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Have you ever needed a room for a large team meeting only to find someone had already reserved it for a quick huddle? How about sitting in a freezing cold office, shivering throughout the day because the air conditioning is blasting in the middle of winter? What about trying to locate one of the few free spaces to do a spontaneous creative session, only to be greeted by cold, unfeeling cubicles?

These kinds of experiences may seem trivial, but they can make or break our employees’ feelings about the workplaces they frequent day-to-day. They can be the difference between an unmotivated worker who feels burnt out and stressed, and a productive, healthy and happy team member who feels present, involved and excited by their work. And while the root causes might seem entrenched in policies and relationship blockers, to really understand what’s missing, you have to go a layer beyond that. You have to look at the data to understand how the environment itself is impacting employee engagement.

How are your employees actually using your space?

Is your workplace still caught up in the seemingly never-ending Return to Office (RTO) debate? According to Gartner data shared with HR Dive readers, 75% of HR leaders had an on-site attendance requirement, despite a separate survey showing nearly half of workers felt the cost of RTO outweighed the benefits. This conflicting data reveals a wider systemic issue: we still don’t really know how our employees are using our spaces in order to deliver truly flexible experiences. Do you really know if they gravitate more towards the solo, heads-down cubicles, or the collaboration zones? Are there even enough of each of these types of spaces to fulfil the working preferences that have become so vital to a modern working experience? Without this data, leaders just can’t confidently set workplace strategies and expectations, which results in guessing games or, in lieu of this information gap, mandated full-time RTO. And as media backlash in recent weeks has shown against the RTO mandates of firms like Boeing, UPS, Google and Dell, they alienate employees by forcing them into work structures that just don’t work for them.

But I’m already using data points to set our RTO…

Perhaps you’re already using manual headcounts to give you an idea of how many people are returning to the office, but you’d be surprised just how inaccurate this information can be. At Metrikus, we worked with a leading UK bank that estimated the average peak utilisation of their office space was 71% using headcounts. However, after installing occupancy sensors and using our platform to track occupancy levels, they realised that this figure was actually below 44%. So you’d be right to validate this data with culture surveys. But even then you only get half the story, and overuse of this tactic can lead to survey fatigue. According to McKinsey & Company, ‘survey fatigue refers to a lack of motivation to participate in assessments—and has the potential to impact response behavior’. Survey fatigue can stoke employee resentment and ultimately, they only reveal how your employee feels in one particular moment; a snapshot in time. Placing the onus on your employees to give you all your data will definitely provide you with the symptoms of what’s hindering workplace happiness, but will fall short of the cure, while unnecessarily placing a burden on your workforce, when they should be left to focus on what really matters – doing their best work. You have to be willing to invest in digitising the workplace, while leveraging the bones of the offices you’re already investing in.

Building a live map to the employee experience

We live in a digitally connected, post-pandemic environment, and with that comes progress. But also friction. If you’re taking on lots of new workplace experience tools and investing in connectivity technologies, while also mandating RTO to traditional buildings that have stood for decades, you have to be prepared to connect these two lived realities together. If you don’t, you risk building a Frankenstein workplace model, where different parts don’t quite fit together, or provide clear insights. So how do you hit the sweet spot?

From people count, indoor air quality data, room booking data, employee app data; there are so many latent data points that are just waiting to be connected to form one clear story about the employee experience. Alone, these data points are valuable, but by pulling them together, you can see how employees are using a space in real-time; which spaces are being under-utlized or oversubscribed at busy times of the day, and how temperature and air quality can be improved to make employees feel great and avoid sick building syndrome.

With these kinds of insights, the doors are blown wide open for viable avenues to make the workplace even more productive and cost effective. From closing floors that aren’t being used, to re-designing unused areas into multi-purpose collaboration zones, or introducing new tools to make in-person meetings more exciting; ultimately strategies to make your workplace dynamic hubs of innovation that employees want to be immersed in.

The office as a tool for engagement

As workplace expert Simone Stolzoff aptly puts it ‘the office itself is a technology, a tool that helps people get work done’. But like any tool, you need to know how to use it to maximise its worth. Companies with a cross-functional team tasked specifically with workplace experience, will be 80% more likely to have high employee satisfaction, according to Gartner. Focusing on the employee experience now more than ever is the top priority for workplace leaders; as more than half of employers are experiencing a turnover rate of at least 15% in 2022.

So when everything but the kitchen sink has been thrown into the mix in saving retention, perhaps the answer is so much more straightforward. With the right building data in your hands, you can focus on creating the best possible workplace for your employees, keeping you ahead of the competition when it comes to attracting and retaining the best talent.

Charlotte Laing is the CMO at Metrikus, the workplace data platform that improves employee experience through better building data. In nearly half a decade of leading the brand, she has seen first-hand the impact transforming the office environment through the right data has on employee productivity. Metrikus partners with ServiceNow, Microsoft, and Accenture to improve workplace outcomes.