Space planning

Calven’s space planning view helps you predict how much space each group needs in the office, based on real booking and presence data.

Choose from several intelligent planning metrics to see how much space each group uses on higher and lower days, then identify over-capacity spaces and make changes to allocations and neighborhood sizes, right from Calven.

How do I start using space planning?

When viewing an office in Backoffice, administrators will be able to access the space planning view. Space planning is a visual reflection of the neighborhoods and desks you've added to your office in the floor plan editor.

For each level in the office, you'll see a bar representing the total desks on that level. You can also expand levels using the arrow to the right of the level name, to see each individual neighborhood within a level. Inside each level and neighborhood, you'll see the groups that have been allocated to it, and how much space they are expected to take up.

What is a group block?

Each group you see in the space planning view is represented as a "group block". Group blocks are meant to reflect the units of people who are booked together in the office.

Each group block consists of the group's primary members who are also members of this office. If your directory has hierarchy, child groups will be included within their parent group blocks. 

“Unallocated blocks” represent groups with primary members that have not been allocated to specific neighborhoods in this office. When Calven auto-books, unallocated blocks will be booked in neighborhoods with “allow overflow” enabled. 

How do I allocate space to a group?

Administrators can allocate groups to specific neighborhoods in the office to ensure that Calven auto-books members in that neighborhood. To allocate a group, visit the group's page in backoffice and use the workspace allocations table too choose where you'd like the group to be auto-booked.

How does Calven know how much space each group uses?

The size of each group block is calculated by 3 things:

• The primary members of the group who are assigned to this office

• The booking and presence data from members over the selected date range and visible data types (bookings, check-ins, no-shows)

• The metric you choose to base block size on

Attendance metrics

Use the group size based on picker to choose the attendance scenario you'd like to use for space planning:

• Calven recommended size

  • The recommended amount of space that should be provisioned to adequately support each group based on compiled booking data for your office

• Total group members

  • Count of primary group members

• 90th percentile attendance

  • 90% of days in the selected period have attendance equal to or below this value

• Average daily attendance

  • Calculates daily attendance and then averages the values

• Peak weekly attendance

  • Current: calculates attendance by identifying the peak attendance day for each week, and then finds the median of those days

• Lowest weekly attendance

  • Calculates attendance by identifying the low attendance day for each week, and then finds the median of those days

Space planning best practices

Here are some tips on how to get the most out of Calven's space planning:

1. Select a date range where you know you have good data and typical behaviors. E.g. December is not good for holidays, summer is probably not good because there’s a lot of vacations.

2. Decide which metric is best for your planning purposes. 

   • When you are planning for hybrid work, your absolute peak for a month or a quarter will be much higher than the rest of the days. You can design for that, but it will increase your Real Estate spend significantly and your average days in the office will feel quite empty. It is better to have more informal “overflow” spaces where people can sit on these peak days and design your proper-fitout bookable desks for a slightly lower day. You can see what your attendance patterns look like in Calven by viewing the attendance tab broken down by date. 

   • If you have more “bursty” utilization then you should look at p90, which shows how much space is needed to handle 90% of the work days in that date range. This allows you to optimize for most of your usage while eliminating the peak 5 work days over a quarter, assuming you can handle the extra capacity on those days with other methods. 

   • If your utilization follows regular patterns, median weekly peak allows you to see what a normal “high point” for a week looks like. For many companies this can be a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. By focusing on the median value each week rather than a specific day, it allows you to ignore the shifting patterns on which specific day and focus on what the peak is and how to handle it.

   • It is also valuable to look at the “weekly low” to see what your office experience will look like on those days.

3. When to think about No-shows and walk-ins vs not:

   • Confirmed bookings are always counted in the block sizes because that reflects intentional usage of the space. There are two other metrics that you should look at and consider how you want to account for them in context of the space.

   • No-shows - these are desks booked by employees but do not end up being used. Since they are booked, they are excluded from other employees using them. You should plan for some amount of no-shows, since that behavior is impossible to eliminate, but you should also work towards minimizing it to make your space more efficient and people-friendly. The Calven recommended size metric incorporates this thinking and plans for ½ of no-shows to be used as space.

   • Walk-ins - Walk-ins represent people who did not book a desk but are present in the office. Some of these employees simply use touchdown spaces or meeting rooms, but some also inevitably use desks even though they didn’t reserve them - you can decide to incorporate this usage into your planning. The Calven recommended size metric incorporates this thinking and plans for ⅓ of walk-in to need desks.