Big rooms are wasting big money: Insights from 10,000 hours of office data

Over the last 6 months, we analyzed over 10,000 hours of meeting room usage across select customers. The main takeaway? Meeting rooms are not being used as designed, and it’s costing companies millions. 

We highlight the numbers behind meeting room usage in our new Workplace Utilization Index: Mid-Year 2019. Wrong-sized offices are underutilized, costly, and detrimental to employee experience in the office.

Generated by Density’s people count sensor platform, here are some key observations: 

  • 36% of the time meeting rooms are in use, they’re occupied by only 1 person.
  • Meetings with between 2 and 4 people represented 40% of all meetings.
  • Large meetings were rare: 85% of meetings had fewer than seven attendees, and only 6% of meetings included more than 10 people.
  • Even the meetings with the most attendees typically only utilized 45% of the room’s capacity.

Solving the problem of wrong-sized spaces will ultimately save companies millions of dollars both in the future and at the time of initial fit-out after buying a new property. However, the answer is not to simply shrink all meeting rooms. 

Getting the right mix of space requires ongoing measurement of how your own employees use spaces at work. There’s no Golden Ratio for office design. The goal is to measure what employees actually need over time and adjust space allocation to respond to these needs as they change.  

Get your free copy of the index here: Workplace Utilization Index: Mid-Year 2019

The ABCs of workplace design from a Behavioral Scientist

There’s science behind the impact of workplace design on employee productivity. To understand this science, we recently sat down with Anja Jamrozik, Ph.D., Director of Research at Montreal-based flexible workspace provider Breather. 

Breather provides private workspace that can be booked from 2 hours to 2 years or more. Companies turn to Breather for everything from meetings and offsites, to longer-term office needs such as a new HQ or regional team space. Inherent to Breather’s customer experience  is providing space that is flexible to the shifting needs of businesses and their employees. 

Jamrozik has expertise in many areas and primarily serves as a behavioral scientist working to improve the design of the built environment for Breather.

People’s environment really matters for their performance.

– Anja Jamrozik, Ph.D., Director of Research at Breather

“People’s environment really matters for their performance,” she said in our recent conversation. “It’s very hard to concentrate if you’re cold or you don’t have adequate lighting. And that extends to every aspect of the workplace.”

Jamrozik’s perspective on why psychological and environmental factors are so important can be broken down into an easy-to-understand “ABC” formula: Attention, Behavior, and Comfort. Here, we will walk through the core components of these workplace ABCs that everybody needs to know.

Attention

Attention is a tricky animal. It is something that, through discipline and effort, we can control. But only to a degree. At some level, our attention will always roam and become depleted over time. 

Without a doubt, our environment plays a major role in how easily everybody can stay in control. Privacy, for example, has a big influence. People are often most productive at accomplishing focus work when they have no distractions. 

Then again, being stuck in a drab, isolated room can become detrimental if the work is not captivating and lead to boredom over time even when there is a challenging problem to solve.

“If you’re trying to focus but it’s a boring task, you might want the activity and noise of coffee shop to keep you stimulated,” said Jamrozik. “But if you’re trying to block everything out, then silence is usually better for really demanding tasks.”

Attention is also a finite resource.

What is the optimal level of distraction? The answer, unfortunately, is that it depends. 

Attention is also a finite resource. A mundane task — like combing through a spreadsheet — tends to drain it quickly. This reality of human psychology cannot be defeated, but environmental factors can play a role in what Jamrozik refers to as restoring attention.

“Nature is a really good example,” she said. “If you’re walking out in the woods, you don’t have to be concentrating on everything. But it engages your attention through the movement, colors, and everything nature has to offer.”

What’s the takeaway? Work environments should provide a mix of spaces that support the different types of attention required to complete different tasks at work.

Behavior

“Environment really, strongly influences our behavior,” said Jamrozik. 

To show just how dramatic this can be, she references one study that relates to collaboration. If an office space has a staircase, incredibly, the people located on different floors are about as likely to organically collaborate as two workers sitting in offices 30 miles apart.

The people located on different floors are about as likely to organically collaborate as two workers sitting in offices 30 miles apart.

“The more difficult it is to access someone else, the less likely we are to do it,” she said. “This has been known for a very long time. So different companies experiment with how they seat people. Some go by function. Some go by project.” 

Even the type of food that is available to workers can impact behavior. As you may imagine, being surrounded by apples and bananas generates a different type of behavior than chips and cookies — and caffeinated beverages offer their own stimulus. What you lay out in the breakroom will affect how people behave in the office.

Behavior can also be influenced by time of day. Many people are able to focus more deeply in the morning whereas they find it difficult to buckle down on a task after lunch when they become groggy. Creatives also know that their best ideas generally come not when they are staring intently at a blank page but during unpredictable sparks of insight that magically appear out of thin air while riding the elevator or brushing their teeth. 

This is why the structure and order of your activities can be so important. “Many people don’t know this,” she said. “Throughout the day, give yourself mental space to figure things out and tailor your actions to whatever you need to be doing.”

Comfort

The last element is comfort. This requirement for effective work should be obvious to anyone who has ever toiled away in a stuffy, poorly designed, outdated office. 

“If you are trying to figure out how to get people to be productive,” she said, “consider their comfort. Usually, comfort correlates pretty well with productivity.”

The best part? Measuring comfort is quite a bit easier to accomplish than incorporating some of the commonly used complex methodologies to track productivity. 

By and large, you can just ask your workers how comfortable  they are in different situations and workspaces to come up with subjective satisfaction scores. This will also enable you to determine which aspects truly matter to employees.

For most people, these things tend to be privacy, temperature, lighting, and acoustics. But Jamrozik also highlights one critical aspect to remember: There is no one ideal environment. 

Much like our comfort foods, workplace comfort factors will vary from person to person. And if that’s not enough to wrestle with, they will even change for individual workers depending upon what type of task they are doing.

Learning your ABCs

By now, it should be clear: Environment and performance will forever be linked. 

Spaces that are ideal for focus work won’t necessarily foster successful collaborative brainstorming sessions. The optimal level of distraction is not zero — at least not all the time. Attention will fall over time but can be restored. Physical aspects of the building design will impact behavior. And comfort, above almost everything else, will always be a key driver of productivity.

Knowing all this, a sensible reaction from organizations is to listen to their employees and provide a variety of different working environments, conditions, and physical spaces. Experimentation and employee feedback will go a long way toward dialing in the right balance.

Experimentation and employee feedback will go a long way toward dialing in the right balance.

Eventually, you can get there. But where should you start? 

What does Jamrozik consider the ideal workspace? “If I were to design a perfect focus space,” she said, “it would have natural light, a nice view, silence, comfort, and a place to move around.”

Panel: Why Facebook and co-working spaces see data as critical to workplace design

Improving workplace experience should be a primary goal for all organizations today. At Density, this is our passion. And we believe data is central to that mission.

To learn more about how other companies are working on this challenge, we recently got the chance to sit down with several industry leaders in this area at the WorkTech19 conference in Los Angeles.

Ari Kepnes, Director of Market Research at Density, moderated a panel on the topic, “Reimagining the Workplace Experience with Data,” featuring the following participants: 

  • Terry Raby, Global Workplace Design Director at Facebook
  • Kieran Hannon, CMO at Openpath
  • Scott Anderson, Senior Director of Operations at CommonGrounds Workspace

Each panelist offered fascinating perspectives on the past, present, and future of work — and how data plays such a critical component in their decision making.

Planning for growth 

Raby recounted her early days at Facebook. After joining the team eight years ago, she spent the first six months building out a database that houses information about how people use the  global social network giant’s offices. It started out as largely isolated data project but has since grown to sync together with more than 40 different systems across the enterprise.

The platform blends together metrics from a proprietary meeting room calendar system, sensors, and an observation study. By layering all these utilization-measuring tools together, Raby was able to provide Facebook with a ratio that dictated the number of meetings rooms the company would need as it prepared for massive growth.

“We use all this meaningful data in order for us to do the right planning so that we can deliver spaces for Facebook in a very expedient manner,” said Raby.

Terry Raby, Global Workplace Design Director at Facebook

Validating design

Anderson of CommonGrounds Workspace, which operates flexible co-working spaces in a dozen U.S. cities, also stressed how much his company relies on business intelligence to optimize its offerings. “We really focus on data to understand how people are using the space,” he said.

One utilization hypothesis he has been trying to test by using Density’s solution is whether different sized groups use amenities differently. To him, it seems as though co-working teams of three or four people venture outside their office often to get coffee, grab a kombucha, or just socialize with others. 

Larger groups of 12 to 20, however, seem to stay in their own area. They are always surrounded by a large social team anyway, and they even have their own refrigerator inside their space. So perhaps such factors lead them to stick to themselves a bit more.

For now, it’s just an observation. Gathering the data will help determine whether or not this is really the case and if any design changes might be warranted. “When we build our next location and we have a 20-person office, we might put that closer to the back — maybe closer to a secondary entrance — because they’re not really interested in the communal aspect,” said Anderson.

Across the board, the panelists from Facebook, Openpath and CommonGrounds offered many practical perspectives and real-world examples. And in so many of these cases, it is clear that they are continuing to find new ways to use utilization data to reimagine the workplace.

What Uber and Airbnb can teach us about the future of the workplace

The mobile world is one of convenience. We can now access whatever we want, whenever we want. This is no longer just a novelty of modern life — it’s an expectation.

We have become almost reprogrammed by the likes of Uber and Lyft when it comes to transportation. Services such as Airbnb have done the same for lodging. And WeWork is bringing a similar mindset to the workplace.

Critically, this mobile-enabled movement offers greater convenience and constant access without imposing the burdens of ownership. And this on-demand, hassle-free principle has been foundational for so many service providers and tech-centric companies.

Mobile-enabled movement offers greater convenience and constant access without imposing the burdens of ownership.

Such disruption requires a response.

How is the world of corporate real estate reacting so far? How are these trends changing the way an industry built upon leases and building ownership thinks about the workplace experience? How might this all be changing the future of work?

These questions — and more — are something that we at Density dove into during a recent webinar called “Intro to the Connected, On-Demand Workplace”

Some of the established players are already speaking about the transformation underway.

Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), for example, stated in a report this year that, by 2030, some 30% of all office space will be flexible — up from less than 5% today. It identified five of the nation’s tech hotspots (New York, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Austin, and Boston ) as the markets that have the greatest growth potential for flex space, which grants employees access to a variety of spaces without necessarily providing them a designated desk or locking a company into a 20-year lease.   

By 2030, some 30% of all office space will be flexible — up from less than 5% today.

The CBRE Institute, in its “Solving for the Future with Agility” survey report last year, said that achieving an “agile workplace” requires creating a “space strategy that is inherently flexible, supported by technology, and designed with the employee experience in mind.”

Almost half (45%) of the participants in the CBRE survey reported that they are in the process of migrating to an “activity-based workspace curated for employee effectiveness and future design flexibility.” Moreover, 81% said they “perceive amenities as integral” to the employee experience, while 59% responded that they plan to introduce mobile apps to “enhance the employee experience by helping them navigate the built environment more effectively.”

Based on this and other signals in the marketplace, we can see that the winds of change are blowing in a clear direction. And those with a stake in the game are beginning to learn lessons from Uber, Airbnb, and Instacart about how to offer employers what they need.

Indeed, as we have seen in transportation, travel, and retail, today’s end-users want three specific things: more choice, better service, and less time to get what they want.

These are the new experience expectations across the board. And choice, service, and time are now becoming demands for modern workspaces as well.

Increasingly, employees will want specific amenities at the push of a button.

Increasingly, employees will want specific amenities at the push of a button. They are tired of spending, as outlined in Gartner research, an entire hour of their workweek just looking for an empty room. More and more they will expect to have exactly what they need when they need it without any hassles or compromises. 

How will your company keep up? How will you meet your employees’ needs? How will you provide the workplace experience that the top talent is coming to not just want but demand?

Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. But the organizations that can start to understand their employees’ needs and can respond quickly will likely become leaders in attracting and retaining the right people.

Zombie meetings are wasting money at offices everywhere

Zombie Meetings are a huge waste of money. No, these aren’t casting call gatherings for the next season of The Walking Dead. They are the commonly occurring times when a meeting is scheduled, invites are sent out, a conference room is booked — and then nobody turns up.

These no-show sessions happen all the time at workplaces across America, and they suck the life out of the bottom line.

Not even Density is immune.

Calculating the waste

For six months, from December to June, we tracked the data at our San Francisco office’s largest conference room “Hopper,” named in honor of pioneering computer programmer and U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper.

Of the 348 meetings scheduled, more than 15% were unattended. That is 53 empty meetings. The late great Yale-educated mathematician Grace Hopper would surely be stunned by such misuse of company real estate.

We can add another number to this waste: $3,127.

In San Francisco it costs $60 dollars an hour to rent a conference room of a similar size, meaning we spent more than three grand to host these 53 zombie meetings. And that is merely one room over just six months — at a company actively working to optimize space utilization.

In San Francisco it costs $60 dollars an hour to rent a conference room of a similar size.

Imagine misallocation of physical space that occurs at organizations with millions of square feet of office space and thousands of employees.

Space underutilization

A deeper dive into the data reveals even more troubling results when it comes to underuse.

Hopper can hold up to 20 people but is actually designed for eight. (Typically, there are eight chairs around the large conference table, but more can be brought in if necessary.)

Despite all the available space, another 25% of the meetings held over this six-month stretch were only attended by one person. So, with a bit of quick addition, we now know that 4 out of every 10 meetings in Hopper feature one or zero people.

4 out of every 10 meetings in Hopper feature one or zero people.

It gets worse: Another 39% of the time, the meetings included either two or three people. And perhaps most interesting of all, we found that, during a typical week, the room is never occupied by more than five people.

Need for a big conference room

What does this all mean? Well, it could suggest that Density San Francisco doesn’t actually need a conference room this big.

But there is one catch: The peak occupancy of Hopper during the six-month testing period was 15. Who were all these people? The attendees on the day of our board meeting, a vital but seldom-occurring event.

At Density, like many other organizations, large conference rooms may be underutilized. But when you need them, you really need them.

And this phenomenon isn’t unique to our company. Many of our clients see a similar trend. Their largest rooms are routinely underutilized — only half full for meetings — on a day-to-day basis. But on occasion, the attendee count actually even exceeds capacity, showing that these organizations do demand large gathering areas sometimes. On average, when large meeting rooms reach overcapacity, it’s only for a 44 minute meeting.