Hybrid Work Meaning: What It Actually Means and How to Make It Work

Workplace Analytics: Key Takeaways

What Is Workplace Analytics?

Workplace analytics is the practice of collecting and analyzing data on how employees use physical office space and resources, including desks, meeting rooms, and common areas, to guide real estate and facilities decisions. Companies use it to size their office footprint, plan desk-sharing ratios, and back space changes with real usage numbers.

Workplace Analytics vs. Workforce Analytics: What's the Difference?

The two terms sound alike, but they track different data. In office management, workplace analytics often measures the physical workplace, covering desk usage, room bookings, and attendance patterns. Workforce analytics measures the workforce itself, covering headcount, turnover, time-to-hire, and productivity metrics pulled from HR systems.

Some workplace analytics tools build their numbers from calendar and email activity, while workforce analytics tools typically draw on HR and employee data. Office-focused workplace analytics tools, including PULT Workplace Insights, track desk and room usage directly instead, based on presence data rather than calendar entries.

What Is Office Space Utilization?

Office space utilization measures how much available desk, room, or floor capacity is actually used over a set period, compared with the total capacity available. If 200 desks are available and only 90 are occupied on average during the measured period, desk utilization is roughly 45 percent, a gap companies may uncover when measuring real presence rather than reservations.

Why Does Office Space Utilization Matter?

Office space utilization gives facilities and finance teams a concrete number for decisions that otherwise rest on impressions, such as whether to renew a lease, reduce desk count, or redesign a floor. Utilization is one input among several, not the full picture. A complete workplace analytics setup also tracks attendance patterns, no-show rates, and room-level demand alongside office utilization, since lease and renovation decisions need more than one weekly percentage to act on.

Which Workplace Analytics Metrics Should You Track?

Most workplace analytics programs track a small set of metrics repeatedly rather than a long list once. The two categories below cover the majority of practical use cases.

Attendance and Presence Data

Office attendance figures typically come from the same presence signal as utilization data, Wi-Fi connections or badge scans, but get reported on their own because HR and facilities teams often ask for them separately.

Space and Desk Utilization Metrics

Desk and room utilization data, sometimes called workplace occupancy analytics, works best when it combines booking records with real presence data. Booking data alone can overstate usage because of no-shows.

How Do You Keep Workplace Analytics Data Privacy-Compliant?

Workplace analytics raises greater privacy considerations when it identifies individual employees rather than reporting only aggregated groups. Companies using workplace analytics must ensure that presence and utilization processing complies with GDPR and similar privacy rules, whether data is aggregated or linked to identifiable individuals.

A Wi-Fi-based presence system can reduce privacy risks when reporting is aggregated, but device identifiers and presence records may still be personal data if they can be linked to individual employees.

Choosing the Right Workplace Analytics Software

Workplace analytics software splits into two broad groups. HR-focused platforms analyze calendar, email, and meeting patterns and usually add a separate license on top of existing HR or productivity subscriptions. Office-focused platforms, including PULT Workplace Insights, analyze desk, room, and floor usage and may use existing Wi-Fi infrastructure, booking data, access systems, or sensors, depending on the setup.

Three questions narrow the choice quickly:

Turn Office Data Into Space Decisions You Can Defend

Workplace analytics gives office and facilities teams a factual basis for decisions that used to rest on guesswork, including how many desks to keep, which rooms to reconfigure, and where to cut costs while protecting the employee experience. Office space utilization is the metric most teams start with, but attendance and no-show data round out the picture.

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The best desk booking software for your team depends on how you work and which processes you need to support. The criteria below can help you evaluate your options. Each one notes when it matters most, since not every point will be equally relevant to every team.

The 7 Best Desk Booking Software Platforms (2026)

#1 PULT

PULT is a cloud-based desk booking software developed in Germany. It combines all major features needed to organize modern office spaces. The platform supports the booking of desks and meeting rooms and also includes visitor management, attendance overviews, parking, hybrid team planning and detailed analytics on office utilization. The software integrates with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft 365, Google Calendar, MS Teams and Slack. Booked but unused rooms and desks are automatically released again. In addition, PULT provides insights into actual usage and booking behavior, making it easier to plan and optimize rooms, spaces and workstations.

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Desk booking: Booking desks through interactive floor plans with tags, equipment filters, QR check-in and automatic check-in via WiFi.

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Room booking: Booking meeting rooms with two-way calendar sync for Outlook and Google, resource management, invitation options and optional catering.

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Hybrid team planning: Clear overview of who is in the office, remote or unavailable on each day. Options include favorites, recurring days, anonymous bookings and calendar synchronization.

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Visitor management: Digital visitor registration, custom sign-in flows, documents and NDAs, iPad reception mode, host notifications and badge printing.

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Office analytics: Utilization reports, occupancy statistics, heatmaps and export functions to analyze how space is used.

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PULT Presence: Automatic attendance detection through company WiFi, with configurable rules, logs and reports for RTO and compliance.

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Parking and additional resources: Booking and administration of parking spaces and other office resources.

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Integrations: Connections with Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Slack, MS Teams, Okta, HRIS systems and WiFi- or network-based systems.

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Security and hosting: Developed and hosted in Germany with GDPR-compliant data processing and ISO 27001–certified infrastructure.

Pricing for PULT: You can use PULT for free with up to 20 users and one location. Advanced features start at $3.40 per user per month, including the AI assistant, integrations and Single Sign-On (SSO). Find out more on the pricing page.

Desk Booking Software PULT

#2 Robin

Robin is a workplace platform from Boston, Massachusetts, focused on hybrid office coordination for mid-market and enterprise teams. Alongside desk and room booking, the platform includes AI-assisted scheduling and workplace analytics, and is used by organizations such as HubSpot, Peloton and Riot Games.

Pricing for Robin: Robin’s prices are not published on the official website and are available on request. A free demo can be booked.

#3 Envoy

Envoy is a workplace platform from San Francisco, California, best known for its visitor management product, which it has expanded into a broader suite covering desk and room booking, deliveries, digital signage and emergency response. It's used across roughly 13,000–14,000 locations worldwide, including by companies such as Slack, Pinterest and Warby Parker.

Pricing for Envoy: Envoy offers a free version with limited functionality. The Premium package costs $362 per month per location when paid annually. Prices for all Enterprise features are available on request.

#4 OfficeSpace Software

OfficeSpace Software is an enterprise workplace platform from Atlanta, Georgia, backed by Vista Equity Partners. Beyond desk and room booking, it focuses heavily on space planning, move management and AI-driven layout generation, and is used by companies such as Shopify, Dropbox and Mailchimp.

Pricing for OfficeSpace Software: OfficeSpace’s prices are not published on the official website and are available on request.

#5 Tactic

Tactic is a hybrid workplace platform from Lehi, Utah, positioned as an affordable, Microsoft-friendly alternative to larger enterprise platforms. It's used by organizations including Red Bull, HPE and the United Nations.

Pricing for Tactic: Prices for Tactic are based on the number of modules booked, such as Desk Booking, Visitor Management and so on. AI, SSO and integrations are also included as separate items. Exact prices are available on request.

#6 Appspace

Appspace is a workplace experience platform from Dallas, Texas, that combines desk and room booking with digital signage, an employee app and an intranet in a single system. It's used by more than 160 Fortune 500 companies.

Pricing for Appspace: Prices for Appspace are based on the number of users and devices managed by the software. The higher-tier pricing plans include more data storage and bandwidth per month. You can try the software for free.

#7 Eden Workplace

Eden Workplace is a workplace management platform from San Francisco, California, aimed at small and mid-sized hybrid offices that want simple, modular, per-resource pricing.

Pricing for Eden Workplace: Eden Workplace is available from $2.25 per month per seat. These are always bundled in packages of 25 seats.

What makes PULT a popular desk booking software?

In PULT you see both booking data and the real occupancy of desks, rooms, zones and parking spaces.

With PULT Presence, the actual presence of your employees is recorded as soon as their laptop or smartphone connects to the company WiFi. Check-in happens automatically and does not depend on any sensors. Your WiFi is all that's required.

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Open-concept Office: The Most Important Points at a Glance

What is an open-concept office?

An open-concept office (or open-plan office) is a contiguous office area in which more than ten employees work in an open space without floor-to-ceiling walls. It differs from a cubicle office in its open structure and from purely open-space areas in that it has clearly defined functional zones.

How does an open-concept office differ from a traditional office?

Office types can be classified based on how the space is divided. From cubicle offices with individual rooms to combination offices and open-concept offices, the openness of the space increases gradually.

A modern open-concept office combines open workspaces with activity zones—areas each designed for a specific task. It is precisely this zoning that distinguishes this well-thought-out concept from a simple desk arrangement.

For hybrid teams, an open floor plan makes particular sense. When part of your workforce is working from home, shared workspaces allow for much more efficient use of space than permanently assigned individual offices.

What are the pros and cons of open-concept offices?

Open-concept offices offer short lines of communication and high space efficiency, but their main drawbacks are noise and a lack of private spaces. The balance between these two factors determines whether the space is productive or stressful.

What are the advantages of an open-concept office?

The advantages of an open-concept office lie in collaboration and cost savings. Teams can easily coordinate with one another; these discussions take place without the need to schedule appointments, and new employees are able to integrate more quickly.

Added to this is the financial benefit. An open-concept office with shared workstations significantly reduces per-capita office costs, especially in companies where a high percentage of employees work from home.

What are the disadvantages of an open-concept office?

The biggest drawback of open-concept offices is the noise level. Conversations, phone calls, and keyboard clicks all blend together, and it is precisely this acoustic distraction that is one of the most common reasons why concentration suffers in an open-concept office.

In a controlled laboratory experiment, a research team at Bond University demonstrated that typical open-concept office noise increases negative mood by 25% and the physical stress response by 34%—as measured by heart rate and skin conductance—after just eight minutes of noise exposure. In real-world office settings, where employees are exposed to these noise levels for hours on end, these effects are correspondingly more pronounced. (Sander et al., Journal of Management & Organization, 2021)

Open-concept office layouts also significantly reduce face-to-face communication. In two field studies conducted with Fortune 500 companies, the volume of face-to-face interaction dropped by about 70% after the transition to an open-concept layout, while email and instant messaging traffic increased sharply. People who are constantly visible to everyone tend to withdraw inwardly and turn to digital channels. (Bernstein & Turban, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Harvard Business School, 2018). The availability of private spaces is therefore an important factor in well-being.

How do I design a modern open-concept office?

A productive and employee-friendly open-concept office is created through spatial zoning based on activity, effective soundproofing, and space planning based on actual usage data. However, furniture and rules alone are not enough if the basic layout of the space does not suit the way people work.

How does zoning work in an open-concept office?

Zoning divides the open space into areas for different activities. This principle stems from the activity-based working concept, in which each type of work is assigned its own appropriate space:

This allows employees to choose a workspace that suits their current task and ensures they have the best possible conditions there.

What type of soundproofing is suitable for an open-concept office?

Effective soundproofing in an open-concept office is achieved through sound-absorbing materials and physical barriers. The combination of elements on the ceiling, on the floor, as well as room dividers and large plants reduces the noise level.

Acoustic panels on the ceiling and walls, sound-absorbing carpeting and rugs, and enclosed phone booths for video calls significantly reduce noise levels.

In cases where noise levels remain high despite these measures, the cause usually lies in the use of the space itself.

How does Desk Booking help optimize space in an open-concept office?

Desk Booking provides the data needed to plan an open-concept office according to actual needs. Rather than relying on assumptions, booking and occupancy data show which areas are regularly in use and which, by contrast, remain empty.

This leads to specific ways to adapt the space that allow for the redistribution and management of its use. For example, if the area designated for quiet work is consistently overbooked while spaces for collaboration remain empty, this is a measurable indicator that the layout needs to be redesigned.

PULT provides the necessary occupancy data: This allows you to analyze the use of your office space, and employees can reserve their seats in the appropriate zone.

How to Turn Your Open-Concept Office Into a Productive Workplace

An open-concept office becomes productive through zoning based on activity, effective soundproofing, and space planning based on actual usage data. The open space is preserved, and its weaknesses are eliminated through the right structure.

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