The ultimate guide to office space management

Table of contents

1. What is space management?
2. Why is office space management important?
3. The pillars of space management
4. Space efficiency
5. Energy consumption
6. Real estate liabilities
7. Environmental impact
8. Rooms management
9. Leverage parking management

Office space management is a critical way to improve your organization from the inside out, creating an environment that fosters productivity and efficiency by making the most of your available space. So you can optimize your organization's operations through efficient management and find innovative ways to streamline day-to-day experiences.

What is space management?

Office spaces used to be huge concrete buildings built as quickly as possible with little-to-no personalization and sometimes no windows. As our understanding of the importance of employee experience has grown, so has our ability to create efficient and productive spaces.

Space management is the philosophy and practice of strategically using space to maximize organizational efficiency and productivity. It considers the little things, from traffic flow to acoustics, assessing how a space will affect an organization's effectiveness. So effective office management plans for the needs of the business and uses the area to support its mission, goals, and objectives.

Exceptional space management is the king of efficiency and productivity and considers the following:

• Traffic flow
• Storage
• Furniture placement
• Lighting
• Workstation design
• Acoustics

Seeing every aspect of the office environment as a critical component of office space management can elevate the entire experience.

Why is office space management important?

The importance of this lies in how it empowers managers and organizations to make better choices that increase productivity and create a better workplace for employees.

The benefits

Effective office space management has many benefits because, at its core, it's a philosophy of broadly increasing productivity. In addition, the efficiency built into office space management makes it a no-brainer.

Benefits of it include:

• Cost reduction
• Increased productivity
• Evolving improvements
• Higher adaptability
• Save workplace admin time
• Thriving company culture

The pillars of space management

1. Space efficiency

Everyone needs a set amount of space to be able to do their job efficiently, and it isn't as much as you might think. Too much space can lead to wasted resources, whereas insufficient space will make employees feel cramped and shoehorned into their desks. Efficient space management strives for a happy middle with enough space but not too much.

An excellent example of this is parking. Too many lots in a car park is a waste of area, but not enough leads to blocked traffic, double parking, and frustrated employees who feel like they circle the lot a thousand times before they can even get to work. Or worse, they simply go pay for parking elsewhere.

Moreover, using parking management software that helps with automated parking can help optimize car parks by sharing, reserving, and allocating parking spaces in an intuitive system. Subsequently, this saves time and money and makes parking the least stressful part of the workplace experience.

2. Energy consumption

One of the biggest expenses of office space is energy consumption. This is the energy that the space uses and can include heating, cooling, lighting, powering and charging electronics, and more. Everything that gets plugged or hardwired into the wall consumes energy, and it’s a huge draw on resources.

Part of good space management is finding more efficient ways to manage the biggest resource consumers in the space. For example, excellent office space management considers how to reduce energy consumption, increasing energy efficiency through things like led lighting, solar panels, or HVAC systems that improve energy efficiency. This has the added benefit of leaning into sustainability goals.

3. Real estate liabilities

Renting, leasing, or owning office space is expensive. The more space you need, the more it costs, so management is important to help you keep costs down while still efficiently using space. With the change to hybrid and remote working, office space management recognizes the importance of making the most of space, now more so than ever.

Office space management can leverage a few things to get the most out of office space, including hot-desking and activity-based working. In addition, planning and organizing their workforce within their offices help save that space.

An important consideration for real estate liabilities is parking lot real estate. Therefore, are the spaces all being used by the correct people? Do you have too many spaces? Could you renegotiate your parking lease? How can parking spaces be used more efficiently? Parking management software is an excellent tool to get the most out of your parking spaces with park reserving and sharing and up-to-date data on real-time car park use.

4. Environmental impact

Responsible companies understand their policies' impact on the environment and are finding ways to be more sustainable. For example, office space management can lessen their environmental impact by using innovative techniques to curb how much space, energy, and non-environmentally friendly materials they use. So companies can save space by using daylighting techniques like skylights, adopting a green cleaning policy, or using less land for parking.

5. Rooms management

Managing meeting and conference rooms is a constant and important struggle for office space management. These rooms are crucial for a company's productivity and forward momentum, but they can also be expensive, requiring a lot of space that might not always be used efficiently.

Finding ways to increase the efficiency of meeting and conference rooms through booking tools can help make space management easy.

Leverage parking management for efficient space management

For many companies, parking is a constant management concern, taking up a lot of square footage while not always giving back the best return. So space management offers a variety of ways to relieve these concerns and optimize parking lots. These range from limiting your space used to using it better and charging for it.

Parking management software is a crucial tool for management because it can automate parking management, getting the most out of your parking spaces while not requiring extra admin attention and assistance.

Parkable offers an ideal parking management solution to optimize your space management. So talk to us about how parking management can help your office reach its full potential.