Average Occupancy
Image courtesy of Robin Powered
Understanding in-person schedules may help determine the most convenient days for meetings and activities. The colors show the days the most people are on campus for in-person learning on the two floors and indicates which days are best to hold activities and meetings.
Space Booking Technology
Image courtesy of Robin Powered
Universities are implementing booking policies to ensure fair usage of rooms and department-specific resources, like labs and cameras. This image shows Station 4 of the room has been booked for a certain time frame. A chart also shows suggested desks where other individuals may be seated in case collaboration is warranted.
Understanding space utilization in today’s hybrid academic world is essential to creating a positive, productive work environment for students, faculty, and staff. A nationwide study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics shows 53% of students are enrolled in at least one online class. Universities are rethinking their priorities, ensuring their technology and environments address both in-person and online learning with a modern system for managing space usage. University leaders can make better space management decisions by gathering data relevant to how their spaces are used, including how many rooms and desks are available and how often they are used, how rooms are assigned, and how the stakeholders rate their overall experience.
Automated information, such as card swipe data collected when certain rooms are accessed, will offer factual numbers, enhancing the comprehensive view of occupancy and usage. Understanding the spaces most frequently used provides important information when making daily decisions that impact faculty and staff.
“Different programs may benefit from various room sizes and amenities,” says Ciara Peter, senior vice president of product management at Robin Powered, a Boston-based workplace software platform company. “Small research groups might need several four-person rooms, while programs with larger groups may require more boardroom-style spaces. Universities with significant remote or hybrid offerings might need additional individual work areas or call spaces to accommodate shifts between in-person and online education.”
Space data collection can benefit an academic institution, because accurate data justifies space decisions to internal stakeholders and donors, especially in highly territorial environments. Peter notes that monitoring enrollment trends helps institutions to better manage and allocate space across departments.
Collecting accurate data and using it to make space decisions benefits faculty, staff, and students because it determines if there is a need to adjust the allocation of desks and meeting rooms or to relocate certain classes or personnel to buildings or floors with different room sizes and amenities.
Determining Priorities for Data Collection
Peter has noticed four strategic priorities that typically top the list of concerns for academic institutions with budget constraints being a primary factor. The financial constraints, attributed to reduced government funding and economic conditions, can restrict investment in research, data collection, student support services, technology, and infrastructure.
The other three priorities include:
- Digital transformation, where institutions may have difficulty supplying the latest tools and technology infrastructure to support today’s teaching and learning models.
- Competition from online education and other institutions, because online education is increasingly popular and often more affordable than traditional models. Higher education is becoming more competitive across the world, as more institutions compete for top faculty, students, and research opportunities.
- Accreditation and quality are important, as institutions aim to offer high standards of academic excellence by continually meeting compliance guidelines, enhancing learning outcomes, and attracting and retaining top talent.
Creating a strategic plan to collect, analyze, and implement the space data begins with determining the key stakeholders, including those impacted by potential space changes and those involved in the decision-making process. Different priorities must be considered for each stakeholder group – real estate/facilities, faculty/staff, and students.
“In real estate and facilities, it is all about right-sizing and making the right recommendations for what to do with the space,” says Peter. “There is another level of complexity within universities, because there are often different budget owners, and there is an evolving philosophy about who owns what, what is centralized, and what is not.”
Centralized data collection and reporting can improve space optimization across different schools, make it easier to integrate new technology with existing resources and determine what types of spaces, how many people, other resources, and amenities are needed.
Top priorities for students are ease of use for all aspects of technology, maintaining anonymity and privacy when using technology, having proper wayfinding throughout the campus to easily move from one area to another, and easily being able to adapt to existing technology systems, including high-usage software platforms, whether working on campus or from a remote location.
When reviewing the needs of faculty and staff, it is imperative to support hybrid work arrangements with easy change management and easy-to-use modern technology to accommodate various teaching models. Peter says many institutions are taking notice of “anchor days,” the most common days that more people come to their offices or classrooms on campus. Knowing these anchor days can make it easier to plan activities and collaborative events when there are more people on campus.
An interesting trend is establishing advanced booking policies to make the best use of limited spaces, set thresholds about how far in advance a room/space can be booked, and create controls regarding who can book certain areas. Using modern technology to gather and analyze data can facilitate more convenient and efficient booking of department-specific resources, like labs and cameras; priority or assigned booking for faculty; and space and desk suggestions to improve usage.
A project at the University of Chicago illustrates the importance of a well-defined booking policy. The university’s challenge was creating a seamless, flexible, and real-time booking system for media production students and faculty. The university used spreadsheets, email requests, and a hotline to book the suites, but none of these manual methods supported ad-hoc booking or guarded against double-booked reservations and instances where someone booked the room but never showed.
The solution was simple technology, including putting Kindle Fire tablets outside each room and implementing policies whereby if you are not in the room 10 minutes into your scheduled time, someone else can use the space. The use of a mobile booking app is encouraged, and a single sign-on was started to create an easy user experience.
Starting Data Collection Process
When an institution starts collecting data with hopes of making positive changes, there are steps to follow to increase the long-lasting satisfaction, productivity, and collaboration among stakeholders. First, establish specific, measurable goals that align with the institution’s mission and its hybrid strategy. Narrow the initial goals to those most important at the time, whether it is right-sizing a certain space or creating an environment that makes students and faculty want to come onto campus more often.
Next, determine the scope of your project. Will it be limited to one school, one building, numerous buildings, or the entire campus?
“You want to start building a muscle and practicing what it is like to gather the data, analyze it, talk about it, and get comfortable with it,” says Peter. “Even if the scope is small, you will probably learn something.”
Data collection tools vary from software provided by companies that specialize in information gathering to using Google, going old-school by writing on paper, or integrating with a badge/card access system.
“This data is not just about the space; it’s about who is in the space, and why they are in this space, and that’s where the magic starts,” says Peter. “The final steps are monitoring, utilizing, and defining success, determining which stakeholders will have access to the data, and then putting the plan into action.”
When gathering space data and implementing the results, institutions should be mindful of the following common mistakes that Peter says could derail their best intentions:
- Doing nothing: If budget constraints are an issue, Peter advises using basic tools (such as card swipe data), rather than not collecting any data. Even basic tools can provide insight.
- “Boiling the ocean:” Avoid trying to tackle all aspects of the data collection at once. Start with a manageable project and gradually expand as you gather data.
- Failing to aggregate data: Ensure data is aggregated across the entire campus to facilitate the study of specific buildings and areas for detailed analysis.
- Limiting data collection to physical space: Do not rely solely on physical space data. Incorporate user feedback from surveys, allow for verbatim responses, and validate findings through direct conversations with users.
Knowing What Data to Collect
The data collected depends on whether an institution is trying to gather information to improve space utilization for a certain group of stakeholders or the entire organization. When looking at real estate and facilities, for example, data should examine capacity, occupancy, utilization, popular resource types, and predictive usage trends. How many people can a space accommodate? How many people typically use the space, and what are they using the space for? What amenities do they prefer? What spaces are becoming more popular?
“Looking at predictive usage is a good idea because saying an area is at 30% occupancy right now may be irrelevant a year from now,” says Peter. “In terms of the planning horizon, institutions often look ahead at least six months to a year, but longer-term predictions may be necessary depending on the stability of the space and the nature of its usage.”
Peter is noticing an increase in universities providing satellite campuses, prompting a trend toward more flexible space management and the need for traditional spaces to be adaptable enough to last five to 10 years.
When conducting predictive usage analysis, consider key factors, such as growth trends, booking statistics, and consistency of space usage. Department growth trends are relatively consistent year after year and can help plan the long-term real estate footprint. Booking statistics can help determine which room size and amenities are the most appropriate for each space.
“Consistency of space usage can help plan the collaboration policies that are put into place,” she says. “Recommended in-office days can be set based on how much a space is used on certain days to foster the most effective collaboration among their staff. Understanding in-person schedules will help determine the most convenient days for meetings and activities.”
When deciding what space data to gather about faculty and staff, it is important to look at the popular days and times when various rooms and spaces are used, how they are being used, feedback from users, and any relevant industry benchmarks. Understanding collaboration benchmarks can lead to best practices in driving teamwork throughout any organization.
Robin Powered offers a benchmarking tool, called CollabScore, which can determine how well an organization is driving leading practices for collaboration and productivity. The tool enables an organization to anonymously compare how effectively their facility fosters collaboration compared to other entities. The score is derived from millions of data points taken from thousands of companies and three of their key components: workplace occupancy score that shows the level of in-person presence and measures office occupancy rates against flexible workplaces worldwide; ad hoc collaboration score that reveals the proportion of colleagues sitting together versus alone in an office and evaluates how an institution’s physical setup and policies foster collaboration; and planned collaboration score to figure the proportion of in-person versus remote meetings.
Data gathered about students should focus on academic performance and how it correlates with how often they are on campus and what type of work or activities they do on campus. Peter notes an interesting trend between salespeople and their productivity when they are in the office: Salespeople working within 15 feet of their colleagues experience a spike in performance. Proximity to other students could also increase productivity in a university setting.
“For students, the data is different, and it’s all about technology adoption,” says Peter. “Technology doesn’t have to be an app, but it should be something that people actually use. Technology adoption is very important to get data, because if you don’t know who is there and how things are being used, it’s hard to make decisions. With technology, you will get better data, hopefully save money, and have happier students.”
Evaluating the Success of Your Data Collection and Action
It is not necessary to wait until your project is completed before making necessary tweaks to address stakeholders’ concerns or to make an improvement. In fact, Peter encourages regular reporting or meetings with stakeholders to keep everyone apprised of the findings and to obtain their feedback.
Implementing new policies and settings should be divided into short-term and long-term projects. Short-term goals could be implementing advanced booking restrictions for spaces; having hybrid resource assignments; and establishing anchor days to get more people onto the campus on a specific day.
Long-term goals entail using data to decide whether space should be expanded or contracted, and then making the necessary arrangements. Any change in space size may require coordinating moves into or out of a space by faculty and students.
Data collection must be approached from various angles, because sensors and card swipes are not enough. Gather all data regarding the real estate, institution, faculty, staff, and students, and review all of it before making changes.
“Don’t keep your data on a shelf; put it to work,” says Peter. “Make sure you have a partner or a tool that can help make sense of the information and put it into meaningful action. The modern educational institution requires a modern system for managing spaces. This is essential for better faculty and student experiences, as well as better data.”
By Tracy Carbasho
