There is no shortage of predictions about the return to the office.  If employees can and want to work from home, dedicated desks seem unnecessary. If people come to the office to collaborate, huddle spaces should replace workstations.

But predictions aren’t foregone conclusions. No one knows what the near or long-term future holds. Not generally speaking, and certainly not specifically for your organization.

While predictions are fun to read, smart decisions depend on data. But here’s the challenge: your workplace is constantly changing. Your employees aren’t sure what relationship they have with your office. Will they come in daily? Stay all day? Sit at a workstation or roam?

Even if they know the answers to these questions today, those answers will likely change over time. In the post-pandemic era, employee behavior will be dynamic.

How do you make sure your workplace experience matches the changing needs of your workforce?

AB-test your workplace.

In the digital world, AB testing is when you compare two versions of a webpage, ad, or app against each other to determine which one performs better. A simple example is testing two ads with different headlines to see which gets more clicks.

This same approach can work with physical space. But rather than clicks, you measure occupancy — which design or space type gets used more often.

We’re seeing this happen right now with the return-to-office. Many of our customers implemented flexible work experiences and neighborhoods before the pandemic. The pandemic gave them the opportunity to advance on this journey by testing these spaces to see which experiences are most useful to their employees.

So, how do you AB-test a space? Let’s walk through our own experience of AB-testing an underused meeting space in our San Francisco HQ.

AB-testing our conference room

We ran an AB test in one of our conference rooms pre-pandemic. It began with a hunch: one of our meeting rooms appeared chronically empty, but we had no idea how often or why.

From that hunch, we made a hypothesis: If we made the space more inviting, more people would use it throughout the day.

Then, we set out to test our hypothesis.

For that, we needed a baseline (we pulled a utilization report from our Density dashboard).

Data confirmed our hunch: The room was designed for four people, but in a typical workday, the room was empty or used by just one person for 96% percent of the workday.

We brought in furnishings from other lounge areas around the office, including a plant, lamp, and soft seating. We wanted to encourage in-person group meetings while not abandoning the room’s value as a space for video conferencing.

Then, we measured the real-time use of the space. Shortly after the redesign, we saw a substantial peak in utilization:

But that data could be misleading. People flock to new experiences. We extended the test to see if space occupancy remained high. After one month, the trend continued to show people use the new space design.

A few months later, data concluded that the redesigned space had 246% more visits in the past quarter than in the previous quarter.

Now that we knew that our team liked the new design, we wanted to find out why — so we surveyed employees. The overall consensus was that with the new design, meetings felt more relaxed and welcoming. Employees wanted to use that space because it helped them collaborate and brainstorm.

Every space is testable

We tested one space, but every space and configuration is up for testing. Is no one using your soft-seating? Relocate it or replace it with workstations. Is your conference room always in use? Add movable desks that let teammates create impromptu scrum spaces.

The most effective way to manage the new workplace is to adopt an iterative, scientific mindset for testing workplace design. Each test brings you closer to supporting the evolving needs of your employees.

Like us, you can start with one room, one hypothesis, and one test. From there, expand to other spaces. Redesigns don’t have to be expensive or resource-intensive. Swap out furniture from one space to another.

AB-testing is a powerful way to breathe new life into underutilized spaces and experiment with new configurations before making more significant decisions (like buying or shedding space).

As you embark on AB-testing your space, remember the most critical components:

1. Create a hypothesis
2. Establish a baseline
3. Reconfigure your space
4. Measure real-time utilization data
5. Get employee feedback for context
6. Keep on testing

Most importantly, develop a willingness to experiment and learn. The new workplace is dynamic. You must be, too.

A 1:1 desk-to-employee ratio isn’t likely a part of the new workplace. Employees won’t spend all day at the office, let alone at one specific workstation.

Unassigned seating is the logical answer, even for companies that had historically preferred a 1:1 ratio. Twilio’s 27 offices worldwide, for example, were 100% assigned seating before the pandemic. Not anymore.

“We are moving to a 100% hoteling model where every desk is a reserved desk, so you have a space that is yours, for the days that you go in.” — Devorah Rosner, Twilio

While unassigned seating likely makes business sense, change is hard to endure. Humans, by nature, like a sense of ownership. We come to associate our desks as an extension of our identity.

So, how do you help your employees manage this change?

Understand (and respect) the employee perspective

Employees crave predictability because the alternative (uncertainty) leads to stress. Arch O. de Berker’s research discovered that uncertainty is more stressful than knowing for sure a predictable outcome.

In other words, it’s more stressful not knowing if you’ll be late to a meeting than knowing you will be. Now imagine coming to the office — after a year-long pandemic, only to barely recognize where (or even how) you work. This drastic change can make it hard for employees to adapt. It might encourage them to spend more time at home than in the office.

Nida Mehtab, Bay Area Lead for Workplace Strategy, Experience Transformation and Change Management at Advanced Workplace Associates, says change management is about leading employees gradually to your desired result.

“It’s really important to think ‘how do I bring my employees along this curve?’ Frustration occurs when you don’t respect that certain expectation of predictability. — Nida Mehtab, AWA

Offer a variety of seating (and meeting) options

CBRE has had flexible seating for nearly a decade. Their flex offices (called Workplace 360s) span the globe. Recently, Peter Van Emburgh, CBRE’s Global Head of Corporate Real Estate, surveyed employees working in these flex offices.

“Shockingly, across 90 offices, 93% of our people said they would not go back to the old model [of assigned seating].” — Peter Van Emburgh, CBRE.

Variety is a big reason why employees would rather have flex seating than personal desks. Yes, CBRE offers standard seating options like soft-seating, meeting rooms, and workstations. But they also give teammates the choice to collaborate in neighborhoods. On days you don’t want to work alongside your teammates, you don’t have to.

It’s also not uncommon to find unique seating options, like unenclosed collaboration spaces in the middle of an office. “It’s like a gazebo sitting in your workplace,” Van Emburgh told Density CEO Andrew Farah. “It’s just about a variety of spaces, and visually, we like to break it up.”

Let individual offices and departments manage this change

Twilio’s Sr. Manager of Global Workplace Operations, Devorah Rosner, didn’t ask employees whether they wanted to switch to unassigned seating. That decision came from the top.

However, she’s also not dictating how each of Twilio’s 27 global offices should manage this transition. Instead, she’s leaving it up to each office:

Returning to the office is a big transition on its own. It becomes even harder to cope with when you change how and where employees work.

But by not micromanaging this change, you’re giving your team some autonomy over their workplace experience.

Help employees see how little time they spend at their desks

Twitch began shifting toward unassigned seating before the pandemic. Izzy Sanchez, Head of Global Workplace and Real Estate, remembers getting pushback when implementing the transition.

He found it useful to help employees realize how little time they spend at their desks.

“If you walk around your office, most of the space is always empty,” Sanchez says. “But if you look at the occupancy, we’re at like 65% of the people, so where were they? They’re all in meetings or in other spaces.”

Data is a powerful tool to use when managing change. If you can physically show people where they spend most of their time, then your decisions become more about data, less about politics.

Before the pandemic, 40% of all office space around the globe sat empty (1). That equates to $150 billion dollars in unused space.

Now imagine what the figure could balloon to post-pandemic.

Employees don’t use the office like they once did. Dedicated desks and 8-hour shifts are no longer the norm. This has workplace managers wondering if they need to shed space or completely rethink the purpose of their workplace.

There’s no doubt this is a cataclysmic time in workplace management. And the most powerful way to manage this change is with data.

83% of corporate real estate executives rank space utilization as the key metric for making workplace decisions (2).

But the traditional ways of measuring space were not designed to handle the hybrid workplace. Workplace studies capture just a snapshot in time. Badge swipe data tells you how many people entered a building; it doesn’t tell you how they used it.

Employees no longer clock in at 9 and sit at a desk all day. They use soft-seating; they schedule meetings; they work from home.

In the era of the flexible office, the longer you capture data the more accurate it will be. You’ll see repeated behaviors over the long-term, vs. potentially isolated and unique events.

That’s why a growing number of workplace teams use Density’s real-time, continuous data to design better spaces.

“We rolled out our Density deployment across 2 million square feet, and it’s the first time we’ve been able to measure and track the amount of people coming into our space and actually utilizing it against a set capacity of seats,” says Peter Van Emburgh, Global Head of Corporate Real Estate for CBRE.

Better informed space decisions

Density captures data over the long-term, so you can make better long-term company-wide decisions on whether to renovate, relocate, or repurpose asset types.

For example, one of our Fortune 500 customers had recently converted a series of one-person office spaces into team spaces and allocated them to an emerging labs teams.

Even with this added space, the team said it needed more space. Our customer used Density’s occupancy data to get an accurate, unbiased view of the issue and learn how they could solve it.

They noticed some spaces being primarily used as intended. The graphic below shows how one meeting room was used by 8+ people the majority of time:

But our customer noticed other spaces being severely underused. The graphic below shows how one meeting room space was used by just 1 person nearly half of the time.

Our customer’s existing workspace floor plan wasn’t working for them.

Based on the data gathered from Density, our customer carved out additional rooms using their existing space. They didn’t have to move teams around or explore additional space. The office space everyone needed was there. It just hadn’t been allocated properly.

Decrease energy waste

Knowing how, when, and where space is used can also increase energy efficiency. Office buildings waste approximately 30% of their total energy costs on inefficient climate and lighting systems that are poorly adjusted to the actual usage and occupancy of the building (3).

Density shows occupancy trends whether you manage one building or dozens across the globe — so you can make smarter, energy efficient decisions.

Streamline cleaning services

Many workplace managers are also using real-time occupancy data to streamline cleaning services, particularly in the post-COVID era. Why clean a space that’s not been used for hours? That’s what one of our customers asked. They used Density data to direct cleaning services to high-traffic areas and avoid wasting efforts on spaces that were left untouched.

Our customers estimate that they will save as much as 50% in cleaning fees from their previous model of deep cleaning all spaces regardless of use.

Adapting to return-to-office trends

Companies are using Density to also validate decisions during this return-to-office era.

No one knows for sure how employees will use their space. The pandemic shook the Etch A Sketch. Most workplace managers we’ve talked to acknowledge that the future is unknown. With that uncertainty comes an even greater need to turn to reliable data.

Twilio, for example, has plans to replace up to 30% of spaces once dedicated to desks into hackable scrum spaces. But first, they’re testing this out in a select few offices.

“We’re going to beta this in a few of the larger offices,” says Devorah Rosner, Sr. Manager of Global Workplace Operations at Twilio, “to model it, to test it, to measure it, and to see how our spaces are actually being used, not how we think they’re going to be used.”

This approach allows Rosner and her team to test ideas on a smaller scale, before making more costly decisions that might not be optimized for Twilio’s workforce.

Van Emburgh agrees.

“Until we have the real data to tell us and show us, at this point we can only make some informed assumptions,” he says. “Then we’ll have the data that really drives some hardcore decisions.”

One of the most significant implications of a flexible workplace is when work happens.

Pre-COVID, dedicating eight continuous hours to work was standard — even for remote employees. It was either explicitly expressed or culturally understood that employees were available for calls, meetings, and collaborations between, say, 9-5. Want to talk to Sam in Sales? Schedule an event on his calendar between regular working hours.

With some exceptions, we all worked hard to put our personal lives on pause during these predetermined hours.

The great work-from-home experiment has blurred these lines. We’ve all had to get creative in managing our lives, jobs, and kids’ virtual classes within the same chunk of time.

It’s no longer about separating work from home. It’s about harmonizing the two. This won’t change even when offices come back online.

“Our homes are now part of our workplaces.” — Devorah Rosner, Sr. Manager of Global Workplace Operations at Twilio.

And while most leaders assume flexibility means where work happens, the most agile workplaces will understand it also means when it happens.

Expecting employees to be at work and highly productive for eight straight hours isn’t just unrealistic.

It contradicts science.

The science against the 9-5 workday

Our circadian rhythm dictates when we’re productive — and it isn’t for eight continuous hours.

The human body generally has two productivity peaks in the day, shown below.

While factors like diet, exercise, and sleep patterns impact this, typically, the first peak occurs a few hours after we wake up.

For the average 9-5 employee, that’s about the mid-late morning. Right after lunch, the peak levels of alertness and energy decline, hitting a low around 3 p.m. (this is a consequence of our natural circadian rhythm, not because of what we ate for lunch).

After this dip, alertness increases until it hits a second peak around 6 p.m., which is followed by a slow decline (leading to when we go to sleep).

In other words, the average employee is rarely at peak performance while at the office. A 2020 study by Gartner reinforces this — only 36% of employees were high performers at organizations with a standard 40-hour workweek.

The impact of the pandemic

Working from home made clear that conventional hours aren’t required to be productive. Late nights, early mornings, and long breaks in the middle of the day don’t hinder our output.

In fact, for many, they enhance it.

But there’s no denying the value and comfort of accessibility. Working in the same office, or at the same time, as colleagues makes it easier to have impromptu brainstorms in a common area and accidental aha moments on Zoom.

But access in excess is harmful to the flexible workplace, and unless you set clear standards, many employees will resort to what’s familiar to them (a conventional workday). That will kick off a domino effect across your org, because humans conform to social norms for acceptance. We may not want to work all day long. But if our teammates are behind a screen all day, we will be, too.

So how do you support your employees’ needs for both flexible scheduling and access to colleagues?

Create core collaboration hours

As part of Dropbox’s shift to a virtual-first company, they’re ditching regular working hours and adopting core collaboration hours.

Between the hours of 9 a.m. and 1 p.m., employees should be online and accessible to their colleagues. Outside of those hours, employees can design their schedules however they see fit.

This makes sense in the flexible workplace. Many of the tasks we do at work can be performed on our own. Some of our best work is done when we’re uninterrupted for hours at a time.

To produce at your peak level, you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.

Cal Newport, Author of Deep Work

And while it may seem that setting required hours of work is limiting, the opposite is true. By explicitly stating their expectations, Dropbox has freed their employees from the constraints of ambiguity.

If Susie wants to walk her dog at 2 p.m. today, she doesn’t have to fear being ostracized by her colleagues who chose to spend 2 p.m. behind a screen. There is no expectation of attendance beyond these core collaboration hours.

To put it simply, the successful agile workplace team will learn how to measure its employees by their output, rather than an agreed-upon set of hours.

The pandemic has forced workplaces to compete against the convenience of working from home. Fortunately, most employees say the office still plays a critical role in collaborating and relationship building.

But post-pandemic, employees will come to the office for a specific purpose. They’ve scheduled time for brainstorming or a team onsite. They want heads-down alone time so they reserved a phone booth.

Their time spent in the office will be carefully planned. Is serendipity a casualty of all this planning?

Serendipitous encounters are a powerful consequence of the office environment, particularly when employees interact with colleagues they normally don’t work with.

Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.

Steve Jobs

Employers and designers know this, which is why for years they’ve looked for ways to encourage these types of interactions. The open floor plan came from this. As did the world’s tallest spiral staircase, housed in Atlanta’s Coda building — staircases are a great place to strike up impromptu conversations.

Workspace design will continue to play a role in fostering serendipitous encounters that spark new ideas and boost workplace camaraderie. But in the new office landscape, you have a bigger issue to address: How do you compel employees to come to the office, even when they don’t have to?

We’ve posed this question to dozens of workplace managers over the past year. Most conclude that there are two factors to lean into to create an environment employees want to be a part of — incredible experiences and employee choice.

Wow-factor experiences

When Izzy Sanchez (Twitch’s Head of Global Workplace and Real Estate) surveyed employees to find out what they missed most about the office, unique experiences like Twitch’s food program were among the most popular responses.

As offices reopen, many experiences like food programs might remain on hold, for safety reasons. But those holds are temporary. They will return. This interim period is an ideal time to go back to the drawing board to ideate on new experiences employees will remember, and want to come back to.

How do you create that wow moment that’s not just the design or aesthetic of the place, but how it makes you feel?

Peter Van Emburgh, Global Head of Corporate Real Estate, CBRE

Van Emburgh cites one of CBRE’s programs, Host, as an example of giving employees that wow experience.

For example, imagine an employee walking into the office and being handed a coffee exactly the way she takes it.

“People remember that experience of walking into a workplace,” Van Emburgh says, “and that’s just something we’re heavily focused on. That hospitality, that white-glove treatment.”

Surveys can help you pinpoint the experiences employees crave. So, too can understanding how your space is used.

For CBRE, that means mapping out the entire journey of employees, from the point of arrival in the office to the point of departure. They’re using Density in part to provide these insights.

Employee choice (and control)

57% of employees surveyed by JLL want to choose where they work while in the office, based on what they’re working on.

Humans equate choice with having control (despite that not necessarily being true). When you give employees a choice of where and how they work, they’re more inclined to enjoy their working environment.

Van Emburgh cites choice as a large reason why 93% of employees who work in CBRE’s 90+ flexible offices worldwide would not go back to the old model of assigned desks.

“We are very thoughtful making sure there are so many choices of where work gets done within four walls,” he says.

Giving employees choice means creating a variety of spaces inside the office. Conference rooms and unassigned workstations are standard. But employees will also want the ability to go somewhere like a phone booth or couch for heads-down alone work. Teams might also want to get creative with how they collaborate.

An effective way to accommodate a near-limitless array of working arrangements is with movable partitions and reconfigurable furniture.

Twilio calls these dynamic spaces — and they’re becoming a central part of the company’s return-to-work strategy.

This allows more variety to meet people where they are. You can build and rebuild as needed.

Devorah Rosner, Sr. Manager of Global Workplace Operations at Twilio

Valve, the gaming company, has been doing this for years. Valve’s flat organizational structure means employees create their own assignments, and lobby other employees for help in making it happen. To support this structure, every desk has wheels, and employees are encouraged to move them where and when they want.

Valve’s approach might be extreme, but most companies can integrate a more approachable flex design.

However, giving employees choice may not be enough to nurture serendipitous encounters. Teammates will likely flock to their familiar cohorts for a sense of place and belonging.

One way you can tear down these siloed cohorts is by experimenting with first-come-first-serve unassigned seating. This minimizes the chances of teammates reserving seats together. Employees can also reserve a meeting room if they need structured collaborative time.

When serendipity has to take place online

Not every employee will want to come to the office. Adjusting to the new workplace means finding ways to nurture collaborative opportunities for every employee.

Some companies are testing virtual open-door policies on Zoom. For example, employees schedule one hour twice a day where they sign into their personal meeting room. Colleagues can join their Zoom for impromptu chats.

It’s not a perfect replacement for stopping by a desk. But it’s something.

Other companies (including us at Density) use the Slack app Donut to schedule meetings with random colleagues. While it’s not quite serendipitous, it does make it easier for employees to connect with colleagues outside their usual cohort.