In an era where workplace flexibility is becoming increasingly crucial and hybrid work has become the norm, companies are faced with a critical decision: how can we simultaneously optimize available office space and meet the needs of employees?

For various organizations, including this real estate company, we are searching for the answer to this question.

For Vesteda, as a medium-sized organization, we have chosen an organization-wide scope: we gather feedback from all employees. To address the question, we will assess different policy scenarios:

• The 50%/50% scenario – Each employee works half the time from home and half in the office.
• The ‘hands-off’ scenario – We leave it up to the employees themselves.
• The optimization scenario – We will manage presence, optimize office space, and reduce peak attendance on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

To make the impact of policy choices as concrete as possible, we collect the necessary employee data and specific information about available office space and locations.

The feedback from employees we gather includes personal preferences, facility needs, time allocation, key work relationships, and motivations for coming to the office or not.

We illustrate the effects of different policy scenarios on expected occupancy rates and facility needs while taking into account the personal preferences and typical time allocation of employees (activity-based working).

This way, we provide an evidence-based answer to the question rather than relying on intuition or assumptions.

Now that a policy choice has been made, it’s time for policy implementation. With the insights into the personal motivations of employees, we make managing attendance more concrete and straightforward.

To measure is to know.