How occupancy analytics can finally put an end to wasteful offices

Workplaces have always been wasteful: empty offices with lights blazing, computers whirring overnight, giant meeting rooms warmed for a party of two. Taken individually, these examples may seem small but for larger businesses, the impact can quickly add up. An enterprise with $10 billion in revenue, for example, can spend $500 million a year on energy. Across commercial and industrial sectors, building energy waste costs an estimated $60 billion a year. The environmental cost, of course, is similarly problematic.

The issue is compounded by new mobility trends. People are not using workplaces like they used to. With remote work the new norm, workers come in at unpredictable times of the day, and offices are no longer nine-to-five operations. Building managers now face the near-impossible task of maintaining a clean and comfortable space without any clear way to predict when and how that space will be used.

“We’ve been trying for at least 20 years to control building systems based on actual occupancy”

– Clayton Miller, leader of the University of Singapore’s Building and Urban Data Science (BUDS) Lab

Carbon dioxide sensors have been a key technology from the start, providing a picture of how many people are in a given space based on CO2 buildup. “These systems save energy as long as the sensors are operating properly,” explains Miller. “But CO2 sensors are notorious for drift and miscalibration, so once sensors start failing, operations staff often switch them off.”

When we talk about a building’s efficiency, we tend to lump together two distinct areas of a building’s energy performance. The first is how efficiently its systems run. The second is conservation, or the savings made by switching off power when it’s not required. “I think conservation has the most potential for saving energy, at the lowest cost,” says Miller. “Energy auditors often focus on the efficiency side, because that’s something they can control, by replacing or upgrading equipment, for example; but they don’t have the confidence or power to tell people to use their building differently.” That’s because, in most cases, the data simply isn’t available.

Focusing on well-oiled equipment while ignoring the low hanging fruit of conservation significantly limits how much energy we can save. Or as Miller puts it: “It’s like having a super efficient car that you drive around in circles all day.”

It’s not just energy that’s squandered in wasteful workplaces. At a time when 37% of knowledge workers visit the office four days or less every week, company cafeterias increasingly struggle to predict how much food is required, and when. As well as adding unnecessary cost, corporate food waste contributes to the 60 million tons of produce (worth $160 billion) that’s thrown away each year in the US, clogging landfill and creating more climate pollution than all the cars in Georgia.

“37% of knowledge workers visit the office four days or less every week”

Many counting on technology to drastically improve conservation efforts and reduce waste. Until recently, however, our space utilization systems have been difficult to maintain – like the CO2 sensors – or raised privacy concerns, such as camera-based setups. New advances in machine learning and computer vision have made accurate, anonymous people count possible. At Density, we’ve leveraged the technology to track workspace occupancy both historically and in real time.

We mount the devices above entryways in corporate offices and help companies figure out how their assets perform. How are people using conference rooms and cafeterias? How busy are the spaces in a building when they’re in demand and, in some cases, when they’re not used at all – even though they’re being paid for?

In addition to the devices, we use a simple API that can be used to integrate into other systems. We feel that this type of open ecosystem is both scalable and accessible to building owners and facilities managers, who get a true picture of how offices are used and when they are populated and provide the right resources at the right time.

Simply knowing how many people are in a space, in a given moment and over time, is the key to cutting energy, reducing waste and improving user experience. One Fortune 500 company used our technology to discover that just 25% of employees come to the office on Fridays, yet their culinary team was regularly purchasing to cater almost three times that number.

“25% of employees come to the office on Fridays, yet their culinary team was regularly purchasing to cater almost three times that number”

In our new, flexible work culture, it’s not enough to make assumptions about how and when office space and facilities are used. We need hard data. “Co-working, hot-desking, and remote working all make demand control much more important,” concludes Miller. Understanding how a building is used is not only useful for the people who design and operate them, but also those who populate them. He envisions systems that act like an Uber or Airbnb for workplaces. “You can tell people how they can use the building: What space is sunny and quiet, where it’s a little bit breezy with an open desk… Even more interesting than controlling the systems is empowering people with information about spaces that match their comfort preferences.”

The agile, data-driven workplace is one where efficiency, optimization and responsiveness intersect seamlessly. And with the missing piece of the space utilization puzzle finally in place, it’s time to start reaping the financial, environmental and experiential rewards.

This article first appeared in PropModo.

What workplace teams can learn from Zoos

offices of the NTA
A 1910 photograph of the Offices of the National Tuberculosis Association

How can the zoo teach us to create more humane workplaces?

“The city is not a concrete jungle, it’s a human zoo,” wrote anthropologist Desmond Morris in 1969. He went on to point out that there is one place where you do find animals behaving unnaturally – when they are locked up in a cage. So why do humans lock themselves in offices – the most robust of cages – for the entirety of the working day?

Over the last century, zoos have replaced barred cages with enclosures designed to replicate the optimal habitat for every animal. Zoology guides the allocation of space and resources. Cross-disciplinary teams adjust the controlled environment to ensure that an animal thrives, not just survives.

Offices have evolved to a lesser extent. Many offices are still designed on the whims of an architect. Cost savings dictate the allocation of space and resources. Once workplaces are built, they are rarely adjusted to meet changing employee needs.

Why is it that some office spaces operate more like cages than like zoos?

Hamburg Zoo open enclosure area no cages
A 1907 postcard from The Hamburg Zoo, the first zoo to use open enclosures instead of cages

Many companies still see workplaces as cost or overhead, rather than a strategic investment. They believe the work environment has a neutral impact on employees. This creates workplaces optimized for cost efficiency, not employee efficiency. Workplace strategy initiatives are rarely implemented unless they provide short-term cost savings.

The best workplace teams use inventive methods to provide work environments optimized for human needs instead of cost alone. Their vision for future workplaces accounts for the behavioral, psychosocial, and health outcomes of building design and operations. In this paradigm, the workplace is a strategic asset to attract and retain top talent.

A natural habitat

Effective workplace are designed around the fundamental belief that the built environment impacts its occupants. They include specific attributes such as proper ventilation, plants, and sunlight. Harvard’s Center for Health and the Global Environment found an 8% increase in productivity when ventilation is increased. Research has shown a 15% increase in productivity after plants were added to offices.

A 2018 study by the Department of Design and Environmental Analysis at Cornell found that optimizing exposure to natural light led to a 84% drop in symptoms of eyestrain and headaches. Companies like RGA automatically adjust lighting to match the sunlight outside and align with circadian rhythms.

From a zoology perspective, each of these features appear obvious. They are rooted in the belief that humans, like animals, possess an innate tendency to affiliate with nature, or “biophilia.” In the corporate real estate industry, this concept is relatively new. The WELL Building Standard, which validates building features that support and advance human health and wellness was founded in 2014.

Standards like WELL will become a requirement instead of a nicety if scientific research on productivity continues. Judith Heerwagen, author of Biophilic Design explained at The Future Office conference, “We spend millions on understanding what makes humans sick, we should be equally focused on studying what makes us well.”

We spend millions on understanding what makes humans sick, we should be equally focused on studying what makes us well.

– Judith Heerwagen, author of Biophilic Design

The anti-camera

Data collection from study participants is no longer enough to guide workplace decisions. Employers need to collect data on their own employees to adequately meet their needs. They need to measure how people use physical space if they are to design to the specifications of the people working in them.

Unlike in zoos, privacy and security concerns complicate monitoring humans at work. Short of installing a camera, there hasn’t been a way to accurately measure how efficiently a particular space is used and if it’s being used as intended.

Recent advances in computer vision and artificial intelligence have made solving this problem possible. Density provides a device and an analytics platform that can accurately count the number of people in a room without compromising their privacy. Collecting data on the interaction between people and place is a growing trend in the emerging property technology sector, or “proptech.”

Cross-department collaboration

After data is collected, communication between cross-functional teams dictates how well physical environments are designed and managed.

The European Association for Zoos Aquariums (EAZA), outlines the following example of an organizational structure:

Source: EAZA Foundations for Management and development

EAZA recommends weekly meetings between zoo management from different departments to “keep everyone up to date… and give everyone the feeling they are involved in running the zoo.” Daily meetings are scheduled to report on the needs of each animal.

Zoo management explicitly does not use a siloed team to develop a one-size-fits-all approach to animal well-being. Collaboration allows the team to change the zoo environment to meet the needs of individual animals.

Most workplaces are structurally incapable of achieving this level of flexibility. Workplaces impact all major departments of an organization, but they are traditionally managed by only one: real estate.

Emerging workplace leaders are enlisting the help of multiple departments in their workplace strategy. Anthony Parzanese, Head of Workplace Innovation at Red Hat describes the need to “raise awareness and education around the collaborative partnerships between Real Estate, IT, Finance, and HR.”

Parzanese solidifies these partnerships through a shared company goal. “We need to help each department understand how much the workplace contributes towards talent attraction and retention.”

We need to help each department understand how much the workplace contributes towards talent attraction and retention.

– Anthony Parzanese, Head of Workplace Innovation at Red Hat

Ironic isn’t it, that to captivate the attention of humans at work, workplace teams must first look to animals in captivity.

This article first appeared in WorkTech Academy.