Articles on: Understanding the Data

FAQ: What happens when a workspace is over capacity?

Workspaces have a specific capacity when set up, representing the number of people who can use this workspace as designed.

Designs do not correspond to real life, and a workspace may be observed with a greater occupancy than its nominal capacity; occupants may be standing, extra chairs have been brought in, or other circumstances that may arise.

When this occurs, the observers are permitted to record more occupants than the capacity of the workspace to ensure accurate recording. As a result, the raw data will always show the number of people recorded as being present.

When performing calculations for the Dashboard there are some complications. The number of occupied seats are not simply added up and compared to the total - if a single workspace contained 20 extra occupants it would “hide” 20 unoccupied seats elsewhere, and it’s important to account for unused space.

By default, occupancy is "capped" at the configured capacity, so an over-occupied workspace will use the maximum capacity when included in calculations.

As an alternative, by ticking the "Show Over-occupied Workspaces As Extra Seats" box in the filters menu, workspaces with extra occupants will have additional seats added for that tour to hold them. This will cause the total number of seats in that tour to increase and the percentages will be affected accordingly.

If the “Show Occupancy By Seat” option is not selected, over-occupied workspaces do not affect any statistics.

Examples:

A study has ten workspaces, each with a configured capacity of 1.
During a tour, nine workspaces are empty and one workspace has 10 people in it.
With the overflow option enabled, the over-occupied workspace will be treated as having 10 seats.
As a result, there are 10 occupied seats out of a total of 19 seats, giving a total occupancy of 53%.

With the overflow option disabled, the over-occupied workspace is treated as having its normal capacity of 1, and 1 occupant.
As a result, there is 1 occupied seat out of a total of 10, giving a total occupancy of 10%.

Updated on: 08/03/2022

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