Council Post: Why ‘Office Attendance’ Doesn’t Measure Whether The Office Works
Micah Remley is Chief Executive Officer at Robin Powered Inc.gettyFor many organizations, real estate is the second-largest cost on the books, behind only payroll. Given that level of spending, you would think ...
Micah Remley is Chief Executive Officer at Robin Powered Inc.
getty
For many organizations, real estate is the second-largest cost on the books, behind only payroll. Given that level of spending, you would think management would track office performance precisely and rigorously, but most don’t.
Instead, most organizations still lean on a single data point: attendance. This is a mistake. While badge swipes and calendar mandates tell a company who showed up, they say almost nothing about what happened after they arrived. And in the era of hybrid work, how employees use the workplace changes daily.
A survey from CBRE shows just how out of sync the modern workplace is with the needs of hybrid work. Their findings show that most organizations hit full capacity on their busiest office days, yet only 34% of companies say they hit that capacity on an average day.
Attendance will reveal the swing but won’t explain why it’s happening or help leaders ensure their office is effective no matter the day of the week. To understand how to use space efficiently and effectively, organizations need a different approach.
The Limits Of Attendance As A Metric
Attendance became the default measure because it’s easy to collect and maps cleanly onto policy compliance (i.e., three days a week in, two days out). Plus, prior to widespread hybrid work, organizations could reliably use attendance data to forecast space needs whenever leases came up for renewal.
But it’s not enough information for planning when attendance is spiky, and it has never been able to show whether the space itself supported the work employees came in to do.
Beyond the bottom-line impact of having the wrong amount of office space, using attendance data alone to make critical real estate decisions can also erode team trust.
Employees who come into overcrowded offices and can’t find an effective place to work eventually stop believing in the mandate that brought them there in the first place. Meanwhile, employees who show up to empty office floors lose confidence in the office serving any purpose at all, since the whole reason to come in was to collaborate in person with their team.
A Better Question: Does The Office Work?
The fix isn’t a better attendance metric, because that still won’t answer the key question of whether the current workspace is working for employees. Answering that question requires a workplace scorecard built from a number of different data points, which include:
• Alignment With Purpose: Does the office support the specific activities employees come in to perform? This is the anchor question that every other measure should tie back to.
• Access And Availability: Can employees find suitable space when they need it? Chronic scarcity and chronic underuse are both signs the space needs to change, just in opposite directions.
• Coordination Among Teams: How easily can teams align their in-office time with each other? When coordination breaks down, the case for coming in at all breaks down, too.
• The Fit Between Space And Use: Are meetings landing in rooms sized for them? Mismatched space creates friction that attendance figures never capture, no matter how closely a company tracks them.
• Follow-Through On Commitments: How often do booked resources go unused? Abandoned bookings provide insight into planning habits and how much employees trust the system they’re booking through.
• Experience Over Time: Do changes made to the workplace actually improve how employees feel about coming in? If the space isn’t providing a good employee experience, that’s a warning sign that leaders need to make changes as soon as possible.
Keep in mind, there is no universal workplace metric because no two offices serve the same purpose. A software company optimizing for focused work and occasional deep collaboration needs a different mix of space than a law firm optimizing for confidentiality and client meetings.
The right scorecard reflects a business’s own model and the people it serves rather than a standard borrowed from another industry.
What Leaders Should Do Differently
Be deliberate about hybrid policy. An accidental hybrid approach that grew out of habit rather than intent tends to use space poorly and create a less effective workforce. A space should reflect how hybrid work is structured and, if necessary, be redesigned around the actual goals for that structure to ensure that the resources employees need are there when they arrive.
Also, shift from tracking presence to tracking effectiveness. Bring department heads into the process of defining what a working office looks like for their own teams, since a legal team and an engineering team rarely need the same thing from the same square footage. And revisit the scorecard on a regular cadence instead of treating it as something examined once and then left alone.
As hybrid work continues to reshape how offices get used, organizations need more visibility than ever into what happens once employees walk through the door.
Attendance tells you who showed up, but it can’t tell you whether the space actually helped them do their work or whether the company is getting a real return on its investment. A workplace scorecard supplies that visibility, as well as the ability to use the workplace more efficiently and effectively.
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