Workplace Analytics – see how your offices are really used.

For decades, office planning was a stable discipline. Headcount times square-meter standard equals required floor space — done. Hybrid work has broken that formula. On a typical Wednesday many offices are at 80% capacity, on Friday at 20%. Average numbers hide the truth and lead to either expensive over-supply or chronic shortage. Workplace Analytics replaces averages with hourly, team-level reality.

The result is not a dashboard you bookmark and forget. It is a continuous feedback loop: every week, every booking, every actually-used desk becomes a data point that informs the next decision — from a single team move to a multi-year lease renegotiation.

Where the data comes from

Workplace Analytics works with whatever signal is cleanest in your environment: anonymized presence sensors under or on desks, desk-booking data from onyo or third-party systems, Wi-Fi triangulation, badge swipes, or calendar metadata. The tool normalizes these inputs into a single utilization model so you can compare floors, sites and teams without IT integration projects.

Privacy by design

Sensors and aggregations are designed to answer one question: is this seat used, yes or no? Individual identities are never required. Data is processed in the EU, retention periods are configurable, and the tool ships with templates for the works-council agreement you will likely need.

From numbers to action

A typical first analysis uncovers two to three large levers — for example a poorly used floor that can become a focus zone, a team that is over- or under-sharing desks, or meeting rooms whose size is wrong. The biggest impact usually does not come from the office shrinking, but from the office finally matching how people actually work.

Office space & desk-sharing: how many workstations do you really need?

The classic rule of thumb — one desk per employee — is dead. In hybrid setups the right number of workstations depends on three things: average attendance per day, peak-day attendance, and how concentrated those peaks are within and across teams. Without measured data, most companies overestimate peak attendance and dramatically over-provision space.

A pragmatic model: required desks = peak-day attendance × buffer (typically 10–15%). The implied desk-sharing ratio is then headcount ÷ required desks. Workplace Analytics replaces the guesswork in that formula with real attendance — by team, day of week and hour — so the sharing ratio you sign off can actually be defended in front of leadership and the works council.

Typical outcomes on real client data: sharing ratios between 1.3 and 1.8 desks per employee, 20–35% less floor space than a traditional 1:1 model, and rent savings that pay back the entire workplace-analytics setup in the first quarter.

Hybrid presence planning: avoiding the Tuesday/Wednesday cliff

Almost every hybrid organization runs into the same pattern: Monday and Friday are ghost towns, Tuesday and Wednesday are over capacity. Without coordination, individual choices stack up into peaks that hurt both the experience (no desk, full meeting rooms) and the case for the office. Presence planning is the lightweight answer — and it only works if it is built on real, not anticipated, attendance.

Workplace Analytics turns presence planning from a kalendar exercise into a steering tool: you see per team which days are systematically over- or under-attended, can negotiate anchor days that smooth the peaks, and measure week over week whether the new policy is actually changing behaviour. Combined with onyo Desk Booking, it closes the loop between planning, booking and real use.

Note: Workplace Analytics is an orientation aid for workplace decisions and does not replace a project-specific data-protection or works-council assessment.