CRE leaders need to stop thinking in terms of weekly occupancy and shift to a monthly framework.

Most conversations I have with people about workplace occupancy include the phrase “days per week in the office.” Over the past two years, this way of thinking about occupancy has become increasingly problematic when considering how people actually work. It can be hard to overcome the hybrid propaganda about 2 to 3 days per week in the office being normal. This definition of hybrid is fairly well embedded in how most think about workplace occupancy.

The challenge with this framing is that many (if not most depending on your industry and region) employees do not come into the office every week. Yes, an employee that comes into the office two days this week but none last week averages one day a week in the office. However, an every-other-week office routine will function very differently from an every-week routine. It has massive implications when thinking about peak versus average occupancy, correlations between team days, and how services are used. Even more challenging are those employees with even lower frequencies (e.g., less than one day per week average) or higher variabilities (e.g., no days at all this month but several days total the month before).

When our thinking is framed around “per week,” any strategies we build to deal with occupancy will be similarly skewed. If you are using peak occupancy as a measure of your workplace instead of average (as most companies are these days), then you have already acknowledged this challenge to a large degree. Taking the next step to think across longer periods than the week is simply an extension of this same approach.

Every bit of our experience disagrees with this change. We work (mostly) Monday to Friday. The office is open Monday to Friday. Therefore, the office should be measured Monday to Friday. Unfortunately, the employees we are planning for do not work in the office Monday to Friday. As you take this into account, it will have implications on your reporting, metrics, trends, and strategy in ways you do not initially expect. However, it will make all of your planning more robust and people-centric.