Workplace standards, design and tracking are hot topics. Everyone wants to make the most with the least amount of space possible. But the understanding of workplace is quickly beginning to overlap with employee concerns about their own privacy.
This brings us to the Quartz article where London’s Daily Telegraph installed sensors on desk chairs to track utilization. This action is one that probably 50+% of all the companies I talk to are considering. How else can you figure out whether a given desk is actually in use on a regular basis?
The issue with sensors is whether data can truly be anonymous. The reality is that a given seat is either assigned or commonly used by the same person regularly. Maybe they work from home three days a week (on average) and their boss is on the fence about it. By measuring this way you are going to get false-positive utilizations by people that are seeking to game the system and keep their seat. You are also going to create a lot of nerves by people believing that the data will be used against them somehow.
Reality is that there are enough managers in this world that would mis-use this data. They would want to analyze their particular team’s seat usage patterns to find trends (whether real or not). But that’s not how these are meant to be used. I
All in all this creates a difficult overlap. You can’t reduce space without knowing how space is used but by measuring with sensors you create an artificial environment in which you may not be able to completely trust the numbers. (If I wanted my desk to occasionally seem used daily I’d be asking a favor from my neighbor to spin my seat every 30 minutes.)
Just something to think on. It doesn’t make these sensors useless and it doesn’t mean other methods would work better. Each company needs to analyze their own culture to determine the best method for them.