As hybrid working trends continue to surge, workplace strategies must evolve to accommodate both in-office and remote employees. Businesses often face the challenge of ensuring that all employees remain engaged, productive, and connected, despite new ways of working. The key to maintaining efficiency lies in the balance between flexibility and structure. It’s no longer just about creating a space that looks good; it’s about designing a space that supports all ways of working.
Shifting towards a hybrid workplace
With the uncertainty of hybrid work trends, shared spaces can often become underused or over congested. Many employees prefer and often seek out flexible schedules. In response, office spaces need to be reimagined to accommodate these cultural changes. Space rationalization has become increasingly important in hybrid workplace design.
What is space rationalization?
Space rationalization involves analyzing office trends to ensure that spaces and resources are being used in the most effective way possible. The process dives deeper into the true usefulness of each space, including desks, meeting rooms and more.
Space rationalization begins by assessing the workspace to monitor how employees are using their environment on a day to day basis. By gathering data around the true usage of each space, it quickly becomes clear which areas are most used, and which areas may be sitting empty. This allows businesses to accurately rework their design and optimize their spaces accordingly. Space rationalization is an essential part of maximizing workspaces for the hybrid work model. Many offices use space rationalization to design facilities that support and encourage a mix of in-person and remote work.
Desk sharing
With employees splitting their time between home and the office, many desks remain unused throughout the week. Agile workstations are a great space rationalization strategy that help to combat empty spaces. Instead of having assigned seats, desk sharing involves multiple employees using the same desk or workstation at different times. This allows offices to optimize their workspace and reduce real estate costs without compromising on employee wellness and productivity.
While desk sharing is a great way to save space, it can be a challenging initiative to implement without the right tools and technology. Desk booking platforms are an easy, user-friendly way to avoid overcrowding. Employees can go into work with confidence, ensuring that they always have a designated workspace available to them.
Occupancy usage tools
Booking platforms are a great way to ensure employees can guarantee an individual space to work. However, booking tools don’t always track actual usage. Employees may make bookings for desks and meeting rooms without actually following through. Occupancy usage tools track actual usage of office spaces with real-time data. Tracking tools like smart sensors monitor occupancy throughout the environment to provide insights on desk usage, overcrowded areas, underused resources and more. By analysing these insights over time, offices can rework their spaces to become more collaborative, efficient and cost effective.
“Instead of relying solely on ad hoc observation or assumptions, we leverage real-time occupancy data, space utilization trends, and workplace analytics to provide informed, evidence-backed recommendations.”
– Paul Bradshaw, Vice President
The elia platform: managing your workspace facilities
We’re excited to partner with elia, an incredibly effective workspace management platform. elia is an all in one platform that tracks space utilization, desk bookings, meeting room bookings, employee habits and more.
Occupancy tracking
elia provides subtle, wireless smart sensors that track employee activity in any given area of the workspace. This includes rooms, desks and shared spaces. Data is gathered in real- time and is easy to analyse on a user-friendly dashboard.
Desk Sensors: Desk sensors are discreetly placed under desks to detect when a person is seated.
Room Sensor: Room sensors are installed above door frames to monitor individual entries and exits.
Desk and meeting room bookings
elia’s easy to use booking system allows team members to reserve a workspace or desk using an interactive floor plan of the office. The platform can assign designated areas to ensure that collective teams are seated together. Offices can also customize their own workplace policies on the booking platform to keep areas organized and restrict resources for specific use.
Employee habit heat maps
In addition to occupancy tracking, elia allows businesses to view employee habits, preferences and trends through intuitive heatmaps. Heat map insights can help influence future decisions on space allocation, seasonal changes, expansion of resources and more.
Ensured anonymity
elia ensures data privacy for all employees. Data collected through occupancy tracking and heat maps is anonymous. Data protection is a top priority and industry best practices are incorporated throughout.
How we use elia to optimize your workspace
At Mayhew, we base our workplace strategies on data and real world insights. We understand that every business is unique and we create and maintain workspaces that work for your individual employees. We integrate elia into our customer experience by using it as a powerful data-driven tool to measure space utilization. We can now easily leverage real-time occupancy data instead of relying on observation or industry trends. As our relationship with a client grows, so does the depth of insights we can provide with ongoing analysis, long-term strategies and seasonal considerations.
“We analyze movement patterns to improve office layouts, ensuring spaces are designed for comfort, collaboration, and efficiency. If certain areas are consistently underused, we work with clients to repurpose them effectively.”
– Paul Bradshaw, Vice President
Comparing desk room booking vs. actual usage
Many clients move toward hybrid work but struggle with right-sizing their office space. elia helps us track how often desks and meeting rooms are booked and actually used rather than just relying on booking details. Booking systems alone are not able to identify when employees don’t show up, shift their schedule or work in alternate spaces. By tracking usage data backed by subtle motion sensors, we can analyse actual usage and reduce excess space costs.
Real-time occupancy tracking
We help clients understand which areas of their office are actually being used in real-time. This enables them to adjust workstations, collaborative spaces, and quiet zones dynamically, backed by real world insights. The tracking sensors used for elia are mostly peel-and-stick and battery operated which means we can get up and running immediately with minimal disruption to ongoing office activities.
Analyzing movement patterns with heat maps
elia heat maps allow us to easily analyze movement patterns around workplace environments. This helps us to improve office layouts and ensure spaces are designed for comfort, collaboration, and efficiency. If certain areas are consistently underused, we work with clients to repurpose them effectively.
We help brands maximize their workspaces
At Mayhew, we begin every design strategy with targeted research on your business. By gathering real-time occupancy data and insights on your unique environment, we can quickly identify usage trends, address any underused spaces and design a workplace that works. Get in touch with our team to learn more. Together, we can create something great.
