Glossary
Presence
Presence is not use: a desk with a bag on it reads as occupied and supports no work.
Presence means a person is physically in the building or at a workplace at a given moment. It is the rawest of the workplace measures and the least informative on its own: it records that someone is there, not what the space is doing for them. A coat left on a chair registers as presence and supports no work.
Also called Attendance, Footfall
How it is calculated
Presence rate = people present ÷ people assigned to the building × 100
- People present
- Counted in aggregate at the moment of measurement, never attributed to named individuals.
- People assigned
- The population the building is provided for, however it is defined in the policy.
Expressed as A percentage of the assigned population, at a stated moment.
Presence is measured and reported in aggregate. Understanding a workplace does not require knowing who was where, and a measure that identifies individuals answers a different question from the one a space decision asks.
Worked example
- People assigned to the building
- 600
- Present, Wednesday 11:00
- 349
- Workplaces observed in use at that moment
- 244
Presence is 58 per cent; occupancy of the workplaces is well below it.
The hundred or so people who are present without occupying a workplace are in meetings, in the coffee area or moving between the two. That gap is a space requirement, and presence alone does not show it.
Where it goes wrong
Treating presence as use
Counting people through a door tells you the building is busy. It does not tell you whether anything in it worked.
Building policy on badge data alone
Access records miss the people who tailgate through a door and count the ones who came in for an hour. They are a floor under the real number, not the number.
Following individuals
Presence answers a question about a building. Attributing it to named people changes what is being measured and what people will tolerate being measured.
Where this measurement decides something
Comparing two suppliers' occupancy figures?
Send us both and we will tell you what each one is actually counting. No meeting required.