Teem
March 23rd, 2022

RELATED GUIDE

13 Workplace Analytics Every IT Leader Should Track

If you’re looking to add the most value to your organization, start with your workplace software’s reporting capabilities.

Does your workplace software reporting give quick answers about the current state of your space? Can your system provide more in-depth workplace utilization data to help leaders plan for the future?

What is workplace software reporting?

Picture yourself among the rapid change and buzzing energy of the office. Meetings are coordinated, scheduled, and adjusted. Desks and rooms are booked, re-booked, or left sitting empty. A parade of customers, vendors, contractors, and other guests check in and out throughout each busy day. Workers of all kinds — full-time and temporary; on-site, remote, and hybrid; local and those visiting from another campus — move around and interact with the environment and the others around them.

Each day, your various workplace systems and applications are used to greet incoming visitors, reserve workspace, find conference rooms and send out meeting invites, and find their way around the office. The more people use these tools, the more information you have about how people are using your space.

Workplace software reporting takes the data that’s been collected and transforms it into digestible insights and actionable recommendations you can use to optimize your workplace. 

Here are some of the most important workplace software reporting options and why they matter.

Must-have workplace software reporting options — and why they matter

Average meeting length and size

How long do meetings last in your workplace?

Knowing your average meeting length provides important insight into typical meeting behaviors in your workplace. When you can look at this information, it’s easier for you to determine whether you need to makes some adjustments to your room scheduling settings.

Even though nearly 75% of all meetings have two to four attendees — according to research from design firm HOK — most meeting rooms are designed for holding larger groups. By looking into your average meeting size, you can intelligently adjust your conference rooms based on the actual needs of your workforce. Another tip: Your workplace software reporting tool should allow you to sort the average meeting times by location, that way you can get an idea of how meeting habits differ from one place to another.

Office space occupancy

If you take your total occupied space and divide it by your total available space, you get office space occupancy. For instance, if your workplace is designed to seat 100 people and you only have 60 desks occupied, your occupancy rate would be 60%. With a good workplace management software reporting solution makes it easy to see occupancy rates for all your buildings, floors, and departments.

Office space occupancy is an important metric, but it’s becoming much more fluid as companies use their office space in new ways. Due to the current element of unpredictability around office utilization, it’s important to understand how this is evolving.

We covered this in depth during a recent discussion with Dan Ryan, the CEO and Co-founder of VergeSense, about the new research they’ve conducted and how it’s helping company leaders hone their future approach and inform their workplace strategies.

You can watch it on demand to learn more about:

  • How office utilization is changing
  • New space planning ratios
  • How utilization varies during the week
  • How collaboration factors into utilization today

True room utilization

True room utilization is an important workplace metric that tracks how often your team is using its existing space. We have found that the optimal usage for individual rooms is somewhere between 3.5 and 6.5 hours per day, depending on a variety of factors like the time of year and the size of your organization.

Keep this in mind: True room utilization isn’t the same as perceived utilization, or the number of rooms employees think are in use because they appear to be reserved.

Room recapture rate

Room recapture rate represents the number of times a room was reserved and then made available again because no one attended the meeting. For instance, if Anna reserved a conference room but no one showed up after 15 minutes, the room is opened up so someone else can use the space. Another group can “recapture” the room for those 45 minutes that it would have otherwise been reserved but empty.

Check out our guide: How Room Scheduling Software Benefits Your Bottom Line.

It’s a really important conference room utilization metric and a helpful way to track the ROI of your software. If you know what your recapture rate is, you have a better understanding of your organization’s employee flexibility and space efficiency gains.

Meetings scheduled in advance

Analyze how many meetings are scheduled in advance versus scheduled at the last minute for insight into meeting behaviors at your organization. If most people are scheduling meetings ahead of time, people are probably using a mobile app to schedule their meetings more often than they’re booking rooms via your room scheduling panels.

Meeting cancellations and unattended meetings

Meeting cancellations are normal when they happen occasionally. But if your team frequently schedules meetings and cancels them at the last minute, your conference room utilization could use some improvement — and it’s probably time to evaluate meeting culture in your workplace.  Review the number of meeting cancellations to get some insight into whether or not your workplace is improving in this area.

Any scheduled meeting without participant check-in is considered unattended. It’s important to keep track of unattended meetings so you know how much conference room space is potentially going to waste.

Visitors

Tracking the number of visitors who come to your workplace is important, especially if you have decided to limit the number of people in the office at one time to maintain safe distancing.

Using Teem’s visitor management software, you can analyze trends by visitor type (such as clients, contractors and guests), and also see historical averages for the number of visitors on any day of the week. This can be useful if you want to minimize traffic in your lobby by requiring visitors to preregister or you’re planning for a higher volume of people in your employee cafeteria.

Can your workplace software reporting do that?

Get rid of Ghost and Zombie Meetings®

When you have a single meeting that no one attends, it’s known as a ghost meeting. The meeting doesn’t happen, but it still “haunts” your calendar, which prevents others from using the space. By requiring employees to check in — which you can do if you have Teem’s room scheduling software —you can minimize ghost meetings.

Then you can review that data later to see how often this occurs.

Zombie Meetings are recurring reservations that no one attends. It is called a “zombie” meeting because it’s functionally “dead,” but still drains your organization of its time, space, and other resources. The good news is that you can minimize Zombie Meetings with Zombie Hunter, a Teem feature that identifies and removes these recurring reservations from room scheduling calendars.

Your zombie threshold is the number of failed check-ins that a recurring event is allowed before Zombie Hunter proactively removes the event from its space.

Optimize your new workplace strategies

Right now, real estate costs are continuing to rise while many assigned desks are going unused. But if you’re like most leaders, you don’t have the tools to collect all of your workplace data. Or enough time to fully evaluate that data so you know how your desks are being utilized and understand what changes you need to make.

You can use Teem’s workplace software reporting to optimize your seating strategy by automatically collecting and analyzing desk utilization data and quickly creating easy-to-understand reports with key metrics to justify new strategies.

Teem’s workplace software reporting also gives you easy access to the following datasets:

  • How long meetings last
  • Typical meeting size
  • How far in advance meetings are scheduled
  • How often meetings are canceled
  • How much waste is recaptured by using Teem
  • Visitor overview
  • Room usage overview
  • Meeting room utilization
  • Zombie action logs
  • Technology overview

Start putting your room and desk insights to good use! In today’s workplace, you can use Teem to check things like hot desk utilization and peak desk hours — which will be key to optimizing the hybrid environment. Get a free demo to see how it works.

Teem author thumb
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Teem

Teem by iOFFICE provides enterprises with space scheduling and management, workplace analytics, building, and campus wayfinding, and visitor management to help cultivate workplaces that fuel productivity, efficiency, and creativity.

SOME RELATED RESOURCES

Hybrid Work Model: How It’s Becoming The New Norm
Today, we’re honoring the memory of a bygone era. As you bid farewell to the traditional work model, there is some good news: One return-to-office solution — the hybrid work model — can help drum up excitement for working in...
3 Tips for a Strong Workplace Strategy in 2022
With the promise of more scheduling flexibility and better working conditions, an increasing number of employees are starting to see the upside of working from the office. But make no mistake: Nobody wants to step back into pre-pandemic office life....
How To Improve DEI in Your Workplace
Today’s workforce demands more from their employers. And rightfully so. Your employees understand the value of coming into the office — as long as it’s managed in a way that reflects their concerns, upholds their values, and expands diversity, equity,...

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

News, tips, and product updates.
Subscribe to Teem’s blog today.