For over 40 years, Accel has made it their mission to partner with exceptional entrepreneurs and teams to build transformational companies. The Palo Alto-based venture capital firm has invested in over 300 companies, including well-known names like Meta, Slack, and Dropbox. 

With a background in hospitality, Lexi Dixon is Accel’s Workplace Experience Manager, responsible for keeping workplace operations running smoothly and efficiently while creating a welcoming environment for both their employees and visitors.

The company’s hybrid work policy provided flexibility for its 100+ employees, but made it difficult for Accel’s newly minted Workplace Experience team to proactively manage their spaces and resources across their two San Francisco Bay Area locations. Thanks to variable attendance trends with unexpectedly busy windows, the team found it increasingly challenging to provide the elevated experience they wanted for everyone onsite. 

The spreadsheet struggle: the challenges of manual data collection

In order to better plan ahead, the Workplace team was manually tracking employee attendance and visitor traffic across several spreadsheets. While this was fine as a temporary solution to understand who was onsite, it was a labor-intensive one. Early on after the pandemic, the number of people onsite was easier to track, but with an increasing volume of visitors and employees coming in, the number of spreadsheets they needed to fully understand onsite attendance trends also continued to grow. With their data spread across several spreadsheets, it was difficult to make sense of trends and glean any useful insights. 

Manually checking who was onsite was time-consuming and inefficient. Checking and logging employee attendance alone took Accel’s Workplace team, on average, two hours a day. This manual process also left their data open to potential errors and inconsistencies. When it came time to report on this data each quarter, Dixon found herself spending a week just to clean up all the data and consolidate name variations (e.g., Alexandra vs. Lexi) to compile her report. 

The other issues they ran into were on unexpectedly busy days—it was difficult for the team to predict when these days would occur and plan resources and staffing accordingly. They would occasionally run out of meeting rooms and didn’t have the data to visualize the patterns around those busy moments. Without this data on their occupancy and space utilization, Dixon’s team had no way to make strategic adjustments and improvements. 

Automating employee check-in with Envoy integrations

Dixon’s first priority was to find a solution that could automate the collection of employee and visitor occupancy data to enable their team to better plan ahead. Accel was already using Envoy to manage their office deliveries, and she was excited to learn about Envoy’s integration with Brivo, their access control system. Along with their existing setup with Okta to manage their employee directory and authentication, she saw that they could fully automate their collection of employee attendance data, eliminating their outdated spreadsheet process entirely. 

“I knew Envoy wasn’t just an app for handling packages, and that we could use it for a lot more,” said Dixon. “The hardest part was getting our team’s buy-in. It was difficult to quantify the benefits of what we could do with Envoy, so I collected a week of data to show just how much effort it took to manage employee attendance and our guest lists.” 

After consulting with the Envoy team, Dixon felt confident that Envoy Workplace could not only make their employee attendance logging a seamless and automated process but also enable them to collect other valuable data about how their spaces are used. 

“Envoy Workplace data helps me create a more personalized experience for our employees without having them fill out a form every week.” 

Results with Envoy: Seamless processes and proactive planning

Now, when Accel employees badge into one of their offices, they’re automatically marked onsite via Envoy. Their Workplace team can easily spot trends in onsite attendance and plan ahead. “Envoy Workplace data helps me create a more personalized experience for our employees without having them fill out a form every week—for example, if I know we tend to have our vegetarian team members onsite on Tuesdays, I can make sure to have those special meals ready for them,” says Dixon. “Envoy helps us make our overall operations more efficient and proactive while keeping that personal touch we want to provide for our employees.”

Dixon’s team saves about two hours a day by automating employee check-ins to each of their offices. “The time our team saves each week by using Envoy adds up to an entire day of work,” says Dixon. She also saves an additional 40 hours each quarter now that she no longer has to clean up the data to pull occupancy and space utilization reports. 

The workplace team can now quantify their busy times and use those numbers to make better decisions about their spaces and resources. Envoy’s room booking features make it easy for employees to reserve spaces for impromptu catch-ups or planned client meetings. Room usage data is automatically updated in Envoy’s analytics dashboards, where the Workplace team can see real-time charts on room bookings by day, most popular room capacities or amenities, and more. 

One way Dixon’s team is using this data is to find ways to better utilize the space they have. Her team identified an underutilized room, which they were able to figure out was because it tended to run warmer than the rest of the office. They also learned there was one Accel employee who loved that room exactly for that reason, and the Workplace team can now give that person a more personalized experience (i.e. a warmer temperature setting) thanks to that intel. 

Data-driven space planning and office layout changes 

Data is also driving Dixon’s push to create a more eco-friendly and energy-efficient workplace. With accurate numbers to back up their planning efforts, the Workplace team is able to plan any changes to their spaces and resources more effectively.

When planning for the renovation of the second floor of their Palo Alto office, Dixon and her team were able to use Envoy data to answer questions such as, “Do we actually need 20 assigned desks here?” Lexi shares that, “Based on the trend we’re seeing, we can change this section of the office to a cluster of hotel desks.” According to Dixon, “We were able to modify and improve some of our construction plans and office layout design based on the trends we saw in our Envoy reports from just half a year’s worth of data.” 

What’s next for Accel

Accel’s Workplace Experience team is continuing to find new ways to make improvements in their workplace operations and create great experiences for their employees. Dixon shared her hopes to keep encouraging their people to use their spaces: “The longer we use Envoy, the more data we’ll be able to use for forecasting. We’ll be able to see where the trends are and hone in on what we can improve. There's so much more that we can pull out that we haven't even thought of yet. We're still early on in the brainstorming phase of what we can do with our workplace and people data.”

“The longer we use Envoy, the more data we’ll be able to use for forecasting. We’ll be able to see where the trends are and hone in on what we can improve.”