Envoy unveils workplace occupancy analytics solution to empower informed decision-making

San Francisco-based workplace platform Envoy today announced the launch of Envoy Workplace, a unified workplace occupancy analytics tool. This captures data from various sources, such as door access scans, WiFi usage and employee sign-ins, providing organizations with an accurate depiction of workplace activities. Envoy claims that Workplace empowers organizations to gain insights into on-site teams and workspace utilization across all locations, facilitating informed decision-making.

According to the company, the tool is the sole fully-integrated solution in the market, combining all the necessary components to manage and optimize workplaces for better experiences. In addition, the analytics tool addresses the most persistent obstacles to creating excellent workplaces, such as fragmented data, space inefficiency and poor employee experience. 

Users can conveniently access unified analytics, desk and room booking capabilities, and seamless delivery management in one centralized location.

“Envoy Workplace will be critical in empowering companies to confidently make the bold decisions necessary for survival,” Envoy founder and CEO Larry Gadea told VentureBeat. “Workplace provides companies with a real-time pulse on their space utilization with accuracy never-before-seen. Envoy Workplace aggregates door access data, WiFi data and other passive signals to give a unified, big-picture view of the office.”

Hybrid awareness

The tool provides hybrid-aware automatic scheduling of desks, automatic resizing of meeting rooms based on attendance and a centralized app to view coworkers’ seats, among other features. The company emphasized that it is designed to focus on employee experience, productivity and modernizing outdated practices.

“Every other solution uses one source of end data,” said Gadea. “For example, some use employee sign-ins, some building badge swipes, but we’re the only ones using multiple signals for the greatest accuracy. Since we pull from multiple sources passively, we have redundancy — so we deliver the most accurate, reliable picture of what’s happening in the workplace: Which teams are on site, and how they’re using their space at each location.”

The platform links to more than 100 frequently used workplace tools and data streams. It consolidates the information and functionality of all these tools to assist customers in automating tasks and obtaining actionable insights on enhancing their workplace.

Enhancing workplaces through real-time analytics

Envoy’s occupancy analytics system captures data from various sources, including door access badge scans, WiFi connections, desk and meeting room check-ins and employee app sign-ins. The tool operates by providing accurate and timely insights into global occupancy, as well as desk and meeting room utilization, for effective planning and decision-making.

The company believes that this system will assist organizations in identifying opportunities to optimize efficiency by either expanding or reducing resources to align with the number of individuals entering the workspace.

Moreover, it allows for measuring the long-term effects of return-to-office policies and strategies by analyzing attendance data categorized by time, team or department.

The system also includes pre-configured reports that can be exported and shared with executives and stakeholders, delivering detailed responses to critical questions.

“Envoy’s analytics takes the guesswork out of workplace planning,” said Gadea. “What we’re doing is giving leaders reliable occupancy and space usage data to understand how people use desks, rooms and team neighborhoods. We’re helping our customers build a cost-efficient, productive work environment based on how people use their space by providing them with the information they need to make informed space planning and management decisions and to make the most of their workplace budget.”

Image Source: Envoy

Streamlining workplace insights for decision-makers 

According to Gadea, leaders can better understand future expectations by utilizing precise historical trends segmented by the day of the week or frequency. Assessing and appropriately adjusting office footprints is the most prevalent scenario.

“Looking at occupancy over a period of time, you can better predict what type of resources you might need, like snacks, lunch or reception coverage,” said Gadea. “By optimizing usage of resources like desks or meeting rooms, you can compare how many desks and rooms are being used on an average day, then right-size the ratio based on those insights.”

Gadea highlighted that companies have transitioned to distributed and smaller offices. As a result, obtaining a comprehensive and standardized understanding of space, untouched by regional, team and industry biases has become increasingly challenging.

Portfolio aggregation capabilities

The platform’s portfolio aggregation feature will benefit the facilities staff and ensure an exceptional roaming experience for out-of-city or remote employee visits, said Gadea.

“Our global occupancy analytics gives a bird’s eye view into utilization and key occupancy stats across every location in your portfolio,” Gadea added. “Our approach allows us to unify the different tech stacks across locations so that our customers get standardized data from our analytics.”

Furthermore, he said: “Whether workplace leaders manage one location or 500, they can access a global view to see how occupancy trends differ across locations. Automatically compiling the data saves the time and hassle of manually pulling data for each location.”

Data-driven planning

The app empowers employees to be more effective and workplace managers to make data-driven decisions, said Gadea. Envoy has has been developing first-party products for years, he said, which allows them to unify and aggregate information to provide more accurate data.

“In the past, analysts on the finance and workplace teams needed to manually combine everything in Tableau, Excel and other tools,” said Gadea. “Not only was it labor-intensive, but it was error-prone and tricky because of deduplication and redundancy.”

He added: “We’ve made the workplace admin’s job much easier. Getting executives and other stakeholders the reports they need to drive important workplace decisions is no longer a major inconvenience. With Envoy, it takes minutes to get accurate data. The information is available on-demand and not dependent on a manual process or analyst bandwidth.”