As organizations look to rightsize their real estate footprint, lower occupancy costs, increase productivity, and improve employee satisfaction, occupancy analytics has become an essential component of the modern workplace. Without occupancy data, you can’t optimize your space or maximize the benefits of a hybrid workplace.

Spatial data is the key to enabling occupancy analytics and meeting these goals, but despite the clear payoff, some organizations have been slow to adopt the space utilization sensors they need to collect reliable granular data. Selecting, installing, and maintaining sensors to cover every space of every facility is a significant investment.

But what if you could enable occupancy analytics without having to research, purchase, and install hardware throughout your office?

Tango Occupancy by Locatee integrates with whatever occupancy sensors you have in place, but it also comes with a unique capability: you can monitor occupancy through your network access.

Monitoring network connectivity to track occupancy

Tango Occupancy leverages your network infrastructure—specifically, your Wireless Local Area Network Controller—to track connections to your facility’s network. Whenever employees or guests sign into your network, the system collects anonymized usage data. When users connect with multiple devices, Tango’s deduplication algorithm ensures they only appear as a single occupant, so you always have an accurate picture of how many people are using your space.

For devices connected to WiFi, Tango Occupancy uses your facility’s access points and each occupant’s signal strength to triangulate their general position in the facility. This triangulation process doesn’t have pinpoint accuracy, but in aggregate, it gives you a picture of how your facility and its spaces are being used.

But not everyone uses Wi-Fi. If someone’s accessing your network via ethernet, this triangulation won’t work—but since they’re still connected to your network infrastructure, Tango Occupancy can still monitor their presence.

As long as occupants are using your network, every five minutes, the system takes a snapshot of your facility’s high-level occupancy information, which it can display in a live dashboard.

What can you do with network monitoring?

Network connections won’t pinpoint someone’s exact location in the office. But they will tell you how many people are in a space, and for how long. So you won’t necessarily see which workstations are most in demand or where people gather in a space, but you’ll know if you need to adjust capacity for certain types of space, and you’ll be able to measure utilization rate—one of the most crucial space utilization metrics for making space management decisions.

If you want to know where you can afford to reduce square footage or which spaces you can repurpose, you need visibility into how employees and other occupants are using the distinct spaces within your facility. Using network access to monitor occupancy gives you the high-level information you need to answer those questions and optimize your space allocation.

Do you still need space utilization sensors?

Whether or not you still need space utilization sensors depends on the decisions you want to inform. While turning your network into a sensorless occupancy monitor will give you the high-level information you need to make many decisions about your space, space utilization sensors provide more granular insights, such as the utilization rate of specific workstations, where people congregate, and whether pathways are congested. Some sensors can follow individuals across a space. Others can count how many people pass through a doorway. In general, the right sensor system can provide far more specificity than network triangulation.

So while you don’t need to supplement a sensorless solution with sensors, incorporating sensors can help you identify if employees prefer workstations with particular characteristics or if there are other spatial problems interfering with how people use your space.

If you choose to add space utilization sensors, Tango Occupancy and Tango Space can integrate this data with your sensorless, network-based data in intuitive dashboards. This gives you the most complete view of your space utilization. If we don’t already integrate with the specific sensors you plan to use, let us know.

Get sensorless occupancy monitoring with Tango Occupancy

Tango Occupancy is a complete occupancy analytics solution with an integrated sensorless solution for collecting occupancy data through network triangulation. Even if you don’t install dedicated space utilization hardware, Tango Occupancy can get you up and running with a sensor-free source of space utilization data.

Want to see what Tango Occupancy can do for you?

Request a demo today.