Auditing Campus Space Utilization

Publication Date: November 15, 2024

Space utilization audits bring value to your campus by creating baseline statistics and identifying areas for improvement and cost savings opportunities. The number of students and workers on campus has likely changed in recent in recent years. Classroom and office space on campus has been radically disrupted since the start of the pandemic. National enrollment trends took a tumble, with two-year colleges facing the steepest declines. While enrollment is starting to trend upwards since the pandemic relief funds expired, the distribution of students is not consistent. Urban flagship schools are seeing the highest increases, leaving rural campuses struggling. Classroom seats remain empty as schools are offering more online courses.

Office space has also been impacted by the pandemic, as many employees never returned to their offices as their positions became partially or fully remote. Many schools enacted hiring freezes or did not fill vacancies, increasing the number of vacant offices across campus. This article provides guidance on performing impactful space utilization audits of classrooms and offices.

Why Classroom Utilization is Important

Accurate space utilization metrics can help your campus understand how space is currently used and identify where efficiencies can be gained. Utilization studies can help justify new construction funds for expanding campuses or determine the need for leased space. They may also identify opportunities to repurpose unused space and thereby decrease utilities, housekeeping, and maintenance costs. Other factors, such as reconfiguring traditional row seating with collaborative layouts, may also affect the number of seats in classrooms.

Utilization studies can also measure compliance with university policies and procedures. Universities often publish standard meeting patterns such as Monday/Wednesday/Friday classes lasting every 50 minutes and Tuesday/Thursday for 75 minutes with a defined break between classes. Deviations from this schedule result in overlapping classes which may cause students to have trouble scheduling the classes they need to graduate. Excessive classes held during peak hours result in overcrowding, a lack of parking, and long lines for food and student services. Having the incorrect number of seats in the scheduling system may lead to over or under-filled classes, with the potential to exceed the fire code.

Internal Audit departments can provide independent utilization analyses from cross-functional data. Campus space is usually tracked by the facilities department, which maintains the official list of classrooms and office assignments. Classroom space may be assigned by the registrar’s office, the schools/departments, or a combination of both, while office space typically is assigned by the departments.

Classroom Utilization Testing

Analysis from classroom utilization testing can add value to your university leadership by identifying trends that may contribute to overcrowding, underutilization, and noncompliance with goals and standards. There are many factors to consider during audit planning. Your campus or system office may have capacity goals or other criteria to measure against. The scope may be limited to classrooms or expanded to other spaces such as labs and rehearsal spaces. Consider testing undergraduate courses separately, as graduate classes may inherently have lower attendance and irregular class times.

Conduct the following utilization tests by comparing a report from Facilities of all classrooms with their room capacities with a comprehensive class listing from your system of record that shows the actual number of students in each classroom. Test 100% of classrooms using data analytics software or Excel subtotals and pivot tables for complete results.

• Classroom Seat Utilization – Determine the percentage of seats filled per classroom by calculating the average enrollment of each class and dividing by the number of seats in the classroom. Lower percentages relate to underutilized classrooms.
• Weekly Hours Used – Calculate the number of hours of class time each classroom is in use on a weekly basis by using the class duration and meeting frequency. The lower the weekly hours, the less utilized.
• Standard Meeting Pattern – Identify classes that do not follow your university’s standard meeting pattern, such as Monday/Wednesday for 75 minutes, or classes starting at a non-standard start time, as they create overlap with other class times.
• Prime Time Scheduling – Chart the number of classes held each hour of each day and compare with any university prime time constraints. This will identify if your university has few classes at 8:00am and too many classes at 11:00am.
• Classroom Capacity Verification –Compare the maximum seats in the facilities report to the class report and identify any seat capacity differences. Visit the classrooms with discrepancies and perform a physical headcount to determine which system needs to be updated.
• Unassigned Classrooms – Determine if there are any classrooms on the facilities report that are not included on the class list. Determine the root cause, such as the building being under renovation, or the department not updating the system with class counts.

The data gathered from these tests serve as both baseline statistics and support for your recommendations. Separate the results by the registering departments to help isolate the departments that are not meeting expectations.

Office Space Planning

Ever since that fateful day in March 2020 when everyone was sent home to work, many workers never returned to their offices. Employees became increasingly comfortable working from home, and employers became concerned whether their employees would come back to the office or elect to find remote work elsewhere. Many campuses decided to allow certain non-student facing departments to continue to work remotely on a part-time or permanent basis. Additionally, any hiring freezes and attrition during the pandemic may have reduced the workforce.

The resulting excess of empty offices creates an opportunity for internal auditors to analyze office assignments and identify underutilized office space. Potential cost-saving recommendations include repurposing office space for other uses, closing spaces altogether to save on heating and cleaning costs, and eliminating unneeded leased space. It may be practical to move workers to consolidate space or create shared hotel space for hybrid workers.

Office Space Utilization Testing

The first step is to determine the university’s criteria for having reserved office space. For example, your human resources department may have determined fully remote employees should not have dedicated office space and hybrid workers working in person less than 50% of the time should share hotel spaces. Human resources likely maintains a database of employees classified as remote workers and their percentage of offsite work. Facilities usually maintains a database of office space and its occupants. Their occupancy report should indicate whether an office is occupied or vacant and should have the employee ID of the person assigned to each office.

Define the scope of the occupancy testing. For example, consider testing administrative workers separately from faculty as on-campus requirements differ. Perform the following test steps to identify underutilized office space in accordance with your university’s policies and procedures:

• Validate the Completeness of the Occupancy Report – Ensure the occupancy report has an assignment for every office so it can be determined whether the office is assigned or vacant. Determine whether there are multiple offices assigned to the same employee ID, shared offices, or other anomalies that would hinder specific identification.
• Review HR Data on Remote Workers – Verify HR has updated and complete records for employee work status classification. Employees may be classified as remote, hybrid, or in-person, or the records may show the percentage of remote work (e.g., working 60% remotely).
• Identify Remote Workers with Offices – Join the occupancy report with the HR remote worker data by employee ID and determine the number of remote workers with assigned office space, based on your university’s criteria. As an example, quantify the number of fully remote workers with offices and the number of hybrid workers working remotely over 50% of the time who have their own offices. Categorize by department and location.
• Identify Unoccupied Rental Space – From the prior test, determine which unused offices are located in rented space. Rented space may be identified in the occupancy report or may come from a separate report from Facilities.

Results will be limited if the occupancy report and/or the remote worker data is incomplete. For the most accurate results, consider postponing the testing until management updates the reports or make a recommendation to update the data and perform a follow-up engagement.

Conclusion

The recent fluctuations in student and worker populations are driving the need for current space utilization reviews. Internal Audit can bring value to your university by independently analyzing classroom and office space usage from cross-functional sources and evaluating the results against university policies and procedures. These tests can be reperformed in the future to compare results and validate whether management’s action plans are resulting in improvements working.