Most organisations trying to make a hybrid office work are arguing from the wrong evidence. Badge swipes say who entered the building. They don't say where people sat, which rooms were booked but empty, which floor was deserted by two o'clock, or why the same six desks are always taken while thirty sit untouched. A space utilisation study replaces that argument with measurement.
What gets measured
A proper study is observation over representative weeks, not a snapshot on a quiet Friday. It typically combines several sources:
Occupancy observation. Structured walk-throughs recording actual use of desks, meeting rooms, collaboration areas and quiet space at intervals through the day. Not what the booking system says — what is physically happening.
Sensor and system data. If you already have desk sensors, room panels or Wi-Fi analytics, the study uses them before recommending you buy more. Most organisations own more data than they analyse.
Employee input. Surveys and interviews that ask how people actually work and what stops them. The gap between the observed data and what people report is often where the real finding sits — a floor can be technically half-empty and still feel impossible to concentrate on.
Benchmarking. How your ratios — desks per person, meeting seats per person, space per workstation — compare against organisations of similar size and sector.
What the numbers typically show
Utilisation studies across UK offices keep finding the same patterns. Peak desk occupancy well below what the floor plan was designed for. Meeting rooms sized for eight, used by two or three. Collaboration space that was added because it was fashionable, sitting empty while people fight over quiet rooms. And a Tuesday-to-Thursday peak that the space was never planned around.
None of these is a criticism of anyone. Desk ratios set in 2019 were set for a different way of working, and space is usually the second-largest cost on the books after people. Carrying 2019 assumptions at current rents is simply expensive.
What you do with it
The output should be a plan you can defend to a board: which teams need what, how much space that genuinely requires, what can be reconfigured rather than rebuilt, and what should not be bought at all. Sometimes the honest recommendation is to buy less than you were planning to — fewer desks, smaller refurbishment, or space handed back at the next lease event. A study that costs a few thousand pounds routinely changes decisions worth hundreds of thousands.
It also changes the quality of the next decision. Post-occupancy evaluation — measuring again after the change — tells you whether the redesign did what it promised before the pattern gets repeated on the next floor.
When to commission one
Three moments make the measurement worth most: ahead of a lease event, when the option to shrink, grow or renegotiate is live; before a refurbishment, when the layout is about to be fixed for a decade; and when a hybrid policy has changed but the building hasn't. In each case the study needs to happen before the design work starts, because once a specification exists, the decisions that matter have already been made.
At JPA Workspaces we run utilisation studies as a fixed-price workplace diagnostic — the findings are yours whether or not you do anything further with us. If you're weighing up a space decision this year, measuring first is the cheapest part of the whole project.