Do you really need more office space? Here's how to decide

How do you know whether a team truly needs more space?

Historically, this has been a thorny topic – largely because we lacked substantial data to gauge space utilization. A seemingly straightforward request for more space became more contentious than needed.

Our platform Atlas was designed to ground these discussions in solid data and remove politics from your decisions.

When a team asks for more space, there are likely multiple factors driving that ask. Atlas helps you identify and understand these factors, so you can make a more informed decision.

Let's walk through a few of these factors below, using our San Francisco headquarters as an example.

Occupancy compared to target headcount

Our San Francisco office has a target headcount of 23. Using Atlas, we see that attendance frequently falls below this number. However, during some weeks, we do exceed our target – peaking at 33 and even 51 people on special occasions:

This leads us to wonder how often these events are happening and if the office can accommodate these influxes. Perhaps more space is needed.

Let’s dive in further.

Identifying where and when the office breaks

We’ve established that there are special occasions when attendance surpasses our target headcount. But that doesn’t justify giving a team more space.

We want to examine what’s happening in the office during a typical week — in this case, the week of July 9. During that week, what if anything is actually breaking at our office that might be leading to a request for more space?

What we discover is both of our meeting rooms were in use at the same time for five hours on this particular week.

So for five hours on this typical week, employees looking for a place to collaborate wouldn't have found an available room.

That, alone, only tells us that supply isn’t meeting demand. But our platform revealed another crucial detail – 38% of the meeting room usage that week was by just one person. When we included two-person meetings, that number rose to 59%.

In other words, more than half of the time that meeting rooms were booked, only 1 or 2 people were using the space.

‍

This discovery poses a challenge: How can we alleviate the meeting room usage by one or two people to free up more space and extend the lifetime of this office?

Seeing if we have enough desks

We’ve concluded that the current meeting room experience is not ideal. Before we decide how to solve this, we want to look at our desk utilization.

We have 20 desks in our SF office. In just a few seconds, we can see in our platform that more than half of our desks were used fewer than 2 hours each day, with two desks not used at all. Even during peak utilization, 6 desks were available.

The data is clear: the team doesn’t need more desks. In fact,  this insight prompts the question: Do we need all the desks we have right now?

We could consider removing some of these desks and replacing them with one-to-two-person pods at a relatively low cost, to alleviate some of the strain on our meeting rooms.

That might be a more cost-effective way to address the space-request need.

Harnessing data to optimize space

With Atlas, we can make confident, data-driven decisions. Instead of shooting in the dark, we're able to discern what's really happening in our workspace and make calculated improvements.

Atlas provides this much-needed visibility, empowering us to tackle the perennial "we need more space" problem with ease.

Take a deeper dive into Atlas below: