3 Reasons Why Campus Space Management Stays Stuck

Put a finger down if your university needs data-driven space management. Put a finger down if you’ve told your leadership team and the outcome was no decision. 

You’re not the only one. 

Our latest higher education virtual panel covered everything from territorial faculty members to underinvested leadership to the organizational inertia that keeps buildings half-empty while budgets stay maxed out.

Our panelists were Chris Morett – President at Co|Here Campus and Workplace consultancy, and Joe Harris from HubStar. 

Over 60 minutes, Chris, Joe, and members of the audience shared the real reasons institutions stay stuck, and the tactics that actually work to move the needle.

Here are the three biggest barriers that came up, and what you can do about them.

1) Leadership is aware of the problem, but won’t make the hard decisions

When we polled the audience on their biggest barrier to better space management, leadership came out on top, with almost half of attendees agreeing that leadership doesn’t want to make any difficult decisions.

Many space managers already know what’s broken and have practical, affordable solutions ready to go. The problem is they can’t get approval.

As Chris put it: “Presidents are busy with lots of people clamouring for their attention. Those conditions make it easy to avoid hard battles that don’t have clear winners.”

One attendee shared a perfect example: they’d done all the homework, built a business case showing significant savings, spent months presenting it to leadership, only to be told that there might be recruiting drives and new leases in the future. The can got kicked down the road.

The fix: Find the willing first instead of waiting for top-down transformation. More on that in takeaway #2.

2) You have the data, but teams aren’t talking to each other (and leadership doesn’t know what to buy)

The second-biggest barrier in our poll was lacking the right data or technology, coming in at 35%. 

But the data often already exists. The problem is no one’s connecting the dots.

It’s common for the timetabling team and the estates team to use completely different data sources and never talk to each other. One team is doing semester-by-semester room allocation, the other is tracking occupancy, but they’re speaking different languages about the same space.

Meanwhile, leadership teams are paralyzed by the number of platforms on the market. Even when someone builds a solid business case showing how much an investment in people and systems could save, decision-makers hesitate. The cost of construction is much higher than investing in people and systems, but decision makers still hesitate. 

The reality is that a pilot is more feasible than perfection.  (See takeaway #3.)

Another dimension to this data problem is massive energy waste. Buildings are heated and cooled with no understanding of who’s actually in them. One institution linked occupancy data to their building management system and saved €85,000 per year just by not heating empty buildings in winter.

When you frame it as opportunity cost, scholarships that could be funded instead of wasted facilities, or carbon emissions tied to underutilized lecture halls, the conversation shifts from nice to have to we can’t afford not to do this.

“What about not having money to give scholarships because it all goes into facilities? That’s unethical.”

Chris Morrett

3) Start with a small-scale pilot, and pick a building where you’ll actually learn something

Rather than attempting campus-wide transformation it’s best to start small with a proof of concept.

Chris’s advice: “Find the willing first and provide them with a pathway to implementation. Do pilots where the stakes are low to get people comfortable.”

One of the best examples came from a Nordic university. They picked one building and tracked occupancy through WiFi data. What they found was that while utilization was higher than expected on most floors, but on the third floor there were no more than 20 people using the space. 

The faculty head, who’d been asking for more square footage and was about to sign a lease, was shocked when the data was presented. He asked how they got the data. The lease conversation stopped immediately.

The takeaway: Come up with a hypothesis and measure it. Use data, not dogma, as your shield. As Chris put it, “What experiments are you going to run this year? What are you going to learn about your organization?”

Play the long game and say it 40 times

Getting space management decisions across the finish line is never going to be an easy task. 

But as this session emphasized, think of this as a communications effort. Chris summed it up, ”You have to say things 40 times before someone will understand it the 40th time.”