (sensor data).

The example data set highlights an occupancy of 34%, but only 20% of spaces were booked, meaning 19% of spaces (121) were subject to squatting. From the spaces booked, on average 5% (29 spaces) were booked but not occupied (no-shows). This data is reviewed on an ongoing basis as the supply and demand of space balances out which will then drive the requirements to book spaces or not.

Result

The workplace team was able to learn utilization and occupancy rates, drill into granular data, monitor office occupancy remotely and decrease the rate of no-show meetings

The data insights have driven:

  • Space planning, sharing ratios and neighbourhood sizes.
  • Informed workplace design.
  • Provided data to aid return to office.