What is Space Management? The Guide to Optimising Office Assets

Your commercial property, whether rented or owned, is a key business asset. Effective and strategic utilisation of your workspace affects the productivity and profitability of your organisation.

Space management is characterised as the management, control and supervision of the physical spaces of the company. This might refer to a single floor, multiple floors or multiple floors in multiple buildings. Space management is a multi-step process that requires data collection, analysis, forecasting and strategy. So the question that is posed is how do you make the most of your company’s spatial assets and tangible supplies, ensuring the budget is optimised moving forward? Below, three space management necessities are explored to help you begin your strategic office space management journey.

1. Compare your company’s goal to your office assets

Revisiting broader organisational goals, both current and future plans, ensures both the proper space utilisation metrics and future space needs are adequately considered when the new strategies are launched.

A few questions worth consider at this stage include:

• How does space management relate specifically to the broader strategic business goals?
• What do you need in terms of both tangible and intangible assets to achieve your space management goals?
• What space utilisation metrics do you currently collect and what data do you need to collect for consistent, ongoing analysis?
• Think of the workspace and your workforce as your two most valuable tools. Proper alignment of the two is one of the most critical components to the company’s survival and growth. Where do the two fit into your master plan, and what changes must be made to get there?
  

2. Gathering employee information and standard processes

This step will help determine what information should be included in your space strategy, as well as help define what data and metrics will be collected in the future.

A few items worth considering:

• How do you want to track your employees and the space they use? (employee by name, department assigned, office assigned, and/or assets assigned?)
• What assets do you want to track?
• Should these assets be tracked by workspace or employee?
  

3. Space Management Tools

Space management tools are what bring everything together. Aligned with a software vendor who can meet your needs both now and moving forward can elevate a great deal of logistical stress when optimising your office spacial assets. If you have not already, your company should consider in a space management tool for efficient management of your real estate.

The benefits of investing in a space management software tool can be felt by your company immediately, where you begin to build an accurate reflection of who is using what and where. As you build on this data, trends become identifiable, which aid in the determination of how to manage future changes.

For many, analysis and planning reveal that reallocating space and repurposing poorly used space will avoid the costly activity of moving to a new facility. Apart from shading excessive real estate costs and redirecting resources within your business, other benefits of better space utilisation include:

Workstation Cost Savings

When an employee only uses their workstation twice a week for example, there are a lot of unnecessary costs that add up. Using space management software, you can better prioritise how these spaces are used to save on expenses. For instance, you could simply have these employees reserve a nondedicated workstation when working in the office.

Store Data in One Place

Effective spatial management requires data. When this data is disorganised and spread across various locations, insights can become siloed within specific departments.  Space management software makes the relevant data available throughout the organisation, allowing facility managers to easily monitor the use of space and implement measures as needed.

Real-Time Space Management Metrics

Greater workplace transparency translates into better communication and greater satisfaction for employees. What's great about space management software is that you have access to well-defined, real-time metrics such as total square footage, percentage of space used and operating costs per square foot. By breaking down these different metrics, businesses can identify better ways to improve their performance.

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