Best practices for high‐level occupancy planning: Data and analysis

As real estate departments and workplace organisations devote more attention to strategic planning, most of the work has focused on improving performance metrics and developing dashboards to communicate this information clearly and concisely. Yet these steps will take these organisations only part of the way. Once they have this information, they need to devote more time to developing strategies and plans. This review examines one of these activities ‐ developing high‐level occupancy plans. Representatives of the strategy and planning groups at ten leading corporations and the occupancy planning experts at seven service providers and system developers were interviewed for this survey. It was found that most firms continue to complete high‐level occupancy plans with tedious and time‐consuming data‐collection processes and spreadsheet analyses. These organisations could improve efficiency and the success of their plans in two ways: better analysis approaches and better data collection and organisation. This review summarises the best practices identified in these areas.