Introduction
This guide outlines best practices for tracking workplace occupancy. Accurately understanding workplace occupancy can help your organization make informed decisions about your office space, make changes to enhance employee satisfaction, and reduce unnecessary costs.
What does workplace occupancy mean?
Is it how many people are in your office? Is it booking desks? Is it just using spaces? Workplace occupancy means knowing who is present in your office regardless of the desks or spaces they’ve booked.
What does workplace presence mean?
Workplace presence is data capturing when a person is confirmed to be physically present in the office.
Why is tracking workplace occupancy important?
Accurate workplace occupancy data is essential for optimizing office space utilization, enhancing employee collaboration, and reducing operational costs. By understanding how and who uses the office, organizations can make strategic decisions about office layouts and policies, ensuring that the work environment aligns with employee needs and promotes productivity.
Best practices for tracking workplace occupancy
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Whether your organization uses assigned desks, hoteled desks, or both, enabling the desk check-in feature is essential for collecting workplace occupancy data because it provides clarity, accountability, and operational efficiency.
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Turn on the local check-in-only feature for desks for the most accurate occupancy data. This policy ensures that people can only check into their desks when they're physically present in the office.
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Set up one (or more) of the 3 local check-in methods to support the local check-in policy:
- Configure automatic check-ins using your office wifi.
- Integrate your badge system to allow employees to be checked into Robin automatically when they swipe their badge. Badge integration options:
- Direct access control integrations we support: Brivo, Kisi, Avigilon (Openpath), & Verkada.
- Do you use a different access control system? Contact your Customer Success Manager about building a custom integration for your organization.
- Or you can upload badge data via CSV into Robin.
- Set up scannable QR codes on desks.
Tracking your workplace occupancy
Track your occupancy score in the Occupancy analytics dashboard, which measures the difference between how many people could be in the office on a single day and how many people actually show up. A higher score means that more desks are occupied. If a space is too large, it is unlikely that employees will have as many in-person interactions. Knowing the data behind this score can help you understand whether you need to expand or contract your office space.
- Note that badge data shows up in analytics as a desk check-in and/or counts towards someone in the office (workplace presence).
The following dashboards and exports include workplace presence data points (data capturing when someone is physically confirmed to be in the office):
- Executive Insights dashboard (requires Advanced Analytics)
- Workplace Presence dashboard (requires Advanced Analytics)
- Workplace Presence export
The following dashboards and exports specifically include desk check-in data points:
- Workplace Insights dashboard
- Desk Bookings dashboard
- Desk Check-Ins dashboard (requires Advanced Analytics)
- Occupancy dashboard
- Hybrid Work Policy export
- Activity Summary export
- Desk export
Who occupied the office today?
If you need a daily report of everyone who came into the office for the day, with or without a desk reservation, we recommend using the Workplace Presence export for the most accurate report.