Barclays Puts in Sensors to See Which Bankers Are at Their Desks (2017)
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Soon after, they began this creepy process of monitoring “utilisation” where minimum wage strangers with clipboards would walk around every fifteen minutes recording how many desks and meeting rooms were being used.
Seems like just one another project whose sole purpose is to spend money so involved parties from both sides can get more rich.
When I lived in London and worked in the city recently, the (ftse 100) company I worked for would do daily pen-and-paper surveys of desk usage and use this to identify:
- if people were ‘desk squatting’ and not freeing up their desk when they went to a meeting for someone else to use (particularly people who were only in a few days a week but set their desk up permenantly and left a jacket and bag there to squat).
- If there were enough unutilised desks to sublease a portion of the building (we had 3 subleasers who were totally separated with security barriers)
- If there were total peaks of desk usage where they ran out of desks where they could try to smooth demand (for instance by asking people to WFH on Wednesday rather than the more popular Friday). If this was possible, it would let them sublease space.
- Once they have statistics, they can distribute space between departments more evenly rather than who shouts loudest.
So I’m guessing it’s to replace that pen and paper survey with better data, probably tied into the building management system.
When the ftse 100 company I was at was doing this - it was using the data to ask people to home work at strategic times to save them space - it was not some sort of individual productivity measuring thing.
A single desk in London can easily cost >£10k per year in a good area, and better space efficiency can also mean that you don’t have to take on that new building at a huge cost.