Occupancy Planning For Hybrid Businesses [2025 Guide]

How much space and resources should you provide if only a fraction of your employees come to the office on any given day? Whether you have a workforce with thousands or a small team, this is a question many hybrid organizations are still struggling to answer.

In this article, we cover how occupancy planning works, its benefits, and how to implement it for your team.

Quick Summary:

• Occupancy planning involves optimizing space to determine how to use it more efficiently.
• The benefits of occupancy planning include cost reduction, greater productivity, and better employee morale.
• Key occupancy planning methodologies include audits, employee feedback, data analysis, floor plans, and scenario planning.
• You can use tools such as booking software, sensors, and analytics platforms to help with occupancy planning.

What Is Occupancy Planning?

Occupancy planning is a way for companies to optimize their use of office space by analyzing what they have and making any necessary adjustments.

This allows them to make the most of their space — whether that consists of a single office or multiple workspaces.

Occupancy planning may involve:

• Changing the number of desks, workspaces, equipment, or ratio of equipment to employees
• Making plans for the future and projections
• Monitoring maintenance needs
• Tracking how employees react to different arrangements to optimize office space

However, the exact process depends on a company’s needs.

Occupancy Planning for Hybrid Organizations

Practically all organizations can benefit from occupancy planning, but it’s especially important for those with hybrid offices. Fifty-nine percent of hybrid workers work from home three days a week or more (with the other 41% working from home two days a week or less).

As a leader at a hybrid organization, you’ll likely have more than half of your team working from home at any given moment, so you don’t have to design your office as though each employee will be present every day.

Instead, you can make better use of resources by catering to the number of employees who will be in attendance.

However, hybrid firms may face uncertainty over how many employees will come to the office and how many will work remotely — creating uncertainty over how much of your team you should provide equipment and desk space for.

Providing too few desks would risk leaving some employees with nowhere to work, but too many desks is a poor use of resources.

Anticipating resource usage is particularly complex for companies with hybrid at-will policies, which allow employees to choose when they work (instead of the company dictating this).

Occupancy planning helps you weather this uncertainty. It involves using tools to predict how many employees your office should cater to.

Why Is Occupancy Planning Important?

Taking advantage of occupancy planning helps companies save money and become more adaptable. You can also boost employee morale and productivity because your workforce has the tools and space they need to do their jobs.

Better Allocate Resources

Real estate isn’t cheap, and rent for office spaces is predicted to increase by around 2% a year until 2027.

Yet wasted office space costs US companies $300,000 a year. Companies can reduce waste by only investing money in the space they will use, freeing up budget to use elsewhere (such as investments in staff or technology).

Occupancy planning helps you reallocate resources without preventing your team from being able to access everything they need when they attend the office.

Help Your Business Stay Adaptable

The world of work has changed a lot in the last decade, thanks to technology and companies embracing remote and hybrid work. With so much change, it’s more important than ever for businesses to be adaptable — and occupancy planning offers a much-needed toolkit.

By auditing available resources and strategies for adapting to different numbers of employees attending the office, companies can more easily react to new ways of working.

Occupancy planning also helps businesses weather economic challenges. If you need to reduce spending, occupancy planning tools allow you to quickly map out different scenarios.

For instance, you can determine how much office space you would need if you reduced your team size or replaced in-office employees with remote workers.

Support Employees

The benefits of occupancy planning go beyond the financial realm. You may be able to improve employee satisfaction too — nobody wants to walk into work and be unable to find a desk or to be surrounded by empty tables and chairs instead of smiling colleagues. Occupancy planning reduces the likelihood of these scenarios.

The occupancy planning process can also include a complete redesign of offices to better suit employee needs, which may help to boost productivity and well-being. Firm AJ Bell found that transforming its offices to create an activity-based, collaborative space increased workplace enjoyment by 33%.

You can design hybrid offices with soft lighting and plants to reduce stress levels, lounge spaces for an inviting atmosphere, or quiet areas for deep work.

Alternatively, you could place colleagues who may need to collaborate close to each other or allow employees to self-allocate desks close to the people they prefer to work with.

This is good news for businesses, too, as happier employees may be more likely to stay. Evidence suggests hybrid work boosts employee retention, and occupancy planning helps you embrace hybrid policies.

Key Occupancy Planning Methodologies

Technology makes occupancy planning possible, but it’s crucial to understand the framework behind the process too.

Audit Your Existing Space

You can’t improve the efficiency of your resource usage without a clear picture of your current situation.

The first step in occupancy planning is to make note of all assets and expenses, including:

• Overhead costs
• Number of employees (and how many are remote vs hybrid vs in-office)
• Square footage of office space
• Resources (such as desk and equipment)
• Stage of the life cycle of different assets

This information provides the basis for any decisions you make about how to use your space.

Engage Your Employees

Not everything is about the numbers. Since one of the benefits of occupancy planning is supporting employees, it’s crucial to consult your team throughout the process.

Ideally, occupancy planning involves creating a positive workspace rather than simply redesigning an office with the minimum square footage and resources possible.

Seek feedback from employees while asking them what they dislike or like about their current space, how often they come into the office, and what their ideal work schedule would look like. Surveys, focus groups, and interviews can all help with this process.

Some employees might initially be resistant to change around the office. However, you can combat their concerns by outlining the benefits, consulting them throughout the process so they feel involved, and offering training where needed.

For instance, if they’re worried about using new software as part of occupancy planning, you can provide workshops with instructions.

Track Your Space Utilization

You need to pay attention not just to what employees say, but also what they do. How is your team currently using the office space? What trends can you identify?

Some space utilization metrics to examine include:

• Peak occupancy
• Average utilization
• Meeting room utilization

Rather than solely focusing on how employees are currently using the space, you may want to track trends over time and make projections for the future, such as how your current office space would cope with a change in team size.

It’s also useful to identify high-traffic areas. For instance, you might find the hot desk section is always full, while meeting rooms are often empty. This gives you clues about how to use the space.

Once you have the data you need, it’s time to decide how you use it, which leads to our next point.

Plan for Different Scenarios

Create various hypothetical scenarios to figure out how these scenarios would affect your office space. For example, what would happen if you decided to increase remote work (or ask more employees to return to the office)?

Occupancy planning helps you map out ways to deal with these different scenarios.

How Can Technology Help with Real-Time Occupancy Planning?

The methodologies outlined above may have required hundreds of hours of work in the past, but technology ensures the occupancy planning process is smooth and streamlined.

Sensors

Occupancy sensors track utilization by collecting real-time data about how space is being used. You can then use this information to create plans or redesign your workspace.

There are various kinds of occupancy tracking tools. For instance, optical sensors use algorithms to analyze images, while passive infrared (PIR) sensors track heat created by people. Other sensors track noise, humidity, or light.

You can use sensors to make heat maps and determine which rooms are the most utilized, providing key data about where to focus resources.

In addition to providing data to aid occupancy planning, sensors can use the information they collect to automatically turn off lights in unoccupied rooms, adjust temperatures, and more.

Space Utilization Software

Once you collect data from sensors, you need a place to make sense of it. This is the role of analytics software, which provides a dashboard to view key statistics, identify trends, and more.

Whatever your key business objectives are, you can prioritize them with this software — for instance, if your key concern is budget constraints, you may find out that office equipment is more expensive than anticipated and decide to change your workplace strategy accordingly.

You can then refine layouts, allocate resources effectively, reduce wasted space, and enhance the employee experience.

OfficeRnD Workplace also offers tools to align office occupancy with team schedules and needs to create a more flexible and efficient workspace.

Survey Software

As mentioned already, getting feedback from employees is vital in the occupancy planning process. Survey software (like Survey Monkey and Typeform) provides an easy way to collect feedback from employee surveys about their workplace experience and preferences, such as a desire for quiet spaces.

Carry out one survey before making changes to establish a baseline of employee satisfaction and identify areas most in need of improvement.

Then, send out another survey after implementing changes to track how workers react. If there are some unintended negative consequences, it may be necessary to make further tweaks.

Booking Apps

Ideally, it would be possible to perfectly predict how many people would need to use desks or other resources and plan your office based on that knowledge. But it’s not always possible, so booking software acts as a backup by letting employees reserve the resources they need in advance, such as meeting rooms, desks, or equipment.

This way, employees can turn up to the office confident they will be able to access the resources they need.

Make the Most of Your Space with OfficeRnD Workplace

Organizations that embrace hybrid working have the opportunity to save money and resources by using their space efficiently. By involving your team in the process and listening to their feedback, occupancy planning can also boost productivity and employee satisfaction.

Fortunately, technology is making it easier than ever to make the most of your space by providing tools such as real-time analytics, occupancy sensors, and booking apps.

Ready to make your space work for you? Get started for free with OfficeRnD Workplace and see how it can completely transform your workplace experience.

FAQ

What Are the Best Practices for Occupancy Planning for a Hybrid Office?

Some of the best practices for occupancy planning in a hybrid office include prioritizing flexibility, leveraging technology, gathering input from employees, and using data.

How Do You Manage a Hybrid Office?

To successfully manage a hybrid office, use technology to facilitate communication and keep track of the whole team. Software helps to track resource use, bridge the gap between remote and in-office workers, and more. It’s also helpful to establish clear guidelines for everyone to follow.

What Is the Occupancy Planning Process?

The occupancy planning process involves analyzing and forecasting the space needs of an organization to ensure optimal use of office resources. It includes assessing current space utilization, predicting future requirements based on growth or operational changes, and developing strategies to allocate space efficiently. This process helps organizations balance capacity, cost, and employee satisfaction while adapting to evolving business needs.

What is Planned Occupancy?

Planned occupancy refers to the intentional allocation and management of space within a facility to accommodate a specific number of people or activities. It involves forecasting and organizing resources, such as desks, meeting rooms, and shared areas, to align with current and future organizational needs. This approach ensures efficient space utilization, supports employee productivity, and adapts to changes in workforce size or operational requirements.

What is the Role of an Occupancy Planner?

An occupancy planner is responsible for optimizing the use of space within a facility to meet organizational needs effectively. They analyze current space usage, forecast future requirements, and develop strategies to allocate workstations, meeting rooms, and common areas efficiently. Their role ensures that the workspace supports productivity, aligns with company goals, and adapts to changes in team size or operational priorities.

What is the Difference Between Space Planning and Occupancy Planning?

The key difference between space planning and occupancy planning lies in their focus. Space planning involves designing and organizing the physical layout of a facility to maximize functionality and efficiency, focusing on elements like furniture placement, flow, and aesthetics. Occupancy planning, on the other hand, focuses on allocating and managing space based on the number of people and their specific needs, ensuring optimal utilization and adaptability to changes in workforce size or operational requirements. Together, these processes help create a functional and well-utilized workspace.

What is the Difference Between Occupancy and Capacity?

The difference between occupancy and capacity lies in their definitions and focus. Occupancy refers to the actual number of people using a space at a given time, reflecting real-time usage. Capacity, on the other hand, indicates the maximum number of people a space can accommodate safely and comfortably, based on its design and regulatory limits. While capacity sets the limit, occupancy measures the current utilization of that space.

How is Occupancy Calculated?

Occupancy is calculated by dividing the actual number of people using a space by the total capacity of that space, then multiplying by 100 to get a percentage. The formula is:

Occupancy Rate (%) = (Current Occupancy ÷ Total Capacity) × 100

This calculation helps assess how effectively a space is being utilized and identify opportunities for optimization.

What is the Difference Between Occupancy and SLA?

The difference between occupancy and SLA lies in their focus and application. Occupancy refers to the number of people or the percentage of a space being utilized, reflecting space usage and efficiency. SLA (Service Level Agreement), on the other hand, is a contractual agreement defining the expected level of service provided, such as response times or performance metrics, between a service provider and its clients. While occupancy measures resource utilization, SLA sets standards for service delivery and accountability.

What is the Difference Between Occupancy and Utilization of Space?

The difference between occupancy and utilization of space lies in what they measure. Occupancy refers to the number of people present in a space at a given time, often expressed as a percentage of total capacity. Utilization, however, measures how effectively a space is being used over a period of time, considering factors like frequency and duration of use. While occupancy shows real-time space usage, utilization provides insights into long-term efficiency and optimization.