Sign InOffice Space Management Guide For Useful Hybrid Workspaces
With more employees splitting time between home and the office, space management has become a top priority for corporate real estate teams and office managers. Hybrid working has led to vast numbers of offices with underused footprints and rising costs. It’s more important than ever to implement a considered, data-driven office space management strategy.
This guide breaks down the essentials of office space management. You'll learn about its changing role, a step-by-step operating framework, advice on integrations and data flows, and hybrid working strategies.
The role of office space management in the modern workplace
Office space management is the ongoing process of overseeing the use of a workspace over time and ensuring that the space actively supports how people work. It connects physical space with organizational performance, so that every square foot of a workspace delivers value.
While office space planning and design define what a workplace should be, management is concerned with continuous optimization to ensure space continues to work effectively as needs, behaviors, and business priorities change over time.
Key responsibilities of modern office space management include:
Space utilization optimization: Understanding how often and how effectively spaces are used, and adjusting layouts accordingly.
Occupancy and demand planning: Anticipating fluctuations in attendance driven by hybrid schedules, growth, or downsizing.
Workplace experience enablement: Managing spaces that support collaboration, focus, and employee well-being.
Portfolio agility: Adapting office footprints across locations to remain flexible as business needs evolve.
Operational efficiency: Reducing wasted space, energy use, and maintenance costs through informed decision-making.
As workplaces become more dynamic, space management also plays a key role in company growth and development: adapting to ensure a portfolio can respond efficiently to potential changes.
Core KPIs and formulas
Office space management is a data-driven discipline. Using real, quantifiable data helps organizations to:
Respond quickly to changing work patterns
Avoid costly over- or under-utilization of space
Make confident, future-ready real estate decisions
The following space metrics help teams move from anecdotal feedback to confidently justifying changes:
Utilization: The proportion of desks, rooms, or areas actively used over time
Peak vs. average occupancy: The gap between busiest days and typical attendance
Density: Amount of space allocated per person or seat
Cost per seat: Total workplace cost divided by the number of available workspaces
Meeting-room performance: Booking frequency, actual usage, and fit-for-purpose of room sizes
No-show and check-in rates: How often booked desks or rooms are not used, and the effectiveness of auto-release policies
Specific KPIs will depend on industry, company size, and workplace policies, so it’s important to do your own research and consider business context when setting your benchmarks. There are a number of broad KPIs, however, that all companies should take into consideration when looking at their office space management strategy:
Alignment: Does the space supply match how employees actually use the office, not just how it was planned?
Flexibility: Can the workplace absorb changes in attendance, team structure, or work style without disruption?
Efficiency: Do space and cost scale together, allowing you to avoid long-term overprovisioning?
Experience: Can employees consistently find appropriate spaces when they need them?
Adaptability: Are you successfully testing and adapting space use over time?
Assigning benchmarks to these KPIs and tracking them over time will help form a decision framework.
An 8-step framework to measure and optimize office space use
The most effective programs follow a simple loop: listen → measure → act → report. The following steps build on this loop and lay out a framework that will help guide your workspace to evolve alongside changing business needs and employee expectations.
Success in this process requires cross-functional ownership. Workplace teams, IT, HR, and finance will all play critical roles.
1. Build your measurement stack
Start by gathering data from multiple sources to provide a complete view of how your office is actually used.
Recommended office space management data sources include:
Sensors: Motion, occupancy, and environmental sensors track real-time usage of desks, rooms, and shared areas.
Wi‑Fi and badge data: Identify foot traffic, presence patterns, and employee flow across the office.
Calendars and booking systems: Understand how meeting rooms and collaborative spaces are scheduled versus actually used.
Incorporate qualitative input from employees as well, to ensure their preferences and needs are properly considered. For example, try using:
Pulse surveys: Gather insights on work patterns, satisfaction, and space preferences.
Team-day preferences: Identify which days teams plan to be in-office to inform flexible seating or hot-desking strategies.
Work-style needs: Capture requirements for focus vs. collaboration spaces, quiet areas, and amenity access.
In anticipation of potential changes, you’ll also need to visualize and verify your space. Digital twins are digital representations of spaces that make it easy to see exactly how they are configured inside a 3D virtual model. They also provide accurate, Automated Measuring and floor plans that can be used as a detailed point of reference. Having a clear, visual model ensures that measurement and planning are based on reality, not outdated drawings.
2. Connect your ecosystem for data flow
Next, you need all systems to work together seamlessly. A connected ecosystem helps to align your full office space management strategy. It will also help to automate insights, as well as ensure privacy and security. Key connections include:
People systems: Calendars, HRIS, and collaboration tools (Slack, Teams) for bookings, check-ins, seat policies, and nudges.
Analytics feeds: Sensors, Wi‑Fi, badge data, and access control events to track occupancy and validate presence.
Data consolidation: Data lakes or BI platforms for cross-site reporting, forecasting, and trend analysis.
Governance: Role-based access, least-privilege permissions, and alignment with SOC 2, ISO, and GDPR standards.
Integrating these systems allows organizations to turn raw data into action. Matterport’s API and integrations provide a flexible connection with systems to enhance this data with the visual layer of a digital twin. Combined with booking and check-in systems, a digital twin can be used to:
Provide a visual reference for which desks, rooms, or collaboration areas are available in real time.
Sync with occupancy sensors and calendar data for comparison of booking and reservation data.
Act as a central interface for operational decisions, where trends across floors or sites are visualized.
By connecting your ecosystem, your office space management program will be capable of driving actionable insights and real-time interventions.
3. Set goals and run an executive reporting cadence
Define site-level OKRs and establish a reporting rhythm. For example: monthly operations review, quarterly portfolio review, and annual lease decisions.
Define some business-specific must-haves for your dashboards to promote actionable insights. For example:
Trend lines: Track utilization, occupancy, and cost metrics over time to spot patterns and seasonal shifts.
Cohort views: Compare usage across teams, floors, or sites to identify best practices or areas needing attention.
Exception alerts: Flag under- or over-utilized spaces, no-show hotspots, or policy violations for immediate action.
A digital twin can also function as a central reporting tool, where evidence of occupancy, usage trends, and interventions is documented in an accessible hub with visual context.
SHoP Architects combine live and historical sensor data inside a Matterport digital twin to monitor environmental conditions and understand how the building really operates in real-time.
“Digitization has been critical to understanding the reality of the space, even though we walk through it every day.” — Geoff Bell AIA, Senior Associate at SHoP Architects
4. Turn data insights into actions
Use data to optimize space and improve employee experience. Some commonly occurring insights are, for example, areas with consistently low use, or significant and disruptive congestion at peak times (like anchor days in hybrid offices).
Try the following strategies to correct these issues:
For low-use areas, try reconfiguring layouts to better suit current work patterns; consolidate underutilized floors or zones; or as a late resort, sublease or repurpose space for flexible work or amenities.
Address peak-time congestion by rebalancing desk-to-room ratios; add focus rooms, huddle spaces, or collaboration zones; or adjust in-office days by team to reduce crowding.
Matterport’s Property Intelligence provides AI-generated space data from digital twins. These insights help with density evaluation, reconfiguration planning, and layout modelling without manual tape-outs.
5. Meet compliance requirements
Compliance is a key part of ensuring spaces are safe and usable, while avoiding operational and legal risks. Key focus areas include:
Occupancy and safety management:
Use occupancy data to prevent overcrowding in high-use areas and ensure fire code adherence.
Verify egress routes are sufficient and clear, keeping spaces functional and safe.
Accessibility:
Ensure ADA compliance across desks, rooms, and shared spaces.
Identify barriers proactively to support inclusive and flexible work.
A digital twin provides a practical way to manage compliance alongside space optimization. By combining accurate, AI-generated measurements with up-to-date visualizations, it offers a single source of truth for inspections, audit trails, and regulatory reporting. Managers can quickly verify that spaces meet safety and accessibility standards while also using the twin to inform reconfigurations, consolidations, or other workspace improvements.
6. Support change management and adoption
Successful office space management depends on employee adoption of new layouts and policies. A structured 30–60–90 day rollout can help:
30 days – Pilot: Test new layouts, desk policies, or room assignments with a small group.
60 days – Champions: Identify team advocates to guide peers and reinforce adoption.
90 days – Training & scaling: Provide wider training, resources, and feedback channels.
Use a digital twin to provide visual, interactive mock-ups of new layouts and support adoption. Employees can explore proposed changes in the form of a 3D virtual tour before implementation. Meanwhile, you can collect contextual feedback from them via Notes and Tags to help with buy-in.
It’s a good idea to keep a close eye on adoption rates right from the start, for the best possible chance at long-term success. Watch out for these key KPIs in the first days of a space modification:
Check-in rate for booked desks and rooms
Reduction in no-shows for reservations
Employee satisfaction and comfort with new spaces
Transparency between management and the workforce will improve both adoption and overall office efficiency.
7. Scale changes across a portfolio
When managing multiple sites, office space management requires coordinated planning and repeatable workflows. To make portfolio-level decisions actionable:
Run scenario planning: Model moves, adds, or changes before implementation and identify swing spaces to minimize disruption.
Centralize requests: Use a standardized intake form for all space changes to ensure consistent approvals and documentation.
Communicate clearly: Notify affected teams early and provide visual references to help employees understand upcoming changes.
Track outcomes: Compare planned vs. actual occupancy, utilization, and employee experience to refine future decisions.
Digital twins make this process faster and more accurate: recurring scans provide up-to-date inventories of desks and rooms, reducing the need for manual site surveys. Each twin also acts as a version-controlled record of floor plans and layouts. For deeper design or facilities work, CAD and BIM files can be exported from the twin.
8. Model the ROI and TCO of your space decisions
Close the loop by translating space insights into clear financial outcomes. Provide finance with clean, consistent inputs to compare scenarios such as reconfiguring space, consolidating sites, subleasing excess capacity, relocating, or introducing flex options—each evaluated with payback timelines and risk tradeoffs.
Account for both hard and soft savings, including avoided build-outs, reduced churn, and fewer site visits or surveys.
Key modeling inputs include:
Right-sizing: Reduction in underused seats × cost per seat
Sublease vs. consolidate: Lease terms, incentives, and tenant-improvement recovery
Flex space: Cost premium weighed against utilization certainty and optionality
This ensures office space decisions are strategic, defensible, and financially grounded.
How to build a hybrid workplace playbook that employees love
Hybrid work is now the default operating model for many organizations. Over the past few years, employees have fundamentally changed how, when, and why they come into the office. Attendance is more intentional, team-driven, and uneven across the week. As a result, offices are no longer full by default, but they are often crowded at the same time, for the same reasons.
This shift has made traditional office rules unworkable. Fixed seating creates friction in a world where space is shared, attendance is variable, and expectations of flexibility are high. Employees feel this most acutely when desks aren’t available, meeting rooms are booked but empty, or team days collide without planning.
A hybrid workplace playbook bridges this gap. It turns flexible work policies into clear, operable guidance that:
Removes friction from everyday decisions
Improves fairness in shared environments
Keeps desks and rooms available for the people who show up
Rather than enforcing rigid rules, a good playbook sets shared expectations and helps employees use the office confidently while allowing workplace teams to manage space predictably and at scale.
Hot desking vs. hoteling
Hot desking and hoteling serve different needs, and choosing the right approach depends on how predictable attendance is and how teams work.
Hot desking allows employees to use any available desk on a first-come basis, typically without advance reservations. It works best in highly flexible environments where attendance is unpredictable and desks are treated as short-term resources.
Hoteling requires employees to reserve a desk in advance for a specific day or time. This model provides greater certainty and is better suited to teams with recurring in-office schedules, specialized equipment needs, or higher coordination requirements.
To keep these models fair and functional, set clear desk etiquette rules, such as:
What personal items (if any) can be left behind
Cleanliness expectations at the end of use
Quiet zones vs. collaboration areas
Embedding digital twins directly into a desk-booking portal or hybrid work app will help employees choose a desk that fits their needs—near teammates, away from noise, or close to amenities—reducing frustration and trial-and-error.
Meeting-room mix and booking rules
Meeting rooms are often the biggest source of friction in hybrid offices—not because there aren’t enough rooms, but because the mix and rules don’t match behavior.
In hybrid environments, meetings skew smaller, shorter, and more frequent. When offices are overbuilt with large rooms or lack enough focus spaces, teams compensate by overbooking, holding meetings in oversized rooms, or reserving rooms “just in case.” This creates artificial scarcity and poor utilization, even when space technically exists.
A balanced room mix supports better utilization and experience. Use mixes based on the following usage patterns:
2–4 person focus rooms absorb hybrid calls and quick syncs without tying up larger spaces
6–8 person rooms support core team collaboration and workshops
Large rooms serve all-hands and infrequent events without dominating the footprint
Booking rules are the operational layer that keeps this system working. To keep rooms available, apply the following booking rules:
No-show auto-release windows that return unused rooms to circulation
Grace periods to account for late starts without encouraging hoarding
Cleaning buffers and service windows to protect room readiness and health standards
From a management standpoint, these rules ensure that measured demand translates into actual availability. Visual tools such as Matterport floor plans help reinforce this by making room size, layout, and capacity obvious at booking time—so employees choose the right room, and the office runs more efficiently as a result.
Team-day coordination
Even in hybrid workplaces where average occupancy is low, peak days still occur, when multiple teams converge in the office simultaneously. These days can quickly strain shared desks, meeting rooms, and collaboration areas, creating congestion, frustration, and underutilized overflow spaces if not managed properly.
From an office space management perspective, planning for these peaks is crucial to maintain service levels, employee satisfaction, and operational efficiency. Key strategies include:
Shared calendars or anchor days: Align teams’ in-office schedules to spread attendance evenly and avoid bottlenecks.
Overflow strategies: Reserve flex zones, huddle spaces, or temporary swing areas for unexpected demand.
Advance visibility: Communicate anticipated peak days to employees so they can plan seating, meeting bookings, and collaboration effectively.
By proactively planning for peak capacity, organizations ensure that even on the busiest days, space remains usable, equitable, and aligned with workforce needs, while minimizing disruption.
Manage your space as a business asset with Matterport
Treating office space as a strategic asset requires a continuous, data-driven cycle. Matterport digital twins plug directly into your workflow to:
Feed the measurement stack with accurate layouts and occupancy insights
Support your hybrid workplace playbook with visual desk and room references
Enable portfolio-level reporting with version-controlled floor plans and automated metrics
Start turning your office into a smarter, more flexible asset today—sign up for Matterport and see your spaces in a whole new way.
