Return to office trends: Occupancy data

Methodology

Office occupancy data, access control, and the return to office

The return to office vs hybrid and remote work debate is raging. Some leaders are urging employees back to the office, while others are trying to attract more talent by offering hybrid and remote conditions. The real estate market and trends are shifting daily.

To facilitate the return to office analysis and real estate planning, we are aggregating and analyzing anonymized unlocks - the most reliable source of office occupancy data supported by Kisi access control.

Sample and variables

To eliminate bias, we are aggregating anonymized data from all Kisi customers headquartered in the US. The 2500+ sample size ensures smaller error margins and lower deviation standards.

We calculate the occupancy rate by dividing the number of daily unique unlocks by the maximum capacity. We're counting all unique unlocks, including unlocks made with mobile access methods and physical credentials.

The unique unlocks indicate that if the same Kisi user unlocks more than one office door or the same door multiple times during the day with the same or different access methods, they'll be counted only once. As the reference point for the maximum capacity, we're using the 0.985 percentile of the highest number of daily unique unlocks observed over the past two calendar years, only including days with at least one daily unique unlock. For the average company, where unlocks typically occur on workdays, this corresponds to approximately one day per quarter with the highest number of unique unlocks excluded. We're doing this to minimize the error of determining capacity based on the highest number of daily unique unlocks that can be one-off occasions and not represent the real capacity, like an office party, family day, or meet-up. The office occupancy data is updated regularly, at least each Monday between 5 and 6 PM UTC.

Limitations

Remote unlocks are counted towards the unique daily unlocks, implying higher capacity rates in some cases. Many Kisi customers use the Geofence restriction, which ensures that users must be in the vicinity of the office to unlock a door, reducing the probability of error.

To guarantee anonymized data, we're only considering the company's HQ when calculating occupancy data by state. Attributing all Kisi-secured office locations to the office HQ might skew the interpretations for location-based data.