Elyas Coutts is CEO of workplace food and beverage company Connect Vending. Opinions are the author’s own.

Average occupancy is a useful metric for capacity planning, but it tells facilities managers little about what’s really happening in an office. High traffic and usage during rush hours — at lunch, the end of the day and the short peaks in collaboration zones — get smoothed out. Distribution patterns are ignored and peak demand is hidden.  

Hybrid arrangements exacerbate the problem, because attendance is unpredictable and not evenly distributed. Teams often choose different collaboration days, in-person meetings might be scheduled at similar times and workplace events might concentrate use within a few hours.

The gap between average and peak utilization shows why a single occupancy figure can be misleading. CBRE’s 2026 workplace data found global average building utilization at 53%, while average peak utilization reached 80%.

HubStar's Hybrid Occupancy Index, which draws on data from more than 300 million square feet of office space across 13 countries, found that attendance tends to concentrate on Tuesdays, the busiest weekday globally at 58.6% occupancy in 2025, while Fridays remain the quietest at 34.5%. CBRE's research tells a similar story, with roughly 73% of organizations reporting Tuesday as their highest-attendance day.

The reasons behind the influx of mid-week office days are often structural, since teams tend to share the same collaboration days and managers schedule in-person meetings in similar windows. 

Within those days, arrivals and departures cluster too, because in practice, facilities teams often find that people arrive shortly before their first meeting and leave shortly after their last, resulting in an increase in demand at reception, elevators, kitchens and meeting-room corridors rather than a steady flow across the day. 

None of this means hybrid work is the problem. It just means hybrid offices’ use patterns are more variable and need more targeted operational planning. 

The difference between utilization and experience

Workplaces can be efficient on paper while creating friction in practice. For example, a building operating at 40% average occupancy sounds comfortable, yet on a Tuesday or Wednesday, the same building might run out of meeting rooms by mid-morning, queue people out of the café at lunch and leave teams hunting for desks near their colleagues. The average usage says that the space is underused, but the reality is that on some days the space isn’t providing employees with a reliable or enjoyable experience. 

This gap matters. Employees do not experience the average; they experience the moment they cannot find a room or the fifteen minutes they lose lining up for coffee. Each of these moments are considered when employees decide if the commute is worth it. A workplace managed on utilization figures alone can score well while ultimately convincing employees to stay and work from home. Efficiency and experience are not the same target. 

Efficiency asks whether space is being used. Experience asks whether space is working at the moment someone needs it. Facilities teams are often measured on the first while being blamed for failures in the second. 

A more informative metric

Rather than measuring average occupancy, facilities teams should consider measuring peak occupancy and how it repeats by day, by hour and by zone. How full are the busiest spaces at peak times and how often does demand exceed what the spaces can provide? 

Alongside peaks, teams should track usage patterns: when people arrive, how long they stay and when demand shifts between settings. An office where employees arrive at 10 a.m., peak at midday and leave by 3 p.m. needs very different catering, cleaning and staffing schedules than one with a steady 9 to 5 rhythm. 

Service pressure points deserve the same attention. Meeting room refusal rates, lunch queue times and desk search times tell leaders far more about workplace performance than a single occupancy figure can. 

The same problem appears in workplace amenities. A site might need to serve 20 to 30 people within a 15-minute coffee break, even when total daily consumption looks modest, for example. That kind of concentrated demand is invisible in an average daily figure. 

An office that works 

Average occupancy still has its place in hybrid workplaces. It is a sensible input for real estate decisions: how much space to lease, whether to consolidate floors, how a portfolio compares year-over-year. The mistake is letting it run the day-to-day operation as well. Space planning and service planning answer different questions and hybrid work has pulled them further apart. One tells managers how many people use the building and the other tells them when and where those people need capacity, cleaning, access and support, and whether the building delivers in those moments. 

Facilities leaders do not need to make every part of the office busy all day, and they should push back when they are judged as if they do. A half-empty Friday is not a failure. A packed Tuesday is not a success if people spend half of it lining up. The job is simpler to describe than it is to do: make the office work at the times people need it most.