More organizations than ever have adopted workplace management solutions to support automation and analytics. According to the FM:Systems 2025 Inside the Workplace survey of U.S. business leaders, 85% of organizations are using workplace management technology, up from 69% a year ago. While adoption may have spiked year-on-year, however, the main motivator behind implementation of these solutions hasn’t changed: improving efficiency.
Workplace management technology addresses inefficiency in lots of different ways, from streamlining the work order process for facility managers to enabling employees to schedule a meeting and reserve a meeting room in the same app. But one of the areas where this technology is having the biggest impact for organizations is in gathering and analyzing data about how workers are interacting with their workplaces.
In this blog post, we’ll unpack what the results of our latest survey tell us about the evolution of data gathering in the workplace and the tasks organizations have chosen to automate over the past year.
How have workplace tracking methods evolved?
Last year, 54% of respondents to our survey said they either had no system in place for collecting data to measure the performance of their work arrangement, or were gathering that data manually. We were surprised by that result, given that technology to automatically track attendance and utilization is relatively inexpensive and easy to deploy.
Fast forward a year and that figure has dropped to 19%. What’s behind that change? Over the past year, many organizations that hadn’t implemented a return-to-office (RTO) mandate have done so, while companies that already had RTO policies in place have expanded them. Tracking compliance with these changing rules has become too complicated and time-consuming to do manually, as has the process of ensuring that spaces are optimized for returning employees.
What functions have organizations automated?
In our previous Inside the Workplace survey, we asked business leaders what aspect of managing the workplace takes up most of their time. The top answer, identifying cost reducing opportunities, reflected the calm before the RTO storm. At a time when organizations were still trying to entice — rather than compel — employees back to the office, tracking attendance wasn’t a top business priority.
The responses to that same question in the latest survey reveal how priorities have changed. Today, business leaders are spending the bulk of their time tracking and reporting utilization and employee attendance and ensuring there are enough desks and rooms available to meet occupants’ needs. So, it’s no surprise that this year’s survey shows big increases in implementation of solutions designed to take on these tasks:
- 70% are using space management and space planning systems, up from 54% last year
- 68% are using workplace analytics, up from 46%
- 43% are using workplace sensors, up from 30%
- 40% are using a visitor management system, up from 30%
Not only were these the top solutions organizations adopted over the past year, they’re also the most popular options among the 82% of respondents who are planning to implement a workplace management solution within the next year.
Conclusion
The shift away from manual tracking is not only saving real estate teams time and effort, it’s producing more accurate, timely and reliable information for decision-makers. When asked how confident they are in the accuracy of the data being collected about their workplace, 93% of participants in our latest survey said they are either somewhat or very confident, up from 81% last year.
Being able to answer questions like, “How effective is our current work arrangement?” and “Are we using space in ways that align with employee behavior and organizational goals?” confidently is a game-changer for organizations as they seek to maximize the value of both their workforce and their workplaces.
