From scattered signals to one clear view of presence

[00:00:00] Austen Blass: Thank you everybody for joining us today. My name is Austen Blass, and I am the director of corporate marketing here at Robin. Just some housekeeping tips before we get into the content. You’ll see that we are recording this session, so we will send you the recording later today or tomorrow morning at the latest.

[00:00:20] There is a Q&A in the webinar, so feel free to drop any questions in there. We’ll be sure to respond to a few of them as time permits, and if we don’t get to yours today on the webinar, we’ll be sure to email you in our follow-up.

[00:00:37] So today we’re talking about presence signals in your office and why they matter more than many teams realize. We’re going to dig into why getting an accurate picture of who’s in your office is harder than it seems. We’ll talk about our concept of presence as a platform, show you what that actually looks like, and discuss the ways that you can get started on improving your picture of presence.

[00:01:04] We have two people with me today whose presence I really enjoy, but who also know this topic inside and out. Ciara Peter is our SVP of Product at Robin, and Brian Muse is our CTO and founder. So with that, I will pass it over to you, Ciara.

[00:01:25] Ciara Peter: Thanks, Austen. Well, I think it’s safe to say that most of us are thinking about budgets, and we also have been asked to look at opportunities to cut costs in the workplace. So we tend to use our experience in the office to start that exercise. You might walk the floor on a Wednesday, and it’s half empty.

[00:01:51] You’re pretty sure that you can give back this floor, but pretty sure doesn’t survive a conversation with your CFO. Without hard proof of what’s actually being used, you can’t make that call, so you keep paying for space that nobody’s sitting in. That’s the problem in a nutshell, and it’s why presence matters.

[00:02:10] What is presence? It is knowing who’s physically in the office, when, and how they’re using it. It sounds basic, but it really is the foundation for all of the decisions that you make around the office. It tells you where the money is going, so with real estate being your second biggest cost, it’s important that it doesn’t sit empty.

[00:02:30] It also helps people coordinate their in-office days to have a much better employee experience, so that going to the office feels like it’s worth the trip. And it lets you run the building to the reality, making sure that you’re staffing the right people on the right days and you have enough coverage for peak days rather than just making a guess. Unfortunately, it does take effort to get presence right.

[00:02:57] In a hybrid office, presence is multidimensional. It’s not just about how many employees are assigned to desks in that office. You need a combination of how many people typically come into the office and specifically on which days, so you can plan for these kinds of bursts and also make sure that you’re not only optimizing for the most full days in the office.

[00:03:20] You need to take a look at upcoming reservations to plan for resourcing and staffing, and you also need to know what spaces are being used and how they’re being used. The answer to this is not a single source, but a combination of many. The reality is that most workplaces are flying blind with legacy presence tracking.

[00:03:43] 90% of companies use badge data only, so they know who is there but not what they’re doing, and one in three meetings gets abandoned, so you end up paying for 30 or 40% more space than you actually need. I’m going to hand it to Brian to share best practices on capturing and acting on your workplace presence signals so you can make the best use of your office.

[00:04:08] Brian Muse: Thank you, Ciara.

[00:04:10] Yeah, so I’m going to talk a little bit about how we think about presence at Robin and inside of the Robin platform. Apologies in advance for probably being a runaway train of thought here. One important thing to always keep in mind about presence signal is that not all signal is the same.

[00:04:33] But more signal is better. It’s going to give you a clearer picture. And you can get signal from tons of different places within the office. Like Ciara mentioned, an obvious one is badge swipes. It’s going to capture the first action of the person as they arrive at the building.

[00:04:51] But there are plenty of other things that indicate if somebody is there. You can detect devices on Wi-Fi. You could have geofencing. It could be as much as, in a room, if somebody taps into the tap scheduler outside the room, right? That’s an indication that there’s a person physically there, and then a whole bunch of other ways.

[00:05:11] And so we’ve never thought about presence as a single feature or a single integration inside of Robin, but as a platform that allows any type of presence signal to come into Robin, and then for what we call side effects to happen as a result of seeing that presence, whether that’s some sort of automation for the employee, like checking them into their desk or giving them suggestions for rooms, or all the way down the pipeline into analytics, so you have a much clearer view of what’s going on in the office.

[00:05:42] I’m going to talk through five or six of the primary ways we see presence getting ingested at Robin and then deep dive into a couple of them. Like Ciara said, badging is maybe the most popular way. It actually is also the best way. And again, the more presence signal, the better.

[00:06:06] I’m going to go through all of these. We recommend setting up more than one. There’s almost no reason not to. But badging, if you’re just trying to get a count of who was in the building that day, is a great way, because most people are going to badge in at least once throughout the day.

[00:06:25] It’s not 100%, people piggyback in, but for the most part. Again, it’s the first thing that people do when they arrive. So checking them into their desk right away, letting their coworkers know that they’ve arrived and they’re on site, helping them get to their meetings. All of that can happen in real time with badge swipes.

[00:06:44] So it is a really great thing to connect. We can also connect the badge itself to the Robin employee profile. Some presence is anonymous, just understanding whether a person is here or not, but badging is one of those forms of presence that tells you who’s there, which is great. I’ll talk a little more about badging in a moment.

[00:07:07] Wi-Fi is the next one, probably the next most popular that people set up. And Wi-Fi is a little different from badging in that I like to describe it as an additive signal. If you set up a Wi-Fi integration with Robin, your expectation shouldn’t be that it’s going to capture 100% of all presence, and that we should just set this up and we’ll be good.

[00:07:29] We’ll have great analytics. The reality is, and I’ll dive a little bit into this in a moment too, there are a lot of ifs with how this performs. So if you’re using badging or other methods, there’s almost no reason not to add Wi-Fi.

[00:07:50] And it just helps build a better picture. Sensors and smart cameras are starting to get really good at anonymous person counting, and these can be at the room level or at the desk level. We work very closely with VergeSense. They make awesome sensors. They’re a great example of this: if you’re present inside of a space, they’ve got an integration with Robin to check you into that space.

[00:08:16] And the same for desks. With sensors, you’re typically not going to get any sort of identity, right? It’s very much, “Hey, there are three people here in this room,” or “We see a person at this desk.” But you can infer some identity if somebody’s assigned to that desk or has reserved that desk and there’s a body in it. It’s probably them.

[00:08:39] The fourth one I’ll talk about is NFC and QR stickers. These are a sleeper hit with our customer base. People love these. They’re not passive, so you do have to manually interact with them, but it’s this great visual reminder to check in. They have some other utility that I’ll talk about in a moment, and they’re pretty cheap and easy to roll out pretty broadly.

[00:09:01] These are the stickers you’d have on the desk where you either scan the QR code or just tap your phone, and it’ll post your presence into Robin. Then a couple of things we’re working on that are coming soon. One is call join events. We’re pretty focused right now on deeper integration into the in-room hardware.

[00:09:22] Those little tap schedulers inside of the rooms that you use to join your Meet call or your Zoom call: being able to act off of that signal that somebody joined the call from the room is obviously great signal for presence in that room, and something we can use to automatically check people in. This is a super common request.

[00:09:42] Just imagine people who are back-to-back in meetings aren’t going to walk back outside the room to re-check into the room on the tablet. And then lastly, geofencing. I would also consider this additive. I’ll talk a little bit more about this in a minute, because it’s very opt-in on the user end, but again, another option for that.

[00:10:05] All right. Moving on. Sorry, I lost my spot in the slideshow here. Where were we? All right, there we are. I just want to spotlight badge and access control integration. This is the first thing I always recommend that everybody set up. We actually support a bunch of these systems, what we call turnkey, or just really out of the box self-serve.

[00:10:30] And when possible, we’re adding new ones all the time. So if you see your access control system listed here, it’s probably very easy to set up in Robin. If you don’t see it listed, we can still integrate with almost any system. If you know a lot about access control, you’ll know it’s very fragmented.

[00:10:47] There are systems with cloud APIs, and systems that are on-prem that don’t have APIs, and we’ve never encountered something that we couldn’t integrate with. We have something we call the Universal Connector API. It’s a really easy way to relay information, even from on-prem systems, into Robin, and we’ve done dozens of these integrations with our customers, and it’s pretty straightforward.

[00:11:14] On the support side, I would say we could probably support pretty much anything. Again, I don’t want to be proven wrong, but we’ve never really encountered anything we couldn’t integrate with. And the benefits of badge I kind of mentioned. The real-time aspect is important.

[00:11:29] We actually have customers that use the daily roster pretty religiously to help get headcounts for lunch orders and things like that. One nice benefit of the badge integration is, again, it’s the first thing that’s happening in the day, so you’re getting a pretty accurate count in real time of who’s present in the office.

[00:11:49] Coworkers can actually see who’s not just reserved a desk. So if your teammate has not just reserved a desk for the day but has been verified on site, you can go find them and have a conversation. And it’s completely passive. Your employees could be completely unaware that Robin even exists and this will work, which is really cool.

[00:12:13] The setup for badge is very lightweight. It’s extremely lightweight for the turnkey ones. You just connect, and then there’s a step where you basically say, let’s say you’ve connected Brivo, “Hey, this Brivo door belongs to this Robin building.” And you’ll configure that for probably just your front doors, right?

[00:12:33] So a couple of doors per building, and then as soon as you do that, it all just starts working. So really simple to set up. We also support a new feature, just supported for Openpath or Avigilon today, but more support will be rolling out as demand dictates.

[00:12:54] And this will allow you to configure which doors guests should be allowed into. On your visitor management, when you’re going to add a visitor through Robin Visitor Management, you can say, “Hey, I want to give this guest door access,” and it’ll give them access to those doors.

[00:13:11] That’s really useful for contractors who need to get in the front door, or if your lobby or receiving area is inside of a front door, so people aren’t just standing at the door milling around. We’re pretty excited about that too. I’ll talk a little more about Wi-Fi. I mentioned this.

[00:13:29] Wi-Fi has a whole bunch of caveats. I still recommend setting it up because it is so simple to set up. You basically provide Robin with your publicly facing IP addresses, and that’s all you do. It starts working. It depends on a few things, which is why I never say only set up Wi-Fi.

[00:13:47] Set up Wi-Fi in addition to something else. If we see a person on any Robin surface on that public IP address, we’re going to post presence and count their presence. But let’s say you have the mobile app, right? If people are using the mobile app, we have to be woken up by iOS or Android, the operating system.

[00:14:09] These operating systems are very strict about battery usage. So we’ll get woken up probably at some point, but it’s not going to be in real time, right? It could be an hour later or even more where our app gets woken up to be able to do this check if we’re running in the background.

[00:14:24] It works on all Robin surfaces, so if anybody’s got the web dashboard open or uses the Outlook extension throughout the day, right, we’re going to see that and check them in. In those cases it’s going to be very additive. You’re going to get all that presence data in there, and the user’s going to see the benefit again of being auto checked in, all the automations that help them.

[00:14:45] So I highly recommend setting it up just because it’s so easy, and if you understand what the expectation should be for it, then it’s really great to have in addition to other methods. NFC and QR, like I said, is a sleeper hit. Tons of customers are using these stickers.

[00:15:08] They’re super cheap. We basically sell them at cost to you. You buy them straight through the Robin dashboard or contact your CSM. They get shipped to you, and you just plop them on the desk. You scan it in the mobile app to pair it, and now you’ve got an interactive desk in your office that people can use to tap in, right, and it’ll post presence and check them in.

[00:15:30] But there are other benefits too. If the monitor’s broken on the desk, they can scan the QR code and report an issue right from there. So super convenient. Great utility. Highly recommend checking these out as well. I talked a bit about the Universal API. It’s for anything else you have: you can still integrate it into Robin.

[00:15:50] We had one customer who was talking about how people have to log in to print something on site, and they said, “Oh, if we see somebody printing something at the office, we’re going to post presence to Robin.”

[00:16:07] So if you have any sort of presence signal that you want to get into Robin, we make it super easy. You just pipe in the resource identifier in Robin, which can come in in a few ways. Some sort of employee identifier, whether it’s their number from your HRIS system or an email address, and the timestamp.

[00:16:25] And again, we’ve seen people hook up all sorts of different things, like mobile device management systems, et cetera. Once we see the data, it’s processed like any signal that our native integrations are processing, where all those side effects just automatically happen. If you’re interested in this, definitely reach out through your CSM or other channels.

[00:16:47] We have technical resources on hand to help advise and guide. We’re always eager to help and see what cool stuff our customers do. And then last but not least on this side, diving into what’s coming up: room-level presence has been long asked for, being able to tie into calling into a meeting from the room.

[00:17:15] We’re working on this and hoping to have it out sometime maybe late summer. Let’s say you use Google Meet or you use Zoom: when somebody taps in in the room into the call, that’s going to post. We’ll be able to gather that as presence signal in Robin and check them into the meeting room.

[00:17:32] Really excited about this. A lot of our focus with presence has been on the floor or building level and understanding who’s in. And so we’re excited to get more into the nitty-gritty of who’s actually in the different areas of the office, the different spaces, how many people are using them.

[00:17:46] It’s going to unlock another level of useful analytics and automation opportunity within Robin that we’re excited about. And then the last I’ll mention here is geofencing. This is obviously going to be opt-in. It’s been a pretty popular request, so we’re excited to roll it out.

[00:18:04] It’s one of those things where employees are going to have to opt in because it uses location permissions on their phone, and you’ll set up a geofence around your office. If people are within that geofence for a certain amount of time, it’ll automatically check them in. But again, this is an additive one because not everyone’s going to set it up.

[00:18:21] Employees really have to see the value. They’re going to have to understand, “Hey, this is doing a whole bunch of things passively for me that I don’t have to do manually anymore, so I’m going to turn it on,” and then you’ll get some extra benefit on the back end, inside of your analytics.

[00:18:34] So sorry to talk at you for forever. That’s all the nitty-gritty of the presence platform, and I’ll pass it back to Ciara.

[00:18:44] Ciara Peter: Thank you, Brian. So now you’ve seen all of the multidimensional ways that you can set up presence to get a really great picture of your office. Now I’m going to share how you can use this to make better decisions.

[00:19:03] All right. What we’re looking at is a dashboard in Robin. This is a custom dashboard that we’ve built, so if you have advanced analytics and you’re interested in implementing this directly, we can do that for you. And I’m also looking for feedback on what else you would like to see in a presence dashboard.

[00:19:22] So please send that along to us. As we talked about, the main goals of presence are to eliminate unused space, optimize the employee experience, and make sure the services and staffing line up with expectations. What we’re looking at here is general presence, so people who have come to the office, and also desk-related presence.

[00:19:43] Let’s see where your day starts. This is your pulse on the building: who’s expected, how full you’ll be, and which days are actually busy. I want to talk about two problems this solves for you right away. First is the Tuesday problem. If you’re looking at average visits by day of week, Tuesday is really busy.

[00:20:02] Some people only come in on Tuesday, possibly, and so they believe the office is this busy every day. But there are opportunities to rebalance this so that you can have a more equal presence throughout the week. That could be through teams having different anchor days, or a number of different opportunities.

[00:20:22] And then I want to talk about whether you can trust your own data. Looking at check-ins by confirmation method, you have badge, geofence, NFC, and QR. If you’re sharing these numbers and somebody challenges them, how you can answer is, “Here’s how it’s actually being confirmed building by building.”

[00:20:44] And in this example, you can see that in Fifty-three State, much of our presence is being tracked with badge. But at Galleria Business Center, we don’t have badge presence set up, and that may be something that you want to consider.

[00:21:06] Moving on to people in attendance, this screen is about your people and your desks, and it surfaces two conversations you probably have been having on gut feel. First is, are the desks being used? We hear a lot, “I want to know who has an assigned desk and is not coming to the office.”

[00:21:31] This gets really expensive, and every one of these is a desk that you could reassign or flex. Can you guys still hear me?

[00:21:46] Brian Muse: Yeah.

[00:21:47] Ciara Peter: Okay, great. Thanks. All right. So the second is where is your office culture actually landing? You can also see the employees with the top 10 office attendance.

[00:22:00] Look at Brian, always showing off, but he’s at the top of the list here. You can see your most frequent attendees and which teams show up versus those that don’t. On average check-ins per employee by department here on the right, the different colors you see are those who are adhering to a hybrid policy or not.

[00:22:20] We have a hybrid policy set up at eight days per month, so we can see that sales is meeting this, but design is a little below that mark. So we’ll want to see how we can encourage them to better use the office. And finally, I want to talk about spaces and meeting rooms. This is where a lot of the money hides.

[00:22:47] We have two problems here that we’ll want to look at, and they’re big ones. The first is ghost meetings. If you look at the no-show rate, Endor down here is getting booked, and nobody shows up almost every time. These rooms look fully booked on a calendar, so it’s pretty misleading, and your team might think that you’re out of space and ask for more, or employees may not show up because they don’t think they have somewhere to conduct their meeting that day.

[00:23:16] This separates the booked from the actually used. And then looking at reclaimable hours, we have something called abandoned meeting protection. We also have this for desks. In this top metric, these are rooms that are being held by no-shows that you could automatically release if you had that set up.

[00:23:39] The unused capacity chart is a different version of this, which shows how rooms are being used versus their capacity. You can see that Nebula has a capacity of eight, and on average only three people show up to that room. So what you might do is split something like Nebula or Solaris into several rooms to optimize your space.

[00:24:12] Okay. Austen, can you help me get back to the presentation? Thank you. All right, we’re going to wrap here with a case study from one of our wonderful customers, athenahealth. Everything we walked through, we’ll see in a company that actually did it. athenahealth is a healthcare IT organization with about eight thousand people globally, headquartered in Boston, with offices around the world.

[00:24:37] They don’t have a global policy. They actually don’t have an attendance policy at the office level. They do this at the team level, which is why analytics and presence are really important. Their check-ins used to be manual, and the catch with this is that if you forget to check in, the system will release your desk if you have abandoned desk protection, so there are pros and cons to this.

[00:25:02] But then you come in, you drive all the way in, and you have nowhere to sit. These missed check-ins also left gaps in the presence data, which made the numbers hard to trust, and that trust is hard to rebuild as the discrepancies continue. So they removed this manual step entirely by setting up badge access with Sigur and tracking badge swipes automatically.

[00:25:29] There’s nothing for the employee to do. Then it reconciles against desk booking, so two systems become one number that everybody agrees on. And with this clean data, they could see a floor wasn’t being used the way they expected, and so rather than renew that space on a hunch, they rebuilt one of their entire floors.

[00:25:48] They eliminated the workstations and repurposed the space to have a one hundred and twenty person training room that can be split into smaller spaces. It also gave managers accurate attendance data so they could manage their own hybrid policy instead of waiting on a central team.

[00:26:15] And the workplace experience director, Brittany, says the badge integration was a no-brainer. It was easy and the right thing. The easy thing and the right thing are the same thing, so the adoption takes care of itself.

[00:26:34] Brian Muse: Yeah. We just have a minute left. If you want to get started today with any of this, definitely talk to your CSM if you need help with any of these or you want to talk through how to start getting going with badge. Wi-Fi’s super easy to configure, so I recommend just going right to the web dashboard, where you can step through configuration of that and start to try it out.

[00:27:00] If you’ve used one of the turnkey supported badge integrations, I definitely recommend just going there. But again, if not, our team is standing by, and we’re happy to help get any sort of access control system integrated into Robin. So yeah, excited to have more people trying this stuff out.

[00:27:23] It makes a big difference.

[00:27:27] Austen Blass: Well, that covers everything. Thank you, Ciara and Brian. It looks like we’re at time. For the questions that did come in, we’ll be sure to follow up with you over email within the next day. And like Brian said, if you’re interested in setting up any of these presence signals with Robin, look out for our email that’s coming tomorrow with the webinar recording, and we’ll include guides for setting up Wi-Fi, access control, and other integrations with Robin.

[00:27:54] But also, if you have any questions, please do reach out to your CSM or our support team at support@robinpowered.com. Thank you so much for joining us today, and we hope you all have a great rest of your day. Thanks, everyone.

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