The stakes are higher than ever when it comes to space planning decisions in today's hybrid, cost-conscious environment. Yet many organizations still rely on outdated methods like clipboard counts and one-time walk-throughs, basing multimillion-dollar investments on broad assumptions and generic benchmarks. These point-in-time snapshots ignore how employees actually use the workplace throughout the day and week, leading to costly misallocations and underperforming spaces.

With global office utilization targets rising to 79%, space optimization has become more critical than ever as companies evaluate their space needs. CFOs and workplace leaders now scrutinize every square foot, question lease renewals, and demand measurable ROI from workplace investments. Yet, many organizations still make these high-stakes decisions using a fundamentally flawed approach. With so many employees now splitting time between home and office. Legacy metrics and calculations no longer work in today's hybrid environment.  

You need more robust analytics to make truly informed space planning decisions that maximize your workplace investment.

That's why we launched SpacePulse, an innovative service that replaces guesswork in space planning with practical, actionable insights. Harnessing advancements in sensor technology, comprehensive data integrations, and AI-driven analytics, SpacePulse evaluates behavioral data over weeks, not just a few days. This reveals how spaces are truly being used, allowing you to optimize future space layouts to better meet your employees' needs and prevent unnecessary construction and wasted investment.

With SpacePulse, you don't have to guess. You know.

We recently deployed SpacePulse for a client who was planning an office renovation and needed to verify the space designer’s plans to add a mix of small, medium, and large conference rooms. The initial proposed design suggested 200 seats across 30 meeting rooms of various sizes. Their plans were based primarily on AV system data that was only available in a portion of the rooms and brief manual observations.

Before investing in this new office layout, the client's workplace team wanted deeper insights grounded in actual behavior, not just assumptions. The team was concerned about too many seats that would remain under used and potentially waste budget in fit-out and operational costs. We gathered high-fidelity behavioral data to validate and refine the proposed plan.

The insights we delivered to the client were surprising and transformative. They enabled the team to recalibrate their meeting space configuration with confidence and save $18 per square foot in buildout costs.

Don't Just Measure Utilization, Capture Behavior

Traditional space planning focuses on averages—square feet per person, weekly room-use percentages—rather than actual behavior. That smoothing hides the crunch periods that matter. In a 3-day in-office policy, overall utilization might show 38% (based on 24 hours) or 23% (based on 40hours), yet during nine peak hours weekly every collaboration space is taken. At those moments, demand is 100%, exposing a mismatched space mix. Proper planning starts with peak-time behavior, ensuring that supply never falls short when employees need it most.

Fullness adds another critical dimension. During those same nine peak hours, suppose all 40 rooms are booked, but each is only 50% occupied. That's a seat-mix problem. Too many seats per room and too few rooms overall. Overflow meetings spill into open desks, leaving employees huddled at workstations on headsets instead of in spaces designed for collaboration.

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SpacePulse represents a fundamental shift in how space optimization studies are conducted ande valuated. Instead of relying on brief in-person observations or meeting room booking data alone, we deploy a more comprehensive approach.

How SpacePulse Works

Integrated Data Sources: During each engagement, critical data sources are mapped early to expose supply–demand ratios, like space utilization, fullness, and occupancy. Reservation logs reveal how often meetings happen ad hoc rather than on the calendar. These behavioral insights guide a more accurate space program; some teams depend on spontaneous collaboration even more than scheduled sessions. Consolidating all feeds into a real-time dashboard yields a comprehensive, multi-source view instead of a single-source snapshot.

Using Savvy, our advanced analytics platform, we layered real-time occupancy readings with four complementary behavioral signals:

·      Occupancy sensors that count heads, not just binary presence. For short-term studies we deploy cellular sensors that operate off the client network.

·      A/V camera analytics as a primary or secondary check on room-level head counts (caveat: camera data quality varies by system).

·      Badge-swipe data from access control, tracking overall building traffic across the week.

·      Outlook reservation data to compare "intent-to-meet" with actual room use.

·      Conference analytics data pinpoints when A/V resources are engaged and reveals the hybrid ratio. For instance, one person occupying a room while seven others join remotely.

This multi-source fusion delivers a far richer view than any single data stream could provide.

Rapid Sensor Deployment: Our team deployed occupancy sensors across 40 spaces on 4floors in just 5 hours. These ceiling-mounted thermal sensors capture comprehensive space usage patterns, including unplanned meetings and informal gatherings that booking data misses. Because the sensors connect via cellular networks, deployment requires no local IT infrastructure or approval processes, eliminating typical implementation delays. When the observation period concludes, sensor removal is equally swift, to minimize disruption to our client's daily operations.

Noise Reduction Approach: Out of more than 60,000 occupancy readings during the study, Savvy flagged hundreds of instances where rooms were used for less than 10 minutes. These brief visits—often facilities pass-throughs, quick calls, or short, unproductive meetings—didn't reflect true collaboration. To ensure our analysis reflected meaningful collaboration, and not quick facilities staff pass-throughs, casual phone calls, or unproductive brief meetings, we applied a duration filter to all sensor data.

These short-duration events were excluded from the dataset to eliminate noise and false signals. This resulted in a sharper, cleaner view of how each space is truly being used, enabling more accurate, actionable insights for space planning decisions.

Coverage Ratio Analysis: Our analysis also needed to evaluate whether the proposed space mix aligns with peak demand. By calculating coverage ratios - the supply of seats or rooms divided by the actual demand - we can determine if there is enough space to meet needs without creating unnecessary excess.

·     Above 1.0 indicates that there might be potential oversupply in meeting room inventory and wasted spend

·     Below 1.0 shows a likely risk of undersupply and probably employee frustration

·     Slightly above 1.0 is the ideal range that ensures sufficient availability without financial inefficiency

Cohesion's proprietary metric provides a data-backed way to right-size space, avoiding costly overbuilding and aligning with employee needs and budgets.

What We Discovered

This approach, driven by integrated behavioral analytics and analyzed by our Savvy platform, revealed patterns that would have been impossible to detect through traditional methods:

Meeting Size Mismatch: 68%of meetings involved only 1-2 people, while just 15% involved 5 or more people. This finding alone challenges the conventional wisdom of planning for spaces primarily to accommodate larger groups. Most meeting rooms in the proposed configuration were simply too large for their typical use.

Room Utilization Crisis: Meeting rooms for 7-10 people averaged just 15%  fullness. Our analysis showed that these larger expensive, premium spaces were consistently underutilized, representing significant wasted square footage and capital investment.

Rampant Ghost Bookings: 80% of scheduled meeting time went completely unused. These no-shows represent massive waste in both space and employee productivity. Rooms that appeared fully booked on calendars sat empty, removing them from the pool of available spaces.  

Ad-Hoc Usage Preference: Over 2,000 instances of unscheduled room usage showed employees' clear preference for flexible, "drop-in"collaboration spaces they can use without having to book in advance.

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Peak Capacity Reality: Even during the busiest times of the observation period, actual space usage fell far below the available inventory. At peak demand, only 10-15 rooms were occupied out of 30 available, with occupancy reaching just 40 people, only 10% of total seat capacity. Where booking data and traditional planning suggested a higher demand, real-time sensor data showed a much lower utilization ceiling. This underscores the importance of planning based on observed behavior, not perceived intent to avoid costly overbuilding and better align room counts and sizes with real-world patterns.

Our findings led the client to fundamentally rethink their approach to space planning and the configuration of the new office.

Where the client's architecture firm had initially recommended 100 seats across 18 rooms, the SpacePulse analysis revealed that only about 60 seats were actually needed across a similar number of rooms. This reduction of 40 planned seats represented a savings of millions in construction and fit-out costs – a savings of $18 per square foot.

Beyond the financial impact, the revised meeting room proposal also enhanced employee experience by providing rooms better aligned with real collaboration patterns. It avoided too many large spaces that would go empty while still ensuring that meeting areas truly supported how people work.

Why Guess When You Can Know?

The future of space planning isn't about guessing. It's about knowing.  We now have the technology to transform space planning, optimizing for utilization, cost, and employee satisfaction.

SpacePulse's integrated approach combines rapid sensor deployment, deep data integrations, and AI-powered analytics to provide capabilities that no one else can deliver at this scale.

Ready to find the perfect space mix for your next project? Contact us today or click to learn more about SpacePulse and how we can help you discover how your employees really spend their day, so you can invest in spaces that allow everyone to do their best work.

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