Are you aware of how much vacant space you are currently paying for in your office? You may occasionally walk around and notice one or two empty offices or workstations and not think much of it. But if you add up all the vacant spaces on one floor, or even across multiple floors in a building, you might be surprised by exactly how much space is sitting there gathering dust. You may be expending valuable resources to support vacant space that is giving nothing back, and that could be utilized much more efficiently in an open office design.
In a traditional office design, it’s easy to overlook spaces that have been sitting vacant for months or even years. We’ve all seen the empty office or cubicle that soon becomes file storage because it’s no longer assigned to an employee. Pockets of vacant space are commonplace, especially in larger organizations where there may be multiple divisions and multiple teams within a division. Many managers simply aren’t aware of the scale – and cost – of vacant or underutilized space. Getting a feel for the magnitude of vacant space is a first step towards developing a strategy to reclaim that space. Of course, I believe the icing on the cake would be to incorporate that space into an open office concept to maximize every square inch.
Any thriving business for which space is a premium analyzes how its space is used on an ongoing basis. Take Disney World for example. Disney analysts regularly analyze ridership volume to identify the most popular rides and those that may be declining in popularity. Sometimes a park can renovate a less popular ride or even rehabilitate its image. For example, did you know that the Pirates of the Caribbean ride that opened at Disney World in 1967 was waning in popularity until Disney’s 2003 release of the highly acclaimed movie, The Curse of the Black Pearl? Talk about injecting life into an underutilized asset!
Borrowing a page from Disney’s playbook (though not quite as exciting as amusement park rides), the first step in reclaiming vacant office space is to quantify the amount of vacant space. Of course, it’s easy to count empty offices, but it’s a bit more challenging to identify underutilized spaces. Amusement parks use electronic tracking devices to track utilization rates. While similar devices are certainly available to determine office space utilization, you probably don’t need anything quite as sophisticated. A simple employee survey or observations over a period of time should give you the information you need, and it may be very enlightening. You may start out thinking, “This workstation belongs to Natalie,” but if Natalie is out of the office for meetings two to three days a week, her workstation is actually vacant much of the time. Conference rooms can be even worse, as they may sit empty and unused for the majority of a work week.
I participated in one such space utilization study for an organization that occupied several floors of a single building. We added up all the vacant workstations and unused space throughout the building. They knew there were some vacant workstations and barely used conference rooms, but they didn’t realize the magnitude. Can you guess how much space was sitting empty in that one building? The total was nearly an entire floor. Not only was this space vacant, but it was mostly unusable because it was scattered in smaller pockets of space on different floors and across multiple divisions within the organization.
Unfortunately, releasing or reclaiming vacant or underutilized space isn’t always easy in a traditional office setting. For example, the above organization has the capacity for more employees on paper, but it only has space for one or two additional employees per division. If a team of ten new staff members needed office space within the building, there would be no way to accommodate them in a contiguous block of space without relocating other employees or work groups. The vacant space just sits there, often as an eyesore.
And if a tenant hopes to save costs by releasing vacant space back to the landlord, there’s a problem. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for a landlord to rent out vacant pockets of space. But if the space is contiguous, that’s an entirely different story.
Vacant spaces are also magnets for inefficiency. It’s much easier for files or boxes to be left in an empty workstation than it is to move them all the way to the storage room, especially when they might be needed again soon. Before long, that empty workstation has become its own file/storage room, and is no longer available as a workspace. Worse still, you’re paying rent and heating and cooling that space unnecessarily.
Now imagine what could happen if most of your space were laid out in an open or mobile office design. In a mobile office, employees and space are very flexible, especially if you don’t have individually assigned workstations. If a study determined that ten workstations weren’t being used or were underutilized, you could easily move your workforce to contiguous areas and either reserve the unused space for new employees or release it entirely. Similarly, if the office requires one or two additional project rooms for a new initiative, you can more easily segment your space and even transition it to an entirely new use, either temporarily or permanently.
The same goes for collaborative space. Imagine a traditional office in a large organization. Each division has its own suite of space with private offices, reception areas, conference rooms, and even support areas. It may be an impressive layout, but how often does each team use its conference room? Or, more to the point, what percentage of the time are those conference rooms sitting empty and unused? With an open office design, the collective need for collaborative space can be pooled so that you may only need two conference rooms to serve five or more separate teams, depending on their needs. Not only is your space being utilized more effectively, but you’re saving money on rent and utilities every month.
Software that manages room scheduling, assignment, and availability is a resource that many organizations with open office designs use to manage their spaces. Not only do these tools help avoid conflicts with space resources, but they can actually be used to gather usage data to quantify the space utilization, capacity, and overall efficiency of your space. (With tools like these, you may have more in common with Disney World than you realized!)
The vacant space you have in your office may truly be an unrealized asset just waiting to be utilized. Pockets of space that are scattered throughout your office may not seem that valuable until they are viewed as a whole. And if you transition to an open office setting, that vacant space may truly be your pot of gold.