Room analytics

The Rooms page is about meeting rooms, and it asks two questions the Office page cannot: how full the rooms are while they are being used, and whether they are the right size for the meetings booked in them. Select FlowAnalytics in the left menu, then Rooms.

Filters, targets, exports and the chart controls work as described in Filters, targets and exports, and what each figure measures is defined in Metrics reference.

What these dashboards need

Occupancy and room fit both count people, so they need a device that can count: a people counting sensor, or a video bar in a room that already has one. Presence detection is not enough.

Rooms without people counting are left out of the occupancy and room fit figures altogether rather than counted as empty. That is the right behavior, but it has a consequence worth keeping in mind: those figures describe the counted rooms only, not the whole selection. An office where six of sixty rooms can count people reports occupancy for those six.

Utilization is different. It comes from bookings and presence, so it covers every room in the selection. That is why a page can show a healthy utilization figure next to occupancy and room fit figures that read 0%: the zeros mean no room in the selection had counting data at all.

The Number of rooms by size chart at the foot of both tabs splits the inventory into rooms with and without a counter sensor, which is the quickest way to see how much of the estate these figures actually cover. Check it before quoting an occupancy number.

Set what the page covers

The filter bar has two things that differ from the other dashboards:

• Asset type is fixed to Room. Both tabs concern meeting rooms, so the filter is not selectable.
• Capacity is in the main filter bar. On other dashboards it sits behind Advanced. Here it is lifted forward as a quick filter, because room size is central to both these dashboards.

The capacity filter is the one to reach for first. Small and large rooms behave differently enough that a combined figure describes neither, and almost every finding on this page is really a finding about one size band.

Room Occupancy

This tab answers how full the rooms are, which is a different question from whether they are used. A room booked all day by two people is fully utilized and barely occupied.

The key figures

• Average room occupancy. The average occupancy per room while the rooms are in use. Idle time is not counted.
• Average seat occupancy. Occupied seats as a share of all seats across the selected rooms, so the larger rooms carry most of this figure.
• Average daily peak utilization. The average of each day’s busiest moment for these rooms.
• Average utilization. The average share of the rooms in use across the period.

The first two and the last two answer different questions, and the page only makes sense when you read them as pairs. Utilization tells you whether the rooms are in demand. Occupancy tells you whether that demand actually needs the space it is taking.

The combination that comes up most often is high utilization with low occupancy. Every room is booked, nobody can find one, and the rooms that are booked are half empty. The answer there is rarely more meeting space; it is more small rooms, or dividing the large ones.

Room occupancy and seat occupancy diverging is a size story. Room occupancy treats a four-seat room and a twenty-seat room equally, while seat occupancy is dominated by the large rooms, so a large gap between them tells you which band to look at.

Occupancy over time

How full the rooms are across the period, with the target shown as a line so you can see when occupancy fell below it rather than only that it did.

Read a flat line at zero as a coverage problem rather than a finding. Rooms that cannot count people produce no occupancy data at all.

Occupancy by room size

Average occupancy broken down by room size. The horizontal axis is capacity in seats rather than size bands, so a room for four and a room for six are shown separately, and the slider under the chart scrolls through the sizes present in the selection.

The pattern to look for is occupancy falling as rooms get larger. That is the signature of an estate with too much large meeting space: the small rooms are full and well used, and the large ones host meetings that would fit in a quarter of the space. The fix follows from the shape of the chart rather than from any single average.

Rooms with lowest occupancy

Individual rooms ranked by occupancy rate, least occupied first, with the rate shown for each. The list is paginated and the sort control reverses the ranking.

Use this to move from a pattern to a decision. A size band with poor occupancy tells you what kind of room is wrong; this list names the rooms, which is what a refit or a subdivision proposal needs.

Room Fit

Room fit turns the same measurement into a judgement about size. A meeting counts as a good fit when occupancy reached at least half the room’s capacity, evaluated in 15-minute intervals, so a meeting that briefly filled half the room is credited with it.

The key figures

• Average room fit. The share of meetings that reached the 50% mark.
• Average utilization. The same utilization figure as the Room Occupancy tab, repeated here so fit can be read against demand.

Utilization sits next to room fit for a reason. Poor fit in rooms nobody wants is a low priority; poor fit in rooms that are fully booked is capacity being wasted, and that is worth acting on.

Room fit over time

How well room sizes matched meetings across the period, against the target line.

This chart is slower to move than the utilization charts, because it reflects the room inventory rather than behavior. A step change in it usually means rooms were added, removed or resized, and if you did not change anything, check whether a sensor or a capacity value changed instead.

Room fit by room size

The share of meetings with a good fit, by room size. This is the chart that says what to build.

A high share in small rooms and a low share in large ones means the large rooms are being used for meetings that do not need them, so the shortage is of small rooms rather than of space. The reverse, poor fit in the small rooms, is unusual and normally means capacity values are wrong rather than that people are cramming into small rooms.

As on the occupancy tab, the axis is capacity in seats and the slider scrolls through the sizes in the selection.

Rooms with lowest room fit

Individual rooms ranked by room fit rate, worst first, paginated, with a sort control to reverse the order.

A room at or near 0% room fit is the clearest single candidate for subdivision, a smaller table, or a capacity correction. Check its recorded capacity first: a room entered as seating twenty when it seats eight will never reach the 50% mark, and the fault is in the asset record rather than in how people use it.

The two charts at the foot of both tabs

Both tabs end with the same pair of charts, which describe the room inventory rather than a single metric.

Number of rooms by size

The distribution of rooms by capacity, split into With sensor and Without sensor.

Read this chart first on any new office. It answers two questions at once: what shape the room inventory is, and how much of it can be measured. A tall bar at one and two seats with almost no sensors means the occupancy figures above are describing a small and possibly unrepresentative part of the estate.

Utilization by room size

Average room utilization by capacity, against the target line. Because utilization does not need people counting, this chart covers every room in the selection.

It is the counterpart to the occupancy and fit charts above it. Utilization by size says which rooms are in demand; occupancy and fit by size say whether that demand needs the space. A size band that is high on this chart and low on the other two is the band to divide.

Reading the two tabs together

A meeting room decision usually needs both tabs and one filter. A worked sequence for the commonest complaint, that there are never enough rooms:

1. On Room Occupancy, check Average utilization first. If it is low, the rooms are not actually in demand and the complaint is about something else, such as the booking process or a few popular rooms.
2. Check Average room occupancy against it. High utilization with low occupancy means the space is being held rather than used.
3. Use the Capacity filter to look at one size band at a time. The averages across all sizes hide the band that matters.
4. On Room Fit, check the by-size chart to see which bands are mismatched.
5. Check the No Show tab on the Office page for rooms. Rooms booked and never used are the cheapest capacity available, and no amount of rebuilding fixes booking behavior.

The conclusion this sequence most often reaches is that an office with a room shortage does not need more meeting space. It needs the space it has divided differently, and the bookings it has actually honored.