Vergesense uncovers insights around meeting room usage amidst global trend of rising office utilization

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 31, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- VergeSense, the company driving the occupancy intelligence movement, today released the Q3 edition of The Occupancy Intelligence Index, which analyzed nearly 30,000 spaces from their 200+ customers, covering over 75 million sqft of commercial real estate.  

Within this analysis, VergeSense did a deep dive into the usage of over 13,000 meeting rooms and uncovered that while more employees are coming into the office with the express purpose of working with colleagues, meeting rooms aren't sufficiently serving their needs.

The Q3 Occupancy Intelligence Index uncovered key insights, including:

• Meeting room designs and availability must be adjusted: The average number of participants physically present in a meeting room during a meeting is fewer than three people, yet 47% of all conference rooms are designed for groups of 5 or more. For 36 minutes of every workday, there are no meeting rooms available to be booked across an entire floor.
• Ghosting is a real, expensive problem: 11.3% of all meetings are ghosted, which occurs when a meeting room is booked yet no physical participants use it. This amounts to over 10 million minutes of time where expensive space is wasted.
• On-the-fly meeting room usage has become the norm: 27% of all meeting room use is "on-the-fly," meaning someone uses the room without formally booking it, amounting to over 18 million minutes of ad hoc usage.

"We know that meeting face-to-face is the top reason that teams value coming back to their offices," said Dan Ryan, CEO and Co-Founder at VergeSense.  "These insights show that there's a disconnect between the ways we're designing meeting rooms, the number of meeting rooms available to our teams, and the new ways employees are expecting to use collaboration spaces."

The Occupancy Intelligence Index also analyzed quarterly changes in Office Capacity Usage (traditionally referred to as "utilization") and reported a moderate upward trend, rising to nearly 12% in Q3.  This metric is derived from anonymous first-party data, and measures the relationship between the number of people actively occupying an office and the capacity of the office.    

"The fact that globally, offices are only at 12% capacity usage while meeting rooms are frequently unavailable represents a 'breaking point' in offices that occupancy planners and space designers can work together to address. There's a major opportunity to use data to inform smarter designs and technology to create a more seamless experience for our teams."

To access The Q3 Occupancy Intelligence Index, visit www.occupancyintelligenceindex.com 

About VergeSense

VergeSense is the company behind the world's first and only Occupancy Intelligence Platform. Over 200 companies, across 45 countries and 75M sqft rely on VergeSense for a true understanding of how their portfolios and spaces are actually used. Customers like Cisco, Autodesk, and BP choose VergeSense to confidently optimize their portfolio and their spaces to reduce cost and improve employee experience.

VergeSense customers benefit from confident decision making, the ability to adapt spaces faster, and peace of mind from high investment in privacy and security. VergeSense allows organizations to right-size their portfolio, validate space planning and designs, optimize cleaning operations, and ensure their teams can always find space to work.

SOURCE VergeSense