Matching Technology and Space Is the Final Frontier

Whether your organization is promoting a back-to-the-office trend, supporting remote work, or championing a hybrid work schedule, someone needs to right-size office facilities. After weathering the philosophical battles over which work style best serves the company’s goals, matching office configurations correctly to office needs is a difficult challenge, the final frontier for IT, facility, and senior leadership.

Striking the right balance, however, is far from straightforward. The process of right-sizing office space — ensuring that facilities neither sit underutilized nor become overcrowded — poses several challenges. Organizations often grapple with questions such as: How much space is actually needed? How should the space be divided into meeting rooms and how many of each size room are required? How do attendance patterns and needs fluctuate over the course of a week, and how do these trends evolve as work habits change?

Successfully configuring office environments to align with these shifting needs requires more than intuition; it demands actionable data. This is where solutions like Cisco Spaces become invaluable. By continuously monitoring space usage and tracking attendance, Cisco Spaces provides organizations with a rich stream of analytics. These insights illuminate real occupancy trends, reveal which meeting rooms and common areas are in high demand, and help leaders pinpoint opportunities for optimization. Armed with this information, organizations can make evidence-based decisions about redesign, consolidation, and resource allocation—ensuring their office spaces are truly fit for purpose in a world where flexibility is key.

Related:Adapt or Face a Silently Disengaging Workforce

Leveraging Existing Infrastructure

Cisco Spaces is a cloud platform that leverages existing Cisco infrastructure as sensors. Spaces captures data from collaboration devices to determine room-based occupancy.

Room-based devices can count the number of people in a room, using two mechanisms:

AI-Powered Head Detection: The device’s camera remains active in a low-power state, using artificial intelligence to detect and count the number of human heads in its field of view. This process is continuous as long as the feature is enabled. It is designed to be anonymous and does not perform facial recognition.

Ultrasonic Sensors: Some devices also use ultrasonic sensors to detect general presence in the room, which complements the camera data.

Cisco WiFi devices can also track the number and location of people. Here’s the step-by-step of how it works:

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In summary, Cisco Spaces uses your existing Cisco Wi-Fi APs as sensors, detects device Wi-Fi activity (connected or not), applies filtering + statistical modeling, and outputs an estimated human count without necessarily knowing who those people are.

Configuring Space to Match Needs

While badge scans can give you an overall idea of who is entering your facility, even when combined with meeting scheduling data, you will have very limited information related to how specific rooms or common areas are being used.

Cisco devices paired with Cisco Spaces can provide granular data on specifically how the areas of your office are being used.

With this level of data you are better able to size and configure your space optimally, from total desks, to meeting rooms, to spots in the cafeteria.

Related:As Channels Increase, So Do Communication Gaps

Beyond People Counting

While office space may be the final frontier, by enabling people counting and location tracking you can also support more advanced use cases:

Spaces can further leverage other sensors in your existing devices and supports standalone sensors to do more than help with capacity planning.

Spaces supports standalone Meraki sensors, which gather carbon dioxide levels (CO2), temperature, noise, air quality, temperature, humidity, and other factors.

Source: https://documentation.meraki.com/MT

DeskPro devices include temperature and humidity sensors.

Cisco Room Navigator, which is a 10” room control and room booking smart touch panel, has sensors that detect air quality, temperature, humidity, noise and light inside and outside the room. Navigator can be mounted on a wall or used as a table-top room control device and works to augment sensors in Cisco Room series, Board series, and Desk series devices.

Source: https://help.webex.com/en-us/result/Sensors%20in%20Desk%20Pro

These additional environmental sensors support use cases beyond occupancy tracking, including:

Alternatives to Cisco Spaces

This article used Cisco Spaces as an example for exploring office space solutions; however, there are alternatives offered by other vendors.

Starting at Sub-light Speed

If you have deployed Cisco room devices, occupancy and environmental sensor data are available via Control Hub (Cisco’s web-based management portal).

This is true even if you are a Microsoft shop and have deployed Cisco room devices in MTR mode. Cisco devices in MTR mode can simultaneously be connected to Teams Room Pro (Microsoft’s web-based device management portal) and Control Hub. Sensor data, including occupancy data, is shown in Control Hub.

Warp Factor 1

If you want to explore more “new worlds”, you can try out Cisco Spaces in three different ways:

You can also likely contact your Cisco sales representative to arrange a visit to one of Cisco’s Experience Centers.

Data Makes All the Difference

Whether you are tasked with exploring brave new worlds or the brave new world of hybrid work, sensor data allows you to make and monitor space and configuration decisions.

Think of occupancy and location tracking data as your long-range sensors helping you safely seek out new ways of working.

Office Space, the final frontier.

These are the voyages of the modern corporation.

Its ongoing mission:

To explore strange new floor plans.

To seek out new work patterns and new corporate cultures.

To boldly right-size where no one has gone before.