Badge Data: The Key to Managing Occupancy in the Hybrid Work Era

Introduction: Why Measure Occupancy

If you are responsible for a larger office or a portfolio of offices or buildings, you probably grew a few gray hairs over the last few years trying to figure out how to get data to optimize it — measure utilization, predict trends, and make the right real estate management decisions.

With the rise of hybrid work arrangements, it can be difficult to accurately gauge occupancy levels which in turn makes it challenging to plan, manage resources, and ensure smooth operations of an office or building portfolio.

While there is a number of technologies available out there such as occupancy sensors, smart cameras, and others, there is one that you most likely already have available with all the hardware installed — access badge data from the access system.

Whether you have or even if you haven’t used it for understanding occupancy— read on. We will look at their benefits but also the technical aspects of badge data collection and analysis, which you need to know to measure the right data.

The Benefits and Drawbacks of Using Badge Data — “Why Badge Data is Your Key to Occupancy Success”

Example of occupancy monitoring dashboard for a large office portfolio

Unlike in the case of occupancy sensors, and smart cameras, all the hardware you need for measuring occupancy is already installed — and used by people entering the office. This brings several very strong benefits compared to these solutions:

• Cost — no additional hardware is needed and the data is already collected. Compare it to the need of installing and maintaining dedicated hardware and the badge data is a clear winner
• Easy scalability — opening new offices typically means installing new readers and connecting to existing infrastructure: Badge data collection systems are easy to scale and can be easily connected to existing infrastructure. So whether you plan to open new offices or expand the existing ones, you can easily start collecting occupancy data without significant additional investments.
• Access readers are a critical infrastructure with 24/7/365 availability: this means that badge data can be collected and analyzed without outages, providing organizations with an up-to-date and reliable source of data.
• Badge data can be used to monitor compliance: Badge data can be used to monitor compliance with security policies and to identify individuals who are not following established protocols, whether it’s hybrid work policies, entrances to be used or anything else.
• Since the technology is already there, the data can provide historical information right now, which provides a shorter time-to-understanding. This allows us to get much better insights and is a significant difference compared to technologies that will start to provide data only when installed.

However, there are also some downsides to consider, too:

• It’s not attendance monitoring. In a typical office, people don’t badge out, so while the data often can give a general sense of occupancy, you will not know with 100% certainty how many people exactly were in the office at any given time. In most scenarios, this is sufficient and badge data is a solid approximation of actual occupancy. If you have people coming in for an hour or two a day at different times (such as a co-working space or a shopping mall) and you still want to measure reliable hourly occupancy, you may need to look for another solution than badge data.
• Also, if you work as director of workplace experience, badge data will not give you detailed information on the individual utilization of desks, phone booths, or seats in a meeting room until access to these areas requires a badge.
• Not everyone badges in. Depending on your office space, it may be more or less common for people to enter with someone else, without badging in. Given that the badge access log is a security audit trail, if this happens a lot, you may need to address it anyway. The more separated and access-restricted the premises are, the more reliable the data is, indeed — as employees need to use the badge several times.

A frequent area of concern is privacy — some employees may feel uncomfortable with the idea of their movements and presence in the office being tracked. However, it’s important to note that in most cases, companies already collect this type of data through security systems, time-tracking systems, or other means. For the occupancy monitoring purpose, only a subset of this data is used, typically aggregated and stripped of personal data.

Conclusion: When to use Badge Data

So when is existing infrastructure and badge data used and when you should look for more specialized hardware solutions?

If you have a large portfolio equipped with access systems and card readers, and scalability and cost are key factors — using badge data for occupancy monitoring can be the most convenient and practical solution to better understand and manage your office space. Potential downsides can be mitigated upfront by implementing best practices and strict data privacy/security measures.

Disclaimer: I work for Sharry.tech, a company that specializes in smart office/buildings solutions where occupancy measuring using badge data is one of (many) benefits. The author has made every effort to present the information objectively and to provide the most accurate and up-to-date information available.