After more than two and a half years of living with Covid, many companies are still grappling with their future workplace strategies.

Back to the office? Stay at home? Bit of both?

One company that’s working to shed some light on the situation is Kastle Systems. The company’s weekly office occupancy barometer is based on physical key swipes, showing exactly how many people enter a building on any given day.

“It’s data of actual human behavior, from a very large sample, showing whether they swiped into the office during a given day or week,” said Dan Sallick, a partner at Subject Matter, a communications agency that has worked with Kastle since 2020.

This office occupancy data is shared publicly, enabling business leaders to learn from those around them and to understand how they might implement their own ‘back to office’ strategies. Or not, as the case may be.

“Their data has been great for all of us analyzing the impact of the pandemic on working from home and the slow stuttering return to the office,” said Stanford University economist Nick Bloom.

As for Kastle itself, their official stance is that in-person work is “critical” to effectively running an organization. However, Jake Heinz, Kastle’s chief marketing officer, thinks office occupancy in general “probably will never be back to 100%”.