As organizations settle into more flexible ways of working, the challenge isn’t simply reducing space or adding new worksettings. It’s designing a workplace that genuinely supports how people work, and one that people trust and choose to use.
Our approach is grounded in a simple idea: workplace design should be based on real work behaviour, not outdated planning norms or generic ratios.
From Headcount to Human Behavior: Understanding How People Work
Traditional space planning starts with headcount and applies broad assumptions — desks per person, meeting rooms per floor, collaboration space as a percentage uplift. While simple, this outdated approach struggles in today's work environments where people don’t work the same way, at the same time, or in the same place.
We begin by understanding work as it actually happens.
Using our Workplace Experience Platform, employees:
describe the activities they perform during a typical working week,
indicate how much time they spend on each activity,
select the worksettings they feel best support those activities, and
identify their key collaborators and the types of collaboration that are most productive.
This is critical. Rather than consultants or designers guessing what spaces are needed, employees directly shape the demand profile, for focus, collaboration, meetings, project work, and support activities.
The result is a dataset that reflects real behaviour, real preferences, and real constraints, not abstract workplace theory.
Just as importantly, this process gives people a voice early. A co-created approach to workplace design. That involvement builds understanding, credibility, and trust before any design decisions are made.
From Employee Participation to an Evidence-Based Space Strategy
Employee inputs are then translated into a robust, activity-based space 'budget'. Activity time (normalised to a typical working week) is converted into demand for specific worksettings, aggregated by team and location, and adjusted for efficiency, attendance patterns and options to consider whether planning is based on average or peak presence.
Because utilization is driven by activity duration, not blunt desk-sharing ratios, the model works across hybrid, flexible, and traditional office environments. It provides clear, evidence-based answers to the questions leaders care about:
How many worksettings do we actually need?
What mix best supports focus, collaboration, and meetings?
How much space is required, and why?
The outcome is a transparent, auditable space budget grounded in how people say they work.
The Role of Professional Insight in Flexible Workplace Planning
Data alone doesn’t create a successful workplace, interpretation does. Every space budget is reviewed by an experienced workplace strategy consultant, alongside:
open-text employee feedback,
executive and departmental leadership interviews,
business priorities, growth plans, and operational constraints.
Using professional judgement, the worksetting mix is calibrated and moderated to ensure the workplace is not only efficient, but practical, resilient, and aligned with organizational culture.
This step turns participation and data into a solution that works in the real world.
Supporting Collaboration Through Workplace Neighborhood Planning
The moderated space budget is then translated into a concept-level design using our neighborhood planning model. Neighborhoods are configured to bring together the right balance of focus, collaboration, meeting, and support spaces, enabling teams to work effectively while allowing collaboration to happen naturally and organically through shared spaces with key collaborators in adjacent neighborhoods.
Rather than relying on isolated settings scattered across a floorplate, rigid grid layouts, or a central "furniture showroom" the neighborhood model ensures:
proximity between collaborators,
clear relationships between different work modes,
and flexibility without chaos.
Because employees helped define the inputs, the resulting workplace feels intentional, not imposed.
Why Activity-Based Workplace Design Matters
ABW isn’t just a spatial shift; it’s a behavioural one. When people recognize their own work patterns and preferences reflected in the workplace, adoption is faster, resistance is lower, and change is more sustainable.
By combining employee participation, data-led analysis, and expert calibration, our approach helps organizations create flexible workplaces that are:
right-sized,
fit for purpose,
and genuinely used by the people they’re designed to support.
That’s how we move from theory to successful reality.
Drop me an email if you feel this may be a useful approach for your company
In today’s hybrid and flexible world, many assume it's the younger workforce pushing hardest to stay home. But our data tells a more nuanced story.
Across our global client base, we’re seeing a clear trend: younger employees and those newer in role actually show a stronger preference for in-office attendance—not because they’ve been told to, but because they want to learn.
They want proximity. They want context. They want career development.
And above all, they want access to the wisdom of those who’ve been there before.
The Mentorship Gap in Hybrid Workplaces
The challenge? The very people best equipped to offer this - experienced, well-networked, high-performing senior staff - are the ones least likely to be in the office regularly.
While newer employees come in looking for guidance and visibility, their senior colleagues are often elsewhere; working from home, in meetings, or immersed in back-to-back calls.
Even when senior team members are present in open office environments, they’re often less accessible—behind laptop screens, on video calls, or locked into established work patterns that make spontaneous interaction and impromptu workplace mentorship rare.
It’s not just about mentoring. It’s about learning through osmosis: hearing how problems get solved, seeing leadership in action, absorbing culture and nuance by being in the room.
But when that room is empty, or when it's filled with Zoom calls and closed doors, those opportunities vanish.
The Value of Social Connection Across Generations
We also see that junior employees are more likely to seek cross-functional friendships and spontaneous social engagement.
These moments, grabbing coffee with someone from another team, chatting at a communal table, often lead to stronger networks and broader context.
But this kind of casual interaction is just as valuable for seasoned employees, who can sometimes fall into established grooves. Getting out of the routine, being visible, and making time for informal connection isn’t just beneficial for others—it can reignite a sense of purpose and fresh perspective for senior staff, too.
Designing Workplaces for Intergenerational Learning
At CRUX Workplace, our work across sectors shows that intentional design and targeted behavior change can close this gap—encouraging visibility, mentoring, and even unstructured social connection across generations:
Collaboration zones and shared “neighborhoods” encourage visibility across levels.
Role-based attendance guidance helps clarify expectations without imposing mandates.
Change management programs reframe office presence as a leadership act—not just a convenience.
Mentoring programs and team agreements surface unspoken needs and create shared commitments across generations.
We’ve also found that Activity-Based Working (ABW) models support this well. ABW gives people the choice of where and how to work, but within an environment intentionally designed to spark interaction and learning. When implemented well, it’s not about forcing anyone in. It’s about giving them a reason to come in.
Leadership Means Showing Up
This is where senior leadership has a real opportunity. Not to mandate. But to model.
Being in the office, occasionally, intentionally, and visibly can have an outsized impact on junior talent. It builds trust. It sparks learning. It keeps the next generation connected to the organization and confident in their growth.
Let’s not allow the office to become a ghost town for newcomers.
Sometimes, teaching an old dog new tricks just means reminding them how much they have to offer.
As organizations continue to rethink the role of the office, it’s become clear that the path to modern workplace strategy differs markedly between the UK and the US. Both markets are now pursuing similar goals: more flexibility, more collaborative space, more value per square foot — but their starting points and trajectories have been very different.
Understanding those differences isn’t just an academic exercise. For organizations operating across both regions, a successful strategy needs to respect the local context, legal, cultural, and spatial.
At CRUX Workplace and IPWC, we’ve built our methodologies around exactly that: providing informed, grounded workplace strategy tailored to how each market has evolved.
UK Workplace Strategy: Building on a Culture of Flexibility
The UK has had flexible working legislation in place since 2003, and many employers were early adopters of remote and hybrid working models. Activity-Based Working (ABW) principles have long been integrated into office design, with progressive management styles enabling shared space use, non-territorial working, and a culture of trust allowing flexibility in the location of work.
When the pandemic arrived, the transition to mass remote work was not such a shock to the system for most professional services employees, it was an acceleration of an existing trajectory. As a result, today’s office strategies in the UK are often iterative rather than revolutionary.
Change management focuses on enhancements: refining worksettings, aligning environments with evolving team needs, and optimizing portfolios in a measured way.
At IPWC, our UK workplace practice reflects this maturity. Our methodology builds on what's already familiar to UK organizations, supporting evolution, not wholesale reinvention.
US Workplace Strategy: A Moment of Transformation
By contrast, many US organizations entered the pandemic with a more traditional office mindset. In-office attendance was the norm, with workspace design focused heavily on individual, task-based environments: cubicles, private offices, and assigned desks.
The sudden pivot to remote work exposed the limitations of those legacy layouts. Once associated with productivity, static environments quickly became redundant. As employees adapted to new ways of working, leadership teams were forced to reconsider long-held assumptions about visibility, presence, and performance.
This disruption created a need for deeper, more transformational change. In the US, workplace strategy has become a quantum leap: from fixed to flexible, from ownership to access, from layout to behavior.
At CRUX Workplace, we’ve developed a methodology tailored to this moment, supporting first-time adoption of ABW, defining new working norms, and helping organizations lead through uncertainty.
Global Workplace Strategy for a Distributed Workforce
For multinational organizations with offices across both the UK and the US, consistency is important — but so is local relevance.
A one-size-fits-all global workplace strategy risks falling flat in one market or the other.
Through our combined expertise, CRUX in the US, IPWC in the UK, we offer integrated, bi-regional support. That means:
Shared principles tailored to local expectations.
Aligned design frameworks with cultural nuance.
Unified reporting and benchmarking across geographies.
Workplace strategy is never just about space. It’s about people, context, and culture. And when those factors differ by country, your strategy should too.