Introducing Robin’s new workplace analytics: Crack the office space utilization code

How do you measure how well your office works for your employees? Some companies rely on surveys, others put together a committee of stakeholders to make office design decisions. While it’s important to actively listen to employees, the cold, hard office space utilization truth lies in the data. But with no tool to measure that utilization, companies have to rely on other, less explicit information.

That’s where workplace analytics come in.

Robin’s revamped workplace analytics provide visibility into space utilization with insightful recommendations and industry best practices that help companies optimize existing offices and plan for new space.

With a growing trend towards facilities proactively (and some cases pushed) into viewing the world from the employee's perspective, 90% of companies are looking into adopting self-service business intelligence tools, according to JLL. It was this trend and the feedback from customers that pushed us to continue to improve our workplace analytics for more sophisticated insights into space utilization, areas of improvement, and recaptured time using Robin’s meeting protection features.

And for when an office move or redesign is on the horizon, we made it even easier to quickly export your current workplace utilization, bottlenecks, and capacity charts to present to stakeholders and let the numbers do the talking.

Interested in utilization reports with insights on how your office space is actually being used? Start a free trial today to see Robin’s powerful workplace analytics.

The power of Robin’s new workplace analytics for the modern office

Our expanded workplace analytics provide a high-level overview of office space utilization based on the calendar system you already use, including Google, Office 365, and Microsoft Exchange. Admins can now dive deep into data and based on the way their employees work, can quickly find answers to questions like:

1. Utilization: Does your office have enough event spaces? 

Jump into the analytics and immediately understand typical workplace utilization patterns for meeting spaces within your office by day, week, or month. How does your office compare to the industry ideal utilization? Get a better understanding by drilling down to a particular building, floor, or space.

Our tooltips help you compare averages with company seasonal peaks or lows, along with explicit suggestions on how to improve spaces that are utilized less than 40% of the time. When office utilization is over 60%, your employees are having a hard time finding a space when they need it.

Recommendations on how to reclaim your space with our meeting protection feature is one way we arm companies with the information to optimize the workplace. Employees are happy because they are able to find the space to collaborate and be productive and you can be assured that you are using your workplace to its full potential.

Click on each image to enlarge and see details

2. Utilization by day: When is the office busiest?

Being able to identify specific times of the day throughout the workweek when the office is busiest helps shed light on scheduling bottlenecks. Using our analytics, you can hover over a chart to see which hours of the day have the greatest number of spaces reserved for events or other activities.

Understand whether your office is truly cramped for space, or if some schedule adjustments, such as meeting days, times or locations, might help alleviate some of the crunch. If the latter is the case, some cultural adjustments may save you from expanding to new space too early.

3. Event and space fit: Are spaces and events well-matched?

Are people reserving the right types of spaces within the office based on their task? Or the first available space they find? Our Event Fit chart compares the capacity of the space with the number of attendees to help you understand whether or not your office is functioning at ideal utilization and incorporates a mix of spaces to support the work taking place. If you find spaces are being mis or underused, design and resource improvements might be necessary.

4. Event breakdown by duration and space type: How are spaces used?

How easy is it to understand how long typical meetings are in your office? By understanding this type of information, you’ll recognize the relationship between spaces and the types of events that take place in them.

Our workplace analytics help summarize where most events are taking place. If huddle rooms are booked most frequently, is this because your office has more spaces built to this standard? Or because this space standard best suits the work taking place? Dive deeper into the most frequently used spaces to help answer this question.

When spaces host a majority of recurring events, it makes it harder for folks to find time to schedule new events in those spaces and may lead to superficial feelings of overuse. Before adding new spaces, take a look at the recurring events on the schedule. Are all of these events still active or can some be removed to free up space? Having time available for ad hoc events meetings gives your office the flexibility to meet the demands of today's fast-paced business needs.

5. Recaptured time: How much space can your office save?

Typically, about 20% of meeting room reservations will be abandoned. While colleagues constantly complain about meeting room availability, facilities sometimes swear there’s enough space and that disconnect can have costly effects. 

Abandoned meetings happen for multiple reasons but we see it most often when multiple spaces are added to an event and go unused or when folks cancel or reschedule an event without updating the room reservation. Calendar systems like Google and Outlook have no way of preventing these types of issues. 

Instead of leaving those spaces unavailable to the rest of the office, Robin releases them from the calendar for others to grab. Our recaptured time quantifies how room displays help manage the schedule of meeting bookable spaces in your office. Offices with flexible schedules and high numbers of ad hoc events typically see higher rates of recaptured time than offices where most events are planned in advance. Not only do companies save on money and square feet, but the recapture tool immediately makes the office feel bigger than before. 

So, how do you plan on measuring how well your office works for your employees moving forward? We revamped our workplace analytics to arm you with the information you need to make actionable decisions. Understanding how people currently use space and areas of improvement isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s a must have in order to retain talent, prevent office space utilization issues, and avoid an expensive office move before it’s truly necessary.