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Workplace Occupancy Tech Fails When Employees Don't Trust It: WSP's Lessons from Five Years of Desk Booking Data
WSP deployed a desk booking platform across its 225-office global portfolio five years ago and quickly learned that the hardest part of workplace occupancy technology is building trust and value with employees. Jay Wratten, Global Smart Places Lead at WSP, has been working through those lessons ever since.
The platform captures person-level desk utilization: who used a desk, when, and whether their colleagues or manager were present at the same time. Some employees responded hesitantly. They worried the data was being used to track their movements or flag them for not coming in enough, and some managers refused to accept that their team's utilization numbers were accurate.
WSP's answer was to close the loop. If the platform is collecting data on how people use the office, employees need to know what that data is used for and, more importantly, see it working in their favor. When occupancy data shows there aren't enough phone booths, add phone booths. When it shows people aren't coming in, don't use that as a performance metric. Show employees the decisions being made because of their usage patterns, and the platform starts to feel like a tool for them, not against them. "We're not trying to fit people to the office," Wratten said. "We're trying to fit the office to the people that work there."
The governance questions are just as important. What happens when the boss walks in and takes the desk someone else booked? What do you do about the person who reserves the same desk every week and shows up half the time? WSP landed on a light-touch social-enforcement model, but Wratten's lesson is that these policies need to be in place before deployment, not worked out in the field.
The rollout strategy matters too. WSP initially deployed office by office, creating an uneven experience: employees in one location had a booking system, while colleagues in the next building over didn't. The fix is to deploy zone by zone, rolling out all offices in a region simultaneously so everyone gets the same experience at the same time.
One constraint WSP hasn't solved: the platform contains personally identifiable information. It would be great to use person-level occupancy data for real-time HVAC and energy optimization. But connecting that data to building controls creates a PII governance problem that's kept the system vertically integrated inside WSP's tenant infrastructure. It's a real ceiling on the connected-building vision that most conversations about workplace tech skip over.
The technology only serves its purpose if the people in the building trust it enough to let it work.
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WSP deployed a desk booking platform across its 225-office global portfolio five years ago and quickly learned that the hardest part of workplace occupancy technology is building trust and value with employees. Jay Wratten, Global Smart Places Lead at WSP, has been working through those lessons ever since.
The platform captures person-level desk utilization: who used a desk, when, and whether their colleagues or manager were present at the same time. Some employees responded hesitantly. They worried the data was being used to track their movements or flag them for not coming in enough, and some managers refused to accept that their team's utilization numbers were accurate.
WSP's answer was to close the loop. If the platform is collecting data on how people use the office, employees need to know what that data is used for and, more importantly, see it working in their favor. When occupancy data shows there aren't enough phone booths, add phone booths. When it shows people aren't coming in, don't use that as a performance metric. Show employees the decisions being made because of their usage patterns, and the platform starts to feel like a tool for them, not against them. "We're not trying to fit people to the office," Wratten said. "We're trying to fit the office to the people that work there."
The governance questions are just as important. What happens when the boss walks in and takes the desk someone else booked? What do you do about the person who reserves the same desk every week and shows up half the time? WSP landed on a light-touch social-enforcement model, but Wratten's lesson is that these policies need to be in place before deployment, not worked out in the field.
The rollout strategy matters too. WSP initially deployed office by office, creating an uneven experience: employees in one location had a booking system, while colleagues in the next building over didn't. The fix is to deploy zone by zone, rolling out all offices in a region simultaneously so everyone gets the same experience at the same time.
One constraint WSP hasn't solved: the platform contains personally identifiable information. It would be great to use person-level occupancy data for real-time HVAC and energy optimization. But connecting that data to building controls creates a PII governance problem that's kept the system vertically integrated inside WSP's tenant infrastructure. It's a real ceiling on the connected-building vision that most conversations about workplace tech skip over.
The technology only serves its purpose if the people in the building trust it enough to let it work.
Register for the next Nexus Labs event.
Sign up for the newsletter to get 5 stories like this per week:
This is a great piece!
I agree.