A guide to keeping warehouses safely open

“We can’t be quiet about safety nowadays—and that’s what’s great about Density, it’s visual and makes it immediately clear for our workers. After installing Safe Displays throughout spaces in our warehouse, we’ve decreased the number of social interactions within 6 feet by 10x.”

Offices have been closed for months. During that time, many companies have been re-evaluating their physical space. How much do they need? Will employees return or stay remote? However, while many businesses have had time to plan their eventual return, some never went home. Warehouses and manufacturers have not been able to shut their doors. Online shopping has boomed during the quarantine and these organizations have stayed hard at work to meet the demand. Remaining on-site means that any new safety protocols to protect against the virus and encourage social distancing have had to be implemented on the fly. 

These companies employ tens of thousands of people in warehouses. Ensuring employee safety while boosting productivity is a balancing act, and companies are looking for practical solutions. Recommendations from OSHA and the CDC offer various ways manufacturers can prepare their space to accommodate COVID-safety practices. For example, warehouses should encourage employees to avoid using the same equipment as their co-workers. They suggest additional cleaning procedures to disinfect communal areas and high-touch surfaces like door handles, push plates, buckets, and machinery. Companies should also consider staggering employee scheduling to limit daily occupancy and provide facilities teams ample time to clean between shifts. 

To learn more, we spoke with our Fortune 100 customers about their experience preparing warehouses for COVID-compliance. What we found is that managers are looking for ways to protect employees and streamline production. In order to do both and keep up with increased manufacturing demand, our customers need to validate their strategies with reliable usage data. Our occupancy platform helps them monitor real-time busyness throughout facilities, target hotspots that require additional service, plan and enforce safe footpaths that limit employee overlap, and identify when restrooms and break areas have been frequented and need cleaning. 

These conversations helped us form our Five Ways to Keep Warehouses Safely Open. In the guide, we explore how data can shore up safety practices and confirm that resources are distributed effectively when addressing concerns.

The most important metric in commercial real estate is outdated and inaccurate

Commercial real estate is regularly measured by the key metric: square feet per person.

The average square footage per U.S. office worker has been steadily declining as real estate costs rise and open offices are replacing private offices and cubicles.

In 2010, companies averaged 225 square feet per employee. By 2017, that average was 151 sq ft. Numbers for collaborative spaces are even smaller, as little as 60 to 80 square feet per person.

Tip: If you’re in the market for commercial real estate, remember to add up to 20% to your immediate square footage requirements. This will address any future growth your company realizes (saving you from having to terminate a lease early, which is costly).

Why the square footage calculation is outdated

Square foot per employee is calculated with a simple equation: the usable square feet of space a company leases or owns divided by the number of employees assigned to each respective space: X square feet divided by Y employees.

Companies assign certain employees to the buildings, floors, or areas where their teams work. The more senior an employee, the more square feet they’re (usually) designated.

For decades, this approach seemed to accurately measure the average space employees use (and need).

The problem is, that the modern workforce is far more dynamic than it once was.

Remote work is more common than ever and office spaces reflect this difference. The amount of space required for an office is no longer a hard formula counting space for individual workstations, but rather a combination of common areas, collaborative meeting rooms, and flexible spaces.

The modern office must account for a variety of workspaces and forms of work including:

  • Work from home
  • Coworking
  • Hot desks
  • Versatile meeting spaces

None of these use cases are predictable. The average office employee’s work schedule (and habits) look far more flexible today than ever before.

A simple calculation no longer suffices.

What happens to the ‘X square feet divided by Y employees’ rule of thumb? The whole equation breaks down.

Variable attendance and changing work patterns destroy the old method of calculating square feet per employee. No wonder 40% percent of global corporate real estate sits empty. This underutilization of office space is due in part to the rapidly changing way we work in offices. It’s also a result of inefficient and inexact approaches to how we calculate commercial space requirements.

Using data — not guesswork — to calculate space needs

Knowing how space is actually used can help you maximize your real estate portfolio and revolutionize your approach to office design. You have a vision of how your work environment looks and data can help define those design decisions.

Knowing your headcount and plugging it into an office space calculator is no longer adequate for assessing space needs. Data and analysis are the only ways to answer the following questions.

  1. Do you have enough open space for your common areas and conference rooms?
  2. Do you have a reception area and break room space adequate for the number of employees?
  3. Does your office plan match the flexible needs of your employees with the right amount of space for the areas they actually will use?

Innovative workplace strategists use historical and real-time data to analyze exactly how much — and what kind of — space per person each employee needs.

With this data, companies realize more value from their existing real estate portfolio, know when new office space is needed, and increase employee productivity and happiness.

Below are two examples.

Calculating how much space is actually used in a Fortune 1000 company

One of our Fortune 1000 customers operates nearly 288,440 sq ft of real estate and employs 1,800 people. When using the traditional calculation, they concluded that they allotted an average of 160 sq ft per employee.

That’s in line with overall market trends.

However, they weren’t satisfied with the guesswork approach to this calculation. So, they installed occupancy sensors to get a data-backed measure of the actual amount of space used by their employees. They realized the average square foot per employee was actually 603 sq ft and briefly during peak times did the average square foot per employee dropped to 310.

Measuring accurate space allocation in commercial real estate

Even then, the number was still 93% higher than their initial estimation. Using this data, this F1000 company was able to redesign its floor plan and optimize its existing space.

Measuring true space allocation in a tech startup

A startup company used Density to measure space allocation across its different teams. The teams were predominantly distributed by different floors ranging from 32,523 sq ft to 43,822 sq ft. Our data revealed that the company’s sales team was inadvertently allocating 1,056 sq ft per employee while the engineering team was allotted 391 sq ft per employee.

Square Feet Per Person Metrics Separated by Team in Density's Dashboard

This discrepancy in the amount of office space used across teams can hinder workplace productivity.

An engineer testing product quality may need to take up more than the assigned sq ft allotted to her role.

Meanwhile, a salesperson may regularly take meetings in phone booths, conference rooms, or even offsite locations like restaurants or co-working spaces — meaning they may need less space than is allotted to them.

Our data helped our client make changes to their office layout to ensure a more evenly (and flexible) approach to space allocation.

Workplace managers use sensor data to make safer, more cost-effective decisions about their space. Of course, sensors aren’t the only tech solution for measuring occupancy. 

Read our free buyer’s guide that compares the most popular solutions for workplace analytics and utilization here

Important space metrics to use to manage social distancing

COVID-19 forced you to shift your thinking from maximizing space for cost efficiency to decreasing office density for social distancing. This article details how to use space metrics to shape your return-to-work strategy.

Use historical Sq ft/person to devise and test your COVID19 response

Sq ft/person can hep you set, and monitor against, specific targets to de-densify your workspace.

The 4th floor in the example above indicates an actual measured density of  261 sq ft/person on average, and 65 sq ft/person at peak.  Equipped with this data and a knowledge of the particular floor’s layout, our client might decide to target a minimum density of 300 sq ft/person on average and 150 sq ft/person at peak. This makes it easier for employees to maintain social distance.

Our client now has the data needed to structure and test different de-densification strategies for the 4th floor.  For example, seeing that the 2nd floor is significantly underutilized compared to the 4th floor may provide an opportunity to reassign teams from floor 4 to 2.  Alternatively, our client might try other options such as implementing staggered in-office schedules, or a phase-based return-to-office plan.

The data our client has access to provides continuous feedback on how the workplace team is performing against its goals. Communicating this data directly to employees will help build credibility and the peace of mind that the workplace team is focused on employees’ health and safety.

Apply this approach across different types of spaces   

This approach is not just helpful for office floors.  You can leverage sq ft/person at the building-level, or in general-use spaces (e.g. cafeterias to help inform and test COVID-19 response strategies).

Building-Level Sq Ft / Person

Set up building-level sq ft/person reporting with as few as 5-10 people-count sensors (i.e. enough to cover all ground-level building entrances).  These sensors will count all the individuals who enter and exit your building — including badge employees and one-time visitors.  Additionally, these people-count sensors can alert security teams when tailgating occurs and provide sq ft/person metrics that are more complete and robust than simply using badge data.

With these sensors in place, you can get a comprehensive, comparative view of your building and floor-level density metrics:

And go deeper on particular times and spaces of interest:

De-densifying general-use spaces will require maintaining occupancy caps relative to available space. Cutting-edge companies use Density’s Safe Display, which shows real-time Sq Ft/Person, and a Go/No-Go signal to the next person who wants to enter.

This helps workspace managers limit occupancy, and shows those who use your space that safety is top-of-mind.

Introducing Density Open Area

October 8, 2020

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

— Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future (1962)

Open Area™

In 2017, we had a customer tell us she spent $700,000 every year for each building in a 4 million square foot office portfolio. $700,000 bought her human consultants who would visit her offices and do 7-day observational studies of how busy different spaces were (once per quarter).

As it turns out, she was not alone. Over the years, hundreds of customers have asked if they could use the infrared technology in our Entry sensors for open space detection (to measure desk availability, lounge use, how people use an amenity, and so on). Our answer has always had to be, no.

Not yet, anyway.

Since then we have been thinking about and working to solve the thorny problem of counting people in unbounded space and making it affordable to scale to tens of thousands of business and hundreds of millions of square feet.

Today, we’re proud to introduce the latest addition to our platform — Open Area™ by Density.

Open Area™, a radar based sensor

Technical Leaps

Once, every few years, you get a glimpse of the future and how it might work. The famous ones are well known: the internet growing at 2,300%, Englebart’s mother of all demos, Steve’s visit to Xerox PARC.

The importance of a novel observation or technical leap is obvious in retrospect but it’s easy to disregard in the moment: hypertext, vaccines, the cambered wing, luggage with wheels, even the steam engine was not of any immediate consequence. It often takes decades even centuries of maturing before any given innovation’s future is assured. But every now and then, if you squint, you sometimes get a chance to make out the rough profile of the future.

This is what we saw:

The Power of Radar

Open Area™ leverages a radar system of our own design.

Each dot is a depth value generated from thousands of small movements in three-dimensional space. We use these clustered data points to count people and observe movement anonymously.

The technology fits in the palm of your hand, is unaffected by sunlight or reflectivity, and mounts in minutes. It is more accurate than a camera, anonymous at source, and made in America.

Features and Benefits

Open Area™ comes with a suite of applications that leverages its unique aerial dataset:

  • Time occupied — See how long, on average, a space is used for
  • Desk and room availability — Let employees make decisions about space in real-time
  • Cost-savings —  60% reduction in deployment costs (vs. camera/optical alternatives)
  • Heatmaps — Track foot traffic patterns to measure the effectiveness of current space designs (coming soon)

Density web application

One more thing …

In the process of exploring the unique capabilities of Open Area™, we realized something novel – a way of looking at people in space we’d never seen before.

Synchronize your floorplan and turn on Density Live. It will feel like a fragment of the future.

You can send us an email to learn more – sales@density.io.

We can’t wait to see what you do with the tech.

Andrew, Density CEO