How Do You Know if Your Workplace Is Working?

25th June, 2025

THE MEASURES TO USE AFTER OCCUPATION, FROM UTILISATION AND EMPLOYEE FEEDBACK TO POST-OCCUPANCY EVALUATION

The transition to hybrid working has permanently altered the metrics by which corporate real estate is judged.

NAVIGATING THE BARBELL EFFECT

The global average building utilisation rate has recently recovered to roughly 53%.

However, average occupancy is a dangerous, misleading metric. It completely masks the reality of the working week:

The Midweek Crush: Building access data reveals a stark reality where Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are consistently the busiest days. This creates a mid-week attendance peak that frequently reaches 80% capacity.
The Long-Weekend Ghost Town: This mid-week surge creates a “barbell pattern,” leaving offices overwhelmingly empty on Mondays and Fridays.

The strategic challenge for business leaders is that you cannot design an office for the 53% average; if you do, your staff will face severe mid-week overcrowding, lack of meeting rooms and friction that negatively impacts comfort.

Relying on outdated metrics like total headcount or generic cost per square foot will lead to catastrophic misallocations of capital. To survive the Barbell Effect, you must shift from tracking mere activity to demonstrating tangible business impact, deploying anonymised occupancy sensors to map actual behavioural peaks.

THE MARIS METHODOLOGY:

INTEGRATED INSIGHT AND POE

At Maris Interiors, we believe that a fit out is never truly finished on the day of practical completion. The contractual milestone where the fit-out is certified ready for occupation is merely the beginning of the operational journey.

Our methodology relies on continuous measurement through a process called Integrated Insight. The cornerstone of this strategy is the Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) – a rigorous review conducted three to six months after move-in to explicitly measure if the space is meeting its operational performance goals. We evaluate the intersection of three core dimensions to guarantee a tangible return on investment:

1. People (The Sentiment): We track absenteeism trends and turnover patterns to see if top talent is voting with their feet. Crucially, we listen to the qualitative narrative to understand if new starters are settling in faster and if there is a tangible buzz in the social zones.

2. Performance (The Dividend): The office must deliver a performance dividend. We help clients track project timelines to see if decision-making velocity improves when teams are physically co-located.

3. Place (The Behaviour): We monitor actual behaviour, not just assumed occupancy. We deploy anonymised occupancy sensors across the floorplate to gather hard data on spatial usage. If these sensors reveal that large formal boardrooms are consistently occupied by only one or two people, we use that data to confidently reconfigure the layout into smaller agile meeting pods.

THE CEO’S CORNER:

GOVERNANCE AND DEFENDING THE HYBRID STRATEGY

For the Chief Executive Officer, the ability to measure workplace performance is essential for defending hybrid strategies to the board and to investors. With average occupancy stabilising in the 50-60% range organisations are frequently holding more space than they actually need. The CEO must use precise measurement to drive portfolio rationalisation. Instead of trying to force employees to fill empty desks leaders should right-size their real estate portfolios and reinvest the resultant savings into high-quality collaboration spaces.

Furthermore, leaders must rigorously track the development and retention of their talent. The CEO must ensure that human resources teams monitor promotion rates and project allocation to verify that remote workers are not suffering from proximity bias. Auditing promotions quarterly guarantees that location does not artificially skew career progression. By tracking these specific outcomes, the CEO transforms real estate data into a powerful instrument for corporate governance and talent retention.

MARIS DIAGNOSTIC TOOLS:

THE IMPACT & OUTPUT DASHBOARD

Tracking security gate swipes and desk occupancy only tells you if your employees showed up, not the quality of their work. We deploy an advanced suite of diagnostics that measure actual human output and business impact:

The Focus Efficiency Matrix: Integrating with workforce analytics, we measure your team’s “focus efficiency” – the ratio of uninterrupted, single-task work against constant multitasking. If this drops below the 62% global benchmark, it proves your open-plan office is too noisy and requires immediate acoustic intervention.
The Utilisation Extremes Audit: Average engagement scores are misleading. Instead, we measure the extremes. We identify the exact percentage of your workforce facing severe burnout risk (spending >75% of their time overutilised annually) versus those at risk of disengagement (spending >75% of their time underutilised annually). We cross-reference with physical attendance to ensure hybrid mandates aren’t secretly destroying the wellbeing of your top performers.
The Activity-to-Impact Index: We help HR and Finance stop tracking vanity metrics (like “number of meetings held”) and pivot to hard business outcomes. This maps physical co-location directly against lagging commercial indicators – such as measuring the “speed to proficiency” for new hires, reduced project delays and overall revenue per employee.

Activity measures effort. These tools measure results, transforming your workplace strategy into a proven driver of enterprise profitability.

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