It is no coincidence that Ubisoft wound up as one of Forbes’ Top 10 for Canada’s Best Employers. This video game publisher cares greatly about the comfort and well-being of its team member; a trip to their main building on Saint-Laurent boulevard in Montreal will convince you. The workspace laid out by their estate management team is designed to promote creativity and performance.

With 250,000 square feet spread over 5 floors, the main building’s workspace consists of more than 30 different layouts, each more intriguing than the last. In fact, their Workplace Strategy is based on a simple principle: Exceptional working environments for exceptional employees.

Seeing as the choice of layouts plays an important role in the estate management’s strategy, Ubisoft reached out to MySeat to better understand how the deployed resources are used so that they may better plan the next phase of workspace development.

The office space utilization study that is currently being conducted in the main building specifically targets shared spaces:

● Meeting rooms, both dedicated and shared

● Soft seating and Lounge spaces

● Content production areas (video editing and recording studio).

● Recreational areas, such as cafeterias and game lounges.

Working with such diversified layouts, MySeat has yet again been able to demonstrate that it’s tool can adapt to many different scenarios. With the help of a finely tuned accelerometer, a MySeat sensor (SenSeative) mounted to a given piece of furniture allows a client to quantify the amount and the duration of its user interactions. It goes without saying that the data gathered remains completely anonymous.

One rather quirky room employed “foam cubes” rather than more conventional seats. For this particular case, an AmbiSense Light sensor was chosen to record the room’s occupancy.

Rather than relying on detecting physical vibrations, this sensor bases it’s measurements on ambiant luminosity to determine whether the room is occupied or not.

This same room was equipped with both an AmbiSense Temperature & Humidity sensors to demonstrate that the ambiant temperature and humidity are indeed within the commonly agreed upon comfort range recommended by the CCOHS.

An exhaustive review of the utilization data collected allows conclusions to be drawn from the questions that were presented by our client, among others, the impact of the dimensions of the rooms on their attendees.

Highlights: Small meeting rooms (4 seats) are used less frequently than larger rooms (6 to 12 seats).

A data analysis made it possible to determine the average number of users occupying a room.

  • Over the course of the studied period, a large room averaged 560 hours of usage.
  • During 70% of those hours, the room was occupied at over half of its maximum capacity.
  • A large majority of meetings between 9 participants or more required the use of podium seats to accommodate additional participants.

Implementing new technology in an organization is no easy task. Without the commitment and followup of the MySeat team, it would not have been possible to obtain the expected results, all the while ensuring a positive response from the users.

“The MySeat team quickly understood our culture, our environment and the reality of a company like Ubisoft. Thanks to this ability, the organization was able to proactively monitor the implementation of the various phases of data collection, and deliver both reports and relevant interpretations pertaining to the collected indicators”, explained Isabelle Dery, Project Manager at Ubisoft Montreal.