Collectively, US government agencies waste billions of dollars annually to maintain unused real estate. On average, federal agencies are using just 12% of the space they own or lease. And since federal, state, and local government agencies have all normalized hybrid work, they’re all facing the same challenges: improving utilization of existing space, avoiding paying for additional real estate, and reducing square footage wherever possible.
But despite bipartisan pressure to “freeze the footprint” and numerous studies highlighting underutilized government real estate, government agencies are often ill-equipped to identify, measure, and manage the square footage they need to offload.
Even when there’s substantial underutilized space, right-sizing your real estate portfolio requires a thorough understanding of your current utilization and the ability to forecast future demand for space. The last thing you want is to downsize and then discover you no longer have the space employees need to be happy and effective. To freeze or shrink your footprint without inhibiting your agency’s productivity or limiting your capabilities, you need a combination of tools and processes to optimize your workplace, analyze and predict its use, and plan and implement the best scenarios.
At Tango, our Fed-RAMP certified workplace management solutions have helped more than 40 government agencies freeze the footprint and use their office space more efficiently. Here’s what it takes to intelligently reduce your square footage.
Implement modern office reservation processes
Without a doubt, hybrid work is the main reason government office buildings are so severely underutilized. According to a Federal News Network survey, just 6% of federal employees work from the office full-time. And like their corporate counterparts, these workers are resistant to pushes to return to the office.
A hybrid model enables a larger pool of employees to share a smaller pool of space and resources, but without the right processes in place, you can’t maximize your ability to freeze or shrink your footprint. And without the right tools, you can’t implement those processes. This is why agencies must understand, control, and optimize the utilization of their shared office resources.
For example, employers often aim to improve utilization by promoting the value of in-person collaboration, encouraging employees to work from the office to be with their team. But in order for that benefit to be true, you need to facilitate an environment where collaboration actually happens, rather than push people to spend time in an empty building. While most office booking solutions simply handle reservations, Tango Reserve allows employees to share their schedules and make their reservations based on when particular colleagues will be in the office, so they can coordinate time together and maximize the value of each office visit. Instead of individuals from various departments being scattered throughout empty rooms, coworkers can actually work together.
Additionally, your current reservation system may mask the utilization of your shared spaces by failing to address “no-show” reservations, where employees reserve a shared space but don’t show up. Tango Reserve equips you to handle this by giving you the option to require check-ins, where employees have to sign-in to the spaces they’ve reserved within a window of time you define. If they don’t appear for their scheduled reservation, the space automatically becomes available for someone else to reserve. This ensures that empty spaces don’t appear to be occupied, allowing you to make optimal use of these shared office resources.
Depending on the hybrid work model you use, you may also need tighter controls over who can reserve what. For example, you may have specific days or times that particular departments need to be in the office, or certain sections, buildings, or floors that they can access. While this isn’t the only way to implement a hybrid workplace model and doesn’t give employees complete autonomy, it can be a key strategy to influence space utilization and evaluate how much space you need to keep. Whatever model you choose, Tango Reserve lets you configure your reservation system however you like, right out of the box (no customization required).
Measure and analyze your occupancy
While most government agencies have dramatically reduced their occupancy by adopting some sort of hybrid workplace model, they may not have the hardware or infrastructure in place to understand how much they can afford to shrink their footprint, or how long they can continue to grow within the same space. Over the last few years, occupancy monitoring and occupancy analytics solutions have rapidly evolved to help organizations optimize their offices and reduce real estate costs, and they’ve become an essential part of making informed real estate decisions for office-based organizations.
But the utilization data you collect from tools like Tango Reserve only gives you part of the story. Office reservation software collects data on reservable spaces, but it lacks functionality for monitoring permanently assigned spaces, and doesn’t provide visibility into other non-reservable spaces.
To get the full utilization picture, you’ll need to augment the data you get from your reservation software with space utilization sensors such as desk sensors, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDaR) strips, or blurred vision cameras. These sensors allow your agency to monitor anonymized employee presence and track how many people are in your building—and where. This data gives crucial visibility into how your facilities are used throughout the day, week, and year, so you can accurately forecast demand for space and determine the square footage you need to be effective.
Installing IoT sensors across multiple locations can take significant time and resources. But that isn’t the only path to increasing your occupancy visibility. Tango Occupancy by Locatee is compatible with space utilization sensors, but it also has a sensorless occupancy monitoring capability that works with your existing infrastructure—no hardware required. It establishes a gateway to your network that monitors authenticated users to determine how many people are in your office and approximately where they are using zones.
Whatever space utilization data you collect, you also need a single source of truth to explore and understand it all: an occupancy analytics platform. Numerous tools position themselves as occupancy analytics solutions, but it’s important to choose one that works with the space utilization data you collect. Tango Space integrates all your spatial data into intuitive dashboards and includes robust space planning and management capabilities—which you’ll need to actually optimize your space after collecting utilization data.
Identify and implement efficient office configurations
With all your spatial data consolidated into a single platform, you can see patterns in utilization over time and forecast future demand for space. In some cases, the square footage you can repurpose or offload will be obvious: workstations or meeting rooms that never get reserved, or spaces people rarely set foot in. But other times, you’ll just see that your overall utilization could be higher without decreasing employee productivity or satisfaction, or that you could reduce square footage by a clear percentage without disrupting operations
As you investigate possibilities, Tango Space’s stack planning capabilities help you find ways to consolidate unused space and reorganize departments by visualizing every space in your facility as blocks.
Tango Space lets you take these insights straight into scenario planning, where you can test unlimited “what if” scenarios and even use AI to find the configurations that best meet your goals and parameters.
Once you’ve determined your best course of action, it’s time to plan out the execution of your new configuration with moves, adds, and changes (MAC). Here, Tango Space lets you transition from occupancy analytics to space planning to move management. You can find the best approach to reducing your square footage, lay out your timeline, and reconfigure your space.
Freezing or shrinking your real estate footprint is a major undertaking, but for every step of the process, Tango’s Fed-RAMP certified workplace management solutions have you covered.
Freeze the footprint with Tango
As a leading provider of IWMS solutions for more than 20 years, Tango’s suite of Fed-RAMP certified software has empowered more than 40 major government agencies to take charge of their real estate and make more informed decisions.
Tango Reserve is a highly configurable office booking system that vastly improves your ability to manage shared office resources.
Tango Occupancy by Locatee is a specialized occupancy management solution that includes sensorless occupancy monitoring capabilities.
Tango Space is a comprehensive occupancy analytics and space management software that empowers you to leverage your occupancy data to optimize your office space.
Want to see how Tango can help your agency freeze your footprint?