Finally, Workplace Data You Can Actually Use

How long do people usually spend in the conference room down the hall?
Do you know how often your meeting rooms are being used?
Can you pinpoint your workplace’s worst-performing room?

For facility managers and business owners, answering these questions — and the millions of others that arise from them — is key to effectively optimizing workplace real estate. But these answers are also tremendously difficult to nail down.

Not wanting to make workplace decisions based on passing trends or mere judgment calls, many leaders seek relevant data to drive their real estate strategies. But large-scale workplace data can take months or years to collect and synthesize. Plus, it’s not a guarantee that the results of a given research report will be affordable or actionable. Making decisions based on statistical evidence is imperative — until it seems impossible to do so.

Rising to meet these needs is Steelcase’s Workplace Advisor, a new product that packs a statistical punch into cloud-based software.

Workplace Advisor doesn’t take its title lightly. Capturing data from sensors installed throughout your work environment, the software synthesizes occupancy and real estate usage information — such as which rooms are being used and for how long — into a user-friendly dashboard that allows you to view your workplace real estate usage in real time.

As the product’s promotional video states, this data can help you “find out which spaces are your top performers and which are underperforming — and why.” With this information, workplace decision-makers can continually optimize their real estate to its peak performance.

With access to this workplace data, a wealth of information is opened up to business owners and facility managers, including answers to the questions above. For example, with Workplace Advisor you can pinpoint your workplace’s worst- or best-performing room by determining how long (or how little) people are spending time in it; how many people have reserved the room and how many of those have appeared at their reservation time; what times of the day the room is reserved and used, and more. With these answers, the time and dollars spent on facilities can be spent with more precision and assurance.

More broadly, this data can be shared with real estate agents and developers, who can help market those spaces, as well as architects and designers, who can provide necessary design changes. Everyone benefits from access to data that is specific to each unique environment.

Available now, Workplace Advisor is easy to implement: sensors can be installed in minutes, and information from them is available immediately.

This landmark system opens up a world of information inside each organization. It’s the product with all the answers.