Know Your Numbers

Numbers are the language of success. I’ve personally experienced this across all aspects of my life. It’s something I suspect we’ve all encountered in this era of constant digitization and measurement. Numbers provide essential insights—whether in financial metrics like revenues, profit margins and budgets, or personal health indicators like how many steps you’ve taken or calories you’ve burned in a given day.

Numbers are the universal measure, objectively empowering us to understand and improve in every area of life.

From a young age, I was captivated by Lego, spending countless hours designing and planning structures, inside and out. This early passion for space planning ultimately led me to pursue a career in architecture.

During my brief stint in that field, I developed a fascination with the numerical and quantifiable aspects of design—such as spatial composition, occupancy and utilization rates, and hybrid and desk-sharing ratios—and how those metrics directly influenced the spaces we were creating.

My transition to construction management combined my love for space planning with the practical aspects of design and construction. I was particularly drawn to the initial planning phase, which looks at occupiers’ needs for their space. The numbers varied from client to client, naturally. But I quickly noticed that a common theme emerged.

Everyone was desperate to know about best-practice metrics and trends. But there were no consistent benchmarks to measure against that were truly apples to apples.

This demand for space-related data led me to occupancy planning and management, a relatively new outsourcing service at the time. In contrast with established practices like facility or project management, occupancy planning focused on quantifying the supply of space within a client’s portfolio, then programming and test-fitting space demands such as seating capacity, square footage per person, conference room requirements and amenity space design.

But 10-plus years into my work in this field—despite managing workplace and occupancy data across millions of square feet for many global clients—I found occupancy planning account teams were still missing a comprehensive data governance program to benchmark these metrics against peer organizations. And the pandemic dramatically increased the need for clean data.

During the pandemic, our clients with occupancy planning programs were able to adapt quickly, quantifying their space and personnel. They created occupancy plans that met government guidelines, designing social distancing floor plans, implementing return-to-office schedulers and providing janitorial staff with data on area usage for targeted cleaning.

Major occupiers needed context and perspective on workplace strategies to navigate the changing landscape.

To address this demand, we developed dashboards supported by commentary and insights. These filled a critical gap in occupier decision-making and evolved into our annual Global Workplace & Occupancy Insights report.

By anonymizing and organizing data from major global occupiers, we can finally offer clear, industry-specific benchmarks and insights on any emerging trends we are seeing. These metrics allow clients to compare their portfolios to other organizations, understand the latest trends in workplace and occupancy management, and gain insights to plan for the future.

Ultimately, you cannot successfully optimize your portfolio without workplace, occupancy and utilization data—and having the benchmarks of industry peers makes the case even more powerful.

While traditional portfolio optimization focuses on market opportunities and rental costs, an equally crucial data point is space utilization. This includes understanding occupancy levels, daily office attendance, square footage per employee, workstation sizes and amenity space usage. Analyzing these factors and trends reveals how effectively your space is being utilized today while also providing a clear path forward.

Today, our team oversees the world’s largest dataset of workplace and occupancy information, encompassing nearly a billion square feet. This meticulously maintained and analyzed data delivers cutting-edge trends and insights that empower occupiers to proactively design, optimize and manage their portfolios. We have helped hundreds of companies not only measure and benchmark their metrics but also use their data to drive optimization. These efforts have led to cost avoidance and savings, as well as generating revenue to support their core business and even avoid bankruptcy.

In today’s world, the importance of clean, reliable data cannot be overstated. And as AI plays a larger role, remember its power hinges on the accuracy and completeness of the data it analyzes.

Across every aspect of life, it’s well understood that you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you are or where you’ve been. And success starts with knowing your numbers.