As hybrid work shrinks offices, motion sensor use might grow
Hybrid work is changing when people work and how they use office space — employees might want more collaboration space. Measuring office use could be a job for motion sensors.
By Patrick Thibodeau
Sensors can also make the underlying thesis of hybrid work — flexibility — that much more flexible, said Jacques Guigui, director of technology and innovation at the Paris location of CBRE Group, a global commercial real estate services firm.
“The first challenge today is to make employees want to go back to the office,” Guigui said.
Guigui, who focuses on how technology can improve the working environment, believes that desk reservation systems are too intrusive. A better approach is to “install the sensors, collect the data and wait,” he said.
Workers who use desk reservation systems tend to reserve the same seat each time, which hurts the concept of flexibility, Guigui said. “In most cases, the work at home — on average, two days a week — avoids the problem of overoccupancy,” he said.
If HR managers want a reservation system, Guigui recommended that they instruct employees to reserve a seat in an office zone without selecting a specific seat. Such a system “will keep the flex spirit of workplace strategy,” he said.
What sensors track
A sensor can provide broad recognition of something that moves, whether a human or an animal, said Fred Katz, an electrical engineering consultant in Hauppauge, N.Y., with patents in sensor technology — including one that addressed the problem of distinguishing between a person and a pet. The typical motion sensor gives the equivalent of 32 pixels of information, and “if you had a TV with 32 pixels of information, you would have a very crude picture,” he said.
There are some systems that can track people in an office, such as cameras and RFID devices linked to employee badges, but they can also raise privacy issues, according to experts. There are a variety of motion sensors that can detect heat, bounce microwaves off objects and use infrared lasers.
Guigui uses a system developed by Microshare Inc., a Philadelphia-based company with tools for monitoring office environments and occupancy, among other products. The data Guigui collects is anonymous, and most sensors can’t collect information about employees.
Scheduling software programs alone “don’t marry the schedule with reality,” said Ron Rock, CEO and co-founder of Microshare. Companies have different shared amenity spaces, for instance, and the question is, “What’s being used, and exactly how is it being used?”