American workers saved a staggering 60 million hours by working from home instead of commuting in 2022. As work-from-home arrangements took hold during the pandemic and have significantly endured post-COVID, professional offices have increasingly resembled dusty Colorado ghost towns. 

According to deskbird, an office optimization software company, only 11% of American companies actually use all of their office space and 45% use less than half. Real estate services company JLL reports that the current average office utilization rate across industries is 60%.

Unused desks and common areas have the greatest impact on utilization rates and offer the best opportunity for efficiently using existing office space. 

With regard to individual workstations, identifying a strategy that considers your firm’s desk ratio and usage patterns can go a long way in helping to identify your organization’s space needs. 

In the article, “Remote Work Opportunities, Office Space Utilization Combine for Improved Efficiency,” recently published in the fall 2024 issue of NewsAccount, I share insights on tracking desk and office space usage patterns, then calculating desk ratios to determine how much space your organization needs.

The article details three workstation usage strategies that firms might consider based on their usage patterns, budget, and other factors, and shares the pros and cons of each:

• Hot desking: This strategy provides community office and workstations for employees to claim on a first-come, first-served basis each day when in the office.
• Office hoteling: The office hoteling strategy provides a booking system that employees can use to reserve offices or workstations days in advance. This ensures that all employees have more fair access to offices and workstations. 
• Office sharing: This strategy has two or more employees sharing one office or workstation by coordinating their hybrid schedules so that only one is in the office on any given day.

Common spaces such as conference rooms, break-out rooms, and huddle rooms often go unused or underutilized for much of the day and offer additional opportunities for creating efficiencies. Once you’ve identified usage and occupancy rates for these spaces, there are opportunities to adjust your common spaces to more closely match these metrics. 

For example, consider reconfiguring large meeting spaces with removable partitions, similar to hotel ballrooms. If you have entirely unused offices, convert a number into small conference rooms or huddle rooms as necessary. There is also the opportunity to repurpose common spaces as employee amenities that may even encourage employees to work in the office more often.

A hybrid workforce presents opportunities for firms to become more efficient, save expenses in the long term, and provide amenities to improve employee well-being. 

Read the full article, “Remote Work Opportunities, Office Space Optimization Combine for Improved Efficiency,” in the fall 2024 issue of NewsAccount.

Steve Grimes is the firm administrator of WhippleWood CPAs in Littleton. Reach him at steveg@whipplewoodcpas.com.