Peeling the Occupancy Onion
How to choose the right occupancy sensor solution
As we emerge from the pandemic and organizations execute their returns to the workplace, interest in monitoring and reporting workplace occupancy has increased. At first thought, this might appear to be relatively straightforward to achieve. But there are many levels of nuance to what occupancy actually means in a corporate office, and they’re uniquely tied to what each organization is really trying to measure.
Knowing what you want your occupancy solution to be able to tell you is an important first step to selecting the right approach and choosing solutions on the market to meet your requirements.
The increased focus on occupancy insights is closely tied to a wide variety of new corporate initiatives. These include monitoring the overall volume of people in an office space to ensure compliance with tight capacity restrictions, understanding how many people choose to return to the office on any given day, and gauging the popularity of particular office areas/floors or even individual seats. Accurate data on occupancy can also inform future real estate investment decisions with much higher precision than traditionally used and is extremely valuable for organizations seeking to consolidate their portfolio without impacting the operations of the organization. Certain occupancy data, when delivered in real-time, can also be used to trigger experiences in an intelligent workplace.
Know what you want to achieve
Before choosing an approach and occupancy solution for your organization, it’s important to understand exactly what you want to achieve. That’s key to being able to clearly define the type of occupancy data (and at what level of granularity and frequency) is needed to realize your goal(s).
There are four main ways in which occupancy is calculated today. Each has its own degrees of complexity (and cost) where implementation is concerned. And each addresses slightly different needs. Here’s a quick summary:
- Planned or forecast occupancy — used by facilities or workplace-operations teams to plan how many people will be in the office on any particular day. This data is typically gathered from a desk/room reservation system or from customized forms that employees complete before coming back into the office. It’s proving popular among organizations that reopen with limited capacity or reduced individual seating and require employees to apply for or reserve a space in advance. The data is used proactively to manage capacity by only making limited spaces available or by provisioning specific services like conference-room availability. Some forward-thinking organizations are also seeking to use it to encourage co-workers back to the office by circulating information about team members’ planned attendance. However, the approach fails to capture actual office occupancy as it can be skewed by “no-shows” or number of people attending to sit in a single reserved meeting room.
- Attendance — relied on by real estate professionals, pre-pandemic, as a basic way of calculating the number of people coming into an office, with the general assumption that people who did so would stay for most of, if not the whole, day. Most easily taken from security-badge systems, this data is highly inaccurate for reporting current occupancy of any unit of space or service (which is what it’s often used as a proxy for). This is because most organizations don’t require employees to “swipe out” on departure. It also fails to capture visitors who enter the space without a security badge and is highly inaccurate for campuses or multi-story office buildings where, once people have passed through security, people can move freely between floors or buildings. This data can, however, be useful for determining how many unique individuals are starting to use the office again in a hybrid fashion.
- Binary occupancy — for identifying if people (individuals or in groups) are present in a particular space, whether that’s an enclosed office, meeting room, restroom, or individual desk. This approach provides real-time data, generally from a small, infrared sensor or other similar device, providing insight into the actual use of space, frequency of use, and length of time used (“dwell time”). It can also be used to drive experience automation, such as triggering lights or displays and automating reservation check-in/check-out processes. While binary occupancy provides accurate data on the consumption of space and services, it does not provide insights into numbers of people in shared or larger spaces nor identify the total number of unique individuals that have come to the office.
- People-counting occupancy — various different technologies can be used for this most advanced form of occupancy monitoring. The right approach for each organization depends on the insights it wants from the data it gathers. Solutions that keep real-time count of the number of people that pass through a doorway can be used to accurately identify how many people are in each room or floor. Camera-based artificial intelligence (AI), using data from security-camera feeds, can be used to count the number of people in a large open space like a cafeteria. Dedicated people-counting sensors can be used to identify the exact number of people in a smaller space (like a meeting room or bank of desks). Some solutions can go as far as detecting “signs of life” using AI and machine learning (ML) to identify rooms or desks that might not have people physically present, but can be considered “occupied” because of laptops, bags and/or paperwork on tables. People-counting can become very granular and, like binary occupancy, can be used to automate processes and experiences in spaces. But it’s usually unable to identify individuals without the use of facial recognition. And, unlike attendance-based systems (described earlier), it can’t generally be used to identify, for example, the number of unique individuals who come to an office on any given day.
Don’t rush in; plan ahead
Knowing what you want your occupancy solution to be able to tell you is an important first step to selecting the right approach and ultimately choosing solutions on the market to meet your requirements. Some organizations might find they already have data or systems that can give them the answers they seek. Others might need a combination of solutions for different types of spaces to tell them what they want to know or bring alive the experiences they want to provide in their future workplace.
The space is rapidly evolving as new technologies become available and new players entering the market, all with some great capabilities. Before rushing in and buying the best new system, it’s important to keep your end goal in mind. Make sure you’re going to get the answers you need to today’s questions — as well as be supplied with data that will enable you to make the right decisions or enable experiences you aspire to provide into the future.
Accenture has put these concepts into practice at our latest Innovation Hub at One Manhattan West in New York City, where data from across the workplace is combined in real time to help us manage and operate the space and provide employees and guests a superior working environment.
This article was first published in the March 2022 edition of CoreNet Global’s ‘The Source’.
