If the past few months are anything to go by, extreme heat is becoming part and parcel of the British summertime. As temperatures continue to rise, employers are under growing pressure to make sure workplaces can cope with the hotter conditions.
The challenge is understanding the smartest way to adapt, because the cost of leaving it to guesswork and getting it wrong is significant.
Senior Technical Architect at Ricoh Digital Experience Centre.
The UK’s June 2026 heatwave is estimated to have resulted in 24 million lost working hours and a cost to the economy of £1.15 billion in lost productivity. Those figures show the direct impact workplace conditions can have on business performance.
At the same time, hybrid working adds another layer of complexity, having fundamentally changed how offices operate. Attendance is far less predictable than it once was, so it’s harder to know where and when things like cooling, ventilation and workspace capacity are needed most.
Aside from the summer heat, organizations need workplaces that perform well in every season and adapt to constantly changing occupancy and environmental conditions. They need to understand how people move through the office. Things like which desks they check into, which meeting rooms fill up, where teams collaborate and which spaces are regularly ignored.
Doing so requires a real-time understanding of how buildings are being used. This is where sensor technology and workplace usage data comes in, turning assumptions into evidence and giving organizations the insight to make smarter workplace decisions.
Building-wide averages can hide local problems
Many offices are still managed around a relatively fixed idea of how a building should operate. Cooling and ventilation systems may follow predetermined schedules, while individual spaces are managed according to their maximum capacity, rather than how they’re being used in the moment. But we know modern workplaces don’t behave that predictably.
One day a floor may be largely empty, while another is full. The following day, those patterns may be completely different. A busy Tuesday might see meeting rooms become warm and stuffy after hours of back-to-back collaboration, while the open-plan workspace next door remains comfortable. Likewise, areas exposed to direct sunlight will naturally heat up much faster than others.
A single temperature reading taken in one location simply can’t capture those differences. Yet building-wide decisions are often made using exactly that kind of limited information, resulting in energy being used where it isn’t needed while genuine comfort issues remain unresolved.
That’s why employers need a more complete view of workplace performance. Environmental sensors can monitor temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide and air quality across different areas, while occupancy data can show which spaces are being used and how it changes throughout the day.
Often, organizations assume they need to monitor employees to understand workplace performance, but that’s not the case. Built with privacy in mind, systems can combine thermal sensing, ambient temperature, CO2 levels and anonymous spatial tracking to show how an area is performing without needing to identify the people using it.
Bring those data points together, facilities teams can identify real issues earlier, understand what’s causing them and prioritize action that have real impact for employees and their productivity.
Making the data useful
Collecting workplace data is only the beginning. The real value lies in how organizations use that information to create better experiences for employees while operating buildings more efficiently. It’s easy to focus on dashboards and sensors here, but the real goal is to give facilities teams information that’s helpful and they can actually use.
Workplace intelligence isn’t just about responding more quickly when something goes wrong. It’s about anticipating issues before they begin affecting the people using the space.
For example, rising carbon dioxide levels may indicate that a meeting room needs better ventilation, while recurring temperature spikes could point to equipment use, afternoon sunlight or an imbalance between occupancy and cooling. This allows facilities teams to pinpoint the root cause of problems and take action before they begin to impact employees.
By directing resources to the areas that genuinely need them, employers improve employee comfort while reducing unnecessary energy use and operating costs. This more targeted approach also supports wider sustainability goals.
Avoiding unnecessary cooling across half-empty floors reduces operating expenditure and helps organizations make progress against Scope 2 emissions targets, without compromising productivity or indoor air quality.
Designing workplaces around how people really work
Perhaps the greatest value of workplace data lies in what it reveals over time.
Patterns begin to emerge, so organizations build a much richer understanding of how their workplaces are being used.
Recurring patterns can reveal which spaces are consistently underused, which place the most demand on building systems and whether certain areas should be opened, consolidated or redesigned altogether. They can also inform more accurate and efficient cooling schedules, room-booking policies and decisions about where particular teams or activities are best placed.
Check-in and booking data add another layer to that. An organization may discover that employees regularly choose a particular bank of desks, that small meeting rooms are constantly oversubscribed or that a purpose-built collaboration area is rarely used. Those behaviors tell facilities teams something that a temperature reading alone never could.
That said, data is most useful when it is considered alongside employee feedback.
For organizations managing several offices and thousands of employees, speaking to everyone individually isn’t always realistic. Workplace data can help identify where deeper conversations are needed, while surveys, feedback tools and direct employee input provide the context behind the numbers.
Workplace intelligence can highlight what’s happening across a building, but employees provide the context that explains why it matters and how conditions affect their ability to collaborate and concentrate.
Bringing these perspectives together creates a much more complete understanding of workplace performance.
Ultimately, it’s about creating offices that continuously adapt to changing conditions to keep employees comfortable and productive, rather than relying on static assumptions that quickly become outdated.
Preparing offices for a warmer future
It's not only the weather that has become harder to predict. Working patterns are changing just as quickly, and static approaches to workplace management are increasingly out of step with both.
Organizations need to understand both how a building is designed to perform and crucially how it’s being used from one day to the next. That visibility enables facilities teams to respond earlier, use energy more intelligently and create environments that remain comfortable and flexible as conditions change.
The benefit is a workplace that simply works better for the people using it. Somewhere people can focus when they need to and trust that the environment will support the work they have come in to do.
Put simply, when a workplace works better for its people, they are far more likely to want to use it.
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