Agilquest Blog

Actual Utilization – Degrees of Actuality in Workplace Measurement

In our most recent webinar, we discussed workplace utilization analytics and the data that is collected from using AgilQuest’s Forum. But we didn’t go into detail about how we define or determine actual utilization or actuality of presence – whether an employee was physically present at a specific desk or conference room, etc.  Here is a quick overview of how AgilQuest defines and gathers the actual utilization.

“Actual Utilization” is an interesting term.  There are degrees of “actuality” for the purposes of measurement.

  • A reservation alone has a low degree of actuality, given that the average booked conference room reservation only has an occupant 30 to 40% of the time.
  • The progression for improved actuality for a room booking, from lower to higher, would be the following presence events:
    • Digital sign outside the room
    • A motion sensor in the room (but this may, in fact, be lower, given that the motion could be caused by the cleaning crew)
    • BLE sensor in the room, person has BLE turned on
    • Camera in the room
  • The progression for improved actuality for a desk booking, from lower to higher, might be:
    • Building system integration such as a security system or a network login
    • Motion/IR sensor under the desk (but you lose information about “who”)
    • BLE sensor (as long as the granularity is sufficient)

But here’s the thing – actuality, or actual utilization accuracy – cannot be considered in a vacuum.

Every form of actual utilization measurement – everyone – has positives and negatives associated with them.  Cultural ramifications (am I being watched or monitored?), legal (PII), cost (deployment, maintenance), equipment reliability, and others will dictate what methods can and cannot be used.

AgilQuest has refined our utilization measurement approach over the last 15 years, long before any of the current “experts” even understood the need, to create the best balance of all of these factors, and then we apply the right solution depending on the requirements presented to us.

There are usually several ways to approach a topic like Actual Utilization, some more academic and some more “real world”.

For the academic side, when CEO, John Vivadelli was on the Board of OSCRE, he introduced the concept of “actual utilization measurement” and “actual occupancy” to that organization that had not understood the significance of the subject and wrote the base documentation for these terms.

For the real world, we have our actual customer results to prove our methods and system work to provide occupancy decision support to real estate, facilities, and workplace strategy practitioners.  Our customers have used our data to save billions of dollars in excess office space capacity.

In 2015, a large consultancy customer started saving $100 million a year in just NYC alone and over 17 years has saved many billions of dollars.  A large audit firm saved $345 million annually as a customer.  The US GSA is also a beneficiary of AgilQuest’s utilization measurement expertise along with Customs and Border Protection.

Read the full case studies here

 Case Study: Booz Allen Hamilton Innovative Workplace  Case Study: How GSA Saved $24 Million through Workplace Transformation  Case Study: Customs Border Protection Workplace

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