Proptech Firm OfficeSpace Surveys Customers and Suggests Strategy

The shift to hybrid work has raised questions for many employers about the proper balance of in-house and at-home, culture and collaboration in a new environment, and measuring whether changes help.

OfficeSpace, a proptech firm that makes and sells workplace management software for hybrid models, released a 2023 Workplace Strategy Report based on what the company learned from surveying more than “150 workplace leaders” and analyzing “thousands of data points across our 1000+ client base.”

In answer to questions posed by GlobeSt.com, a PR firm representing OfficeSpace said that the “workplace leaders” were a combination of OfficeSpace clients and workplace leaders on LinkedIn. The data points were “from several proprietary data sources, including feature usage statistics, OfficeSpace platform data, and client support case volumes.” The sourcing of the survey respondents and data raises questions about how broadly descriptive and representative the results can be.

There were three key findings.

One was the impossibility of establishing a single correct answer for how often employees should be in the office. “Many decision makers are leaving that option up to individuals, or creating policies specific to locations or departments,” the report said. “Workplace leaders are concerned with ensuring the time employees spend in the office is driven by valuable activities employees couldn’t accomplish on their own—i.e.: activities that focus on building culture and fostering collaboration.”

Some other recent studies have suggested that workers give a significant portion of the time they save in a lack of commuting back to their jobs, even though they’re not getting paid for it. But employers and employees often disagree on key aspects of working from home, like productivity, and getting a common view is difficult. That makes finding any answer that both sides can embrace a challenge.

Leaders are also wrestling with the idea of how to look at space. Although a traditional view would be to look only at the amount of space a company leases or owns, the suggestion is to think about employee needs. “That could mean implementing changes to better suit collaboration, socialization, or private work,” the company said. “Leadership teams are taking steps to reorganize their offices for purpose-driven work.”

The third issue is technology and investing in what could “effectively measure space utilization.” As the company further wrote, “Data that’s layered from multiple quantitative and qualitative sources … will offer a clearer picture of whether a company’s hybrid strategy is working once goals and objectives are in place.”

But that last point gets messy. Does this also include systems that measure whether people are in the office or not and, if so, where are they working in the building? What types of technology will work best in trying to understand how people use an office? How do other sources fit in?