Cutting floor space assumes you know what is actually occupied. Most organizations are flying blind, with entry badges as their only measure and a desk ratio chosen by comparison rather than observation.
The question raised in the steering committee is almost always: “what ratio should we use — 0.6 desks per employee? 0.7?” That is the wrong way in. The right ratio depends on your own reality — how attendance spreads across the week, team sizes, which roles need to be on site, seasonality — and most organizations never measure that reality.
A ratio borrowed from a peer produces one of two classic failures: expensive empty floors, or saturated Tuesdays and Thursdays where people cannot find a desk. The second is the costlier one, because it destroys trust in the scheme within weeks.
Counting entries is the most available measure, and the most misleading. It gives a volume of presence on site, not an occupancy of space. It says nothing about where people settled, for how long, or whether the meeting rooms booked were ever used.
Three gaps come up every time you actually measure:
Occupancy measurement touches a sensitive subject and should be treated as such from the outset. Two principles hold the conversation with employee representatives together: you measure spaces, not people; and you work with aggregated data, never individual records.
In practice that means indicators by zone and by time slot, not named histories. The processing must appear in your records, its purpose must be space optimization, and its retention period must be limited. Framed that way, the approach goes through; framed ambiguously, it creates opposition that costs more than the project.
You can only manage what people actually use. If booking a desk takes more than thirty seconds, or means opening a tool they never open otherwise, they will not book — they will just sit down, and your measurement will be wrong.
Hence three non-negotiable requirements: booking happens on the phone, in seconds; it shows who is in, because that is the real reason people come to the office; and it releases itself automatically if nobody shows up. That last point alone resolves most ghost bookings.
The temptation is to mandate attendance days to flatten the curve. It works on the spreadsheet and rarely on the ground: teams come in when their colleagues come in, not when the calendar says so.
The approach that holds is to make the information visible — which zones are busy, on which days, who is in — and let teams self-regulate. That means accepting that Tuesday stays busy, and sizing for it rather than fighting it.
Thirty minutes, starting from your real situation. No generic deck.