Presence Is Not Value

A room used twice a week looks wasteful on a utilisation report. Whether it is depends on what happens in it, and no sensor can see that.

The practical lesson in “Presence Is Not Value” is to connect a measurement to a named decision without treating the number as certainty. Teams exploring remote employee productivity monitoring can review the provider's website as one source of time and project context, while retaining direct feedback and documented outcomes as the basis for interpretation.

The leap being made

Low occupancy means low value.

For a public, independent reference related to “Presence Is Not Value”, consult the CIBSE Knowledge Portal. Its principles provide a useful check on scope, terminology, governance and the claims made during procurement or review.

It is intuitive, it is what dashboards imply, and it is wrong often enough to be dangerous.

A board room used four hours a month hosts the decisions that fund everything. A quiet room used twice a week is the only place one person can work at all.

What low numbers can mean

The space is genuinely unnecessary.

The space is badly designed and people avoid it.

The space is hard to book.

People do not know it exists.

It is used for something the sensor cannot detect: a phone call, a difficult conversation, an hour of concentration.

Or it is used rarely and the rare use matters enormously.

Six explanations, one number, and the dashboard presents the number.

What high numbers can mean

Genuine demand.

Or insufficient alternatives: a crowded floor can mean people have nowhere else to go rather than that they want to be there.

Or a booking system that makes hoarding rational.

High utilisation is as ambiguous as low utilisation and gets far less scrutiny, because it confirms what facilities teams want to hear.

How to use the numbers honestly

Treat them as a question rather than an answer. A low-use room prompts: why is this unused, and does it matter?

Go and look. Half an hour of observation explains more than a quarter of data.

Ask the people who do use it. Rare users of a space usually have a specific and defensible reason.

And decide on the combination, which is slower and produces decisions you can defend when somebody objects.

The counting that measures nothing

Some activity is invisible to every method: thinking, reading, a call taken standing up, a conversation in a corridor.

Spaces that support those show as empty.

Which means a programme optimising purely on sensor data will systematically remove the quiet, the informal and the occasional — the parts people miss most once they are gone.

What this means for your programme

Never let a utilisation figure be the sole basis for removing space.

Pair every data-driven proposal with observation and with asking.

And write down the question each number is supposed to answer, because a number with no question attached will be used to justify whatever was already planned.

What to check

Has any space decision in your organisation rested on utilisation alone?

Do you know why your least-used space is least used?

Has anybody observed it, or only read the report?

And what activity in your building would a sensor never see?