Main / Blog / Research / Basking’s Global Occupancy Benchmarking Study 2021: The End Of The Five-Day Office Week Is Here
Research

Basking’s Global Occupancy Benchmarking Study 2021: The End Of The Five-Day Office Week Is Here

  • Date: December 22, 2021
  • by Eldar Gizzatov

To mark the end of the year, Basking’s Data Analytics team has prepared a Global Occupancy Benchmarking report, putting together the data insights from the offices worldwide, incl. the North America, EMEA, LATAM, and APAC regions in October-November 2021.  Our goal was to help the CRE professionals in understanding the effects of COVID-19 on workplace occupancy across different regions and creating data-based Return-to-Office plans globally.

For this analysis, we have selected the data from 88 offices and 11 organizations (primarily in professional services and technology sectors) across the world with 49% of offices located in EMEA, 31% in the USA, 13% in Canada, 5% in LATAM, and 3% in APAC region. 

The Five-Day Office Week Is Over

One of the key insights that stood out for us was the end of the five-day office week. This is clear when we look at the frequency of office visits per week: 40 to 64% of the employees worldwide are coming to the office only once a week, and only 10-26% of the employees are now visiting the office 4-6 days a week. 

Peak Occupancy Varies Across Regions

We’ve also found that the average peak occupancy rates varied widely across the regions in October-November – from 23% in EMEA and 22% in APAC to 16% in the USA, 13% in Canada, and 9% in LATAM.

Average Peak Occupancy Rate week over week

The daily peak occupancy is the highest number of persons observed in the office at the same time in a day. It helps understand the occupancy of an office during the busiest time in a day. It is different from the daily unique occupants, which represents the number of unique persons that visit the office in a day. For example: If two people visited the office from 8 AM – 3 PM, and three people visited the office from 3 PM – 5 PM in a day, then, the peak occupancy for the day is three people and the daily unique occupants would be five people.

Duration of Visits, Most Popular Weekdays

Duration of office visits in November 2021

When people do come to offices, they tend to stay longer, in particular in Canada and the USA, where 55% and 47% of the employees respectively spent 7-12 hours per visit.

Popular days for office visits in November 2021

In EMEA, USA, and Canada, the majority of the people preferred coming to the office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. In APAC, Tuesday seemed a popular day for people to visit the office. And in LATAM, surprisingly, most people visited the office on Fridays.

You can find the report in full here. Get in touch if you have any questions!

Read more

Get started

If you want to know more about how our product works or have additional questions, please reach out to us: