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Today data is all around us. You can track and measure activities such as office and space utilization in the workplace. Often the biggest challenge is not how we are able to measure certain activities but rather: How can we turn this data into actionable and business-driving activities?
At AskCody a part of our platform is called Workplace Insights, which harnesses PowerBi and Microsoft Exchange data to provide knowledge about office utilization. Here you can read our thoughts on how you can turn your data and analytics into actions and thereby benefit from your workplace data.
Putting your workplace analytics into action presented in Lego
Data is a massive buzzword today and is described as the key to making smart business decisions. We often hear people proudly stating how “data-driven” they are and to be completely honest, we also use the term ourselves. But what is truly important is to remember that data in its purest form is raw material without any meaning or context.
Data is basically just numbers until you put it into a context, and then:
Data turns into information that turns into insights that turn into actions. Or illustrated with Lego bricks:
When you put data into context, you can start to sort and re-arrange the analytics. You might now start to recognize patterns, but there is still a long way to go before this turns into business-driving activities. The road from pure data to actions often requires sharp skills and inside knowledge about your workplace. This makes it difficult to start working effectively with workplace data, and the task is often not just a one-person job.
This is the reason we wanted to make our analytics tool easy to operate. The goal of a workplace analytics tool (such as our own Workplace Insights module) should be to help and guide users on, how they can turn their own data from raw numbers into useful and valuable actions.
How can you turn your workplace data and analytics into actions?
This is the real question. And before we can answer it, let us provide you with a bit of context.
At AskCody we track different metrics of data about office and meeting room utilization. To give you some examples - check out the images below to visualize a couple of the metrics we track.
All the workplace analytics and data are fictional and only used for this example.
These types of data are all great to give an overview, but they are "just" informative. It highlights that there are X amounts of bookings, attendees, and resources during a specific time interval – in this case one year. This is all great data for organizations, but if we think back to the Lego example from earlier, the data is only sorted and organized into columns.
To provide more context into your workplace analytics we have added filtering options to track specific metrics. This is a great tool to compare data for different variables.
This could be useful if:
- You want to compare analytics in certain time intervals: E.g. During and after Covid-19
- You want to track how resources with specific amenities are being used compared to others
- You want to know how certain locations are performing compared to others
- You want to know if there are differences between the use of smaller or larger meeting rooms
These are all great functions and with a bit of analysis, you will be able to turn this data into valuable insights, which could lead to actionable and business-driving activities.
3 examples of turning workplace insights into business driving actions
We have seen examples of organizations using their workplace data and turning it into business-driving activities with an impact on revenue. Here we will provide you with examples of how companies have used Workplace Insights successfully.
1. Discovering unused office resources
With AskCody Workplace Insights you'll quickly get an overview of the used and unused meeting rooms and desks. We have seen companies changing the layout of their offices to fit the new needs of their employees. We have seen cases of companies scaling down on their rooms to cut down on real estate costs especially if the building is in a metropolitan area with high leases. Another use case we hear is companies scaling up on employees, but instead of extending the office, they choose to add more desks and use Workplace Insights to measure the usage of their desks. This could be changing larger meeting rooms to smaller hubs for collaboration and teams meetings.
2. Designing for preferred meeting room types
AskCody Workplace Insights is a great tool to compare different meeting room types to figure out, which meeting rooms are best suited for your organization.
You could analyze the use of Internal or External meeting rooms. In the example below we see a much higher demand for External rooms. This could lead to a change in the office space to have fewer Internal meeting rooms
You could analyze the use of Video Conference rooms compared to Workshop rooms. This could be as the example below, where video conference rooms are used more than rooms for workshops.
3. Minimizing bottlenecks - optimizing the weekly usage.
The usage of your rooms and desks would often depend on, what time of day they are used. With a utilization matrix you can get an overview of how your resources are being booked. You could discover periods of time where utilization is low or periods where the utilization is too high.
We value your feedback
It is important for us, that our Workplace Insights module meets the needs of our users and customers. Therefore, we are constantly re-iterating new features. We love hearing feedback from our users or others interested in our solutions. So, if you have any feedback please reach out when talking to some of our customer-facing teams.
If you want to learn more about how you can use your workplace analytics. You can read our e-book here:
