Peak-day occupancy
The single most important number for property decisions. Track weekly and trend over quarters. Sustained peak above 85% means more space needed; below 60% means consolidation is on the table. The trend matters more than the snapshot — a single quiet week or a single conference week tells you nothing, but a six-month trend tells you almost everything you need for a property decision. Plot the trend, mark the trigger thresholds on the chart, and the conversation with finance becomes a 10-minute review rather than a quarterly battle.
Booking-to-show ratio
How many booked desks are actually used? Ratios below 75% mean your booking culture has decayed — people block desks and don't release them, and your peak-day data becomes unreliable. Address with auto-release of no-show bookings after 90 minutes, combined with friction-free cancellation. The ratio is a leading indicator of data quality; without it, every other KPI is suspect.
Room utilisation by size
Often the most actionable property KPI. If 2-person rooms run at 95% and 8-person rooms at 30%, your floor plan is wrong. Reconfigure before you rebuild. Most offices were laid out for pre-pandemic meeting patterns and have a structural surplus of large rooms; the data is the case for the reconfiguration project. Tracking utilisation by size category (not just overall) is what turns the dashboard into a decision.
Cancellation rate and lead time
How far in advance do people book, and how often do they cancel? Short lead times and high cancellation rates suggest a booking culture under stress — usually because the system is hard to use or the peak-day attendance pattern is becoming compressed. Long lead times and low cancellation rates suggest a settled rhythm. Both extremes have implications for capacity planning.
Vanity metrics to ignore
Total bookings, unique users, system logins and 'engagement minutes' are all interesting and none of them drive decisions. The temptation to report them is strong because they go up over time and look like success; the discipline of leaving them out of the monthly review keeps the focus on the metrics that change behaviour. If a metric does not have a clear trigger point that drives a decision, it does not belong on the dashboard.
The monthly review meeting
Four numbers, monthly review, real decisions. Workplace lead plus a property representative plus a representative from people operations, 30 minutes, single agenda: 'what should we do differently next month?' The output is one or two action items, tracked from one meeting to the next. The rest of the dashboard is for show.
Four numbers, monthly review, real decisions. The rest of the dashboard is for show — and the discipline of ignoring it is what makes the workplace function operationally credible.