One of the biggest misconceptions in workplace strategy is that it starts with design.
It doesn’t.
It’s easy to jump straight to polished renderings, attractive worksettings, and “Here’s one we did earlier” examples - they certainly catch the uninformed eye during the procurement process - but workplace strategy is not interior design applied at scale.
A successful workplace begins with understanding the business itself.
Why Workplace Strategy Begins Before Design
Before we can talk about layouts, furniture, or aesthetics, we need to understand:
How people actually work
Where work happens most effectively
Which activities require in-person interaction
Who collaborates with whom
What prevents people from doing their best work
How culture, leadership, process, and technology influence performance
This discovery and diagnostic phase is the foundation of every successful workplace strategy.
Understanding How People and Organizations Work
Without it, organizations risk creating beautiful spaces that fail operationally because they were designed around assumptions, trends, or another company’s solution. What worked for one company may completely fail for another because every organization has different:
Work processes
Team dynamics
Cultural behaviors
Leadership styles
Collaboration patterns
Operational pressures
The workplace should be a response to those realities - not a copy-and-paste exercise.
Using Workplace Research to Inform Better Decisions
We spend significant time understanding the nature of work before developing solutions.
Through leadership interviews, manager discussions, workshops, activity analysis, collaboration mapping, and employee engagement, we build both a top-down and bottom-up understanding of the organization. Supported by our Workplace Experience Platform, this process allows us to capture work activities, interaction patterns, workplace preferences, operational challenges, and cultural dynamics quickly and at scale across entire businesses.
The result is not simply opinion or assumption, but meaningful evidence about how work is actually undertaken, where friction exists, and what employees and teams need in order to perform at their best.
These insights become the foundation for the wider project brief — informing workplace design, architectural planning, technology strategy, operational protocols, change management activities, and ultimately the real estate strategy itself.
Creating Workplaces That Support People and Performance
When workplace solutions are shaped through deep engagement and evidence-based understanding, the outcomes are typically more effective, better adopted by employees, and more closely aligned with the long-term objectives, culture, and ways of working of the organization.
Because the goal is not simply to create a space that looks impressive.
The goal is to create an environment that helps people:
Connect more effectively
Share knowledge
Mentor and learn
Focus deeply
Collaborate intentionally
Build stronger working relationships
Perform at their best
Good workplace strategy is people-centric, operationally informed, and evidence-based.
The aesthetics come later.
And when the groundwork has been done properly, the design becomes far more meaningful because it reflects the organization itself, not the latest workplace trend.
Updated: 4 days ago
Shared desking is becoming a natural part of workplace strategy as organizations adapt their offices to the way work has changed. But one of the mistakes I see quite often is that the conversation starts in entirely the wrong place: with the desk-sharing ratio.
Why Desk-Sharing Ratios Are the Wrong Starting Point
“We’re going to move to eight desks for every ten people.” Or perhaps six for ten, or five for ten. Whatever the number happens to be, the problem is that the moment you lead with the ratio, the message employees hear is very simple: “You had something before, and now we’re taking some of it away.”
That is not a particularly helpful starting point for workplace change, especially when the real opportunity should be almost the exact opposite. Done properly, shared desking should not be about giving people less. It should be about giving them access to more of the spaces they actually need to do their jobs well.
Designing Workplaces Around How People Actually Work
Work has changed enormously over the last few years. For many people, a typical working day is no longer eight hours sitting at the same desk doing broadly the same type of work. It is a mixture of individual focus, Teams or Zoom calls, formal meetings, informal conversations, project work, collaboration, mentoring, learning and social interaction. Some of those activities can be done very effectively at home, while others are much better when people are together.
If the nature of work has changed, then the workplace has to change with it.
That means moving away from offices dominated by rows of individual desks and cubicles, and towards a broader mix of settings that support the different things people are actually doing during the working day.
But there is an important distinction here. The answer is not simply to take out a large number of desks and replace them with sofas, booths, pods and high tables because they look contemporary. That is not workplace strategy; it is closer to creating a furniture showroom.
Using Workplace Data to Determine Space Requirements
The only sensible way to develop a new workplace is to first understand, in some detail, how people actually work. What activities are they doing? How frequently are they doing them? How long do those activities typically last? How many people are involved? Who do they need to interact with, and is that interaction normally virtual or face-to-face? Which activities are more productive in the office, and which are better carried out elsewhere?
You then need to understand how those patterns differ across the organization, because the accountant does not work in the same way as the marketing team, the HR team does not have the same requirements as a project team, and a one-size-fits-all solution is unlikely to work particularly well for any of them.
Once you have that information, the conversation becomes much more useful because you can start to quantify what the workplace actually needs. You can begin to understand how many focus spaces are required, how many small rooms are needed for virtual calls, how much informal collaboration space is appropriate, what size meeting rooms are necessary, which teams need to sit near one another and which settings are likely to be used frequently rather than occasionally.
That is the point at which the workplace becomes evidence-based rather than assumption-based.
At CRUX, this is why we spend so much time understanding activities, attendance, interactions, worksetting preferences and relationships between teams before developing the workplace solution. The range and quantity of worksettings should emerge from the work people are doing rather than from a predetermined target for how many desks somebody believes can be removed. Our own methodology is deliberately built around capturing those activities and preferences and translating them into a space budget and workplace configuration.
Why Employee Engagement Matters in Workplace Change
There is another important part of this, and that is engagement. You cannot really understand how people work without speaking to the people who are actually doing the work.
Employees understand the detail of their roles and the day-to-day frustrations that may not be visible from elsewhere in the organization. Managers understand how their teams operate, where the pressure points are and what might be changing. Leaders understand the wider direction of the business and what the organization is trying to achieve over the coming years. You need all three perspectives if the workplace is going to support both the people using it and the business itself.
Engagement also has another benefit: it helps people become part of the process rather than simply having a new workplace imposed on them. That matters because moving towards shared settings can represent a significant change, particularly for somebody who has had their own desk or office for many years.
If the first thing they hear is that their desk is being taken away and they are now expected to share, it is hardly surprising if the reaction is negative.
But the conversation is quite different if people can see that the workplace has been developed around the activities they actually carry out and that, in return for giving up ownership of one particular desk, they gain access to a much wider range of spaces that are better suited to different parts of their working day.
The message then stops being, “We’re taking your desk away.” Instead, it becomes, “We’re giving you a better workplace.”
Fewer Desks, More Choice
That, for me, is the real opportunity. You may end up with fewer traditional desks, but you should have considerably more choice. You may have less ownership of one particular piece of furniture, but you gain better access to spaces designed for focus, collaboration, virtual calls, meetings, learning and social interaction.
This is why I think the idea of “less is more” is useful when we talk about the modern workplace, but only with an important qualification. Less is only more if you know exactly what you need more of.
And you only know that by doing the analysis, engaging the workforce and allowing the evidence to shape the solution.
Start with What Your Workforce Needs
So before starting the debate about whether the right desk ratio is eight-to-ten, six-to-ten or something else entirely, I would start with a much simpler question:
What does your workforce actually need the workplace to help them do?
Get that right, and the ratio will follow.
The Little Things We Don’t Talk About
There are more choices than ever in how we go about our work. Should this be an email, a Teams message, or a phone call? Is now a good time to interrupt? Should I schedule time or send a quick message? Where is it okay to take a virtual call?
For some people, talking through these details can feel unnecessary. “We have work to do, so why do we need to discuss exactly how we’re going to do it?” Yet most of us develop preferences and habits around these decisions whether we discuss them or not.
Don’t text me about work. Call me if it’s urgent. Send me a Teams message before stopping by. Put time on my calendar rather than asking if I’m free.
None of these preferences are inherently right or wrong, and they don’t all need to become rules. The challenge is that our teammates are developing their own systems too, and our systems don’t always match.
As the number of ways we communicate and work together has grown, there is simply more to misunderstand. Talking about some of these seemingly small details can make it easier to establish what works for the team, rather than leaving everyone to figure it out individually.
When We Can’t Just Pick It Up Along the Way
For much of our working lives, many of the everyday practices that helped teams work together didn’t need to be formally discussed. Some expectations came from the organization or manager, while others were simply picked up by working alongside colleagues and observing how they communicated, organized their work, and navigated the workday.
We could see when someone was busy. We learned who preferred a quick conversation and who wanted an email. We noticed where conversations happened and how the team generally operated. While there less platforms for communicating, there was still plenty of room for misunderstanding, but many of these unwritten practices were visible.
As more of our work happens through technology and teams work across different locations and schedules, there is more that we can’t learn simply by observing. At the same time, people have more options for developing their own ways of communicating, organizing information, and accomplishing their work.
What works perfectly well for one person may not work particularly well when it intersects with someone else’s system. That doesn’t mean everyone needs to work in the same way.
It does mean there may be value in talking about things we once expected people to simply figure out.
How Team Norms Make the Invisible “Onboardable”
In our work, we often recommend team norm conversations as one way to provide some structure for these discussions. The conversation might include how different communication platforms are used, when people are generally available for collaboration, expectations around responsiveness, meeting practices, or how the team prefers to use different spaces within the workplace.
Knowing that an organization’s working hours are 8:00 to 5:00, for example, doesn’t necessarily tell someone whether 8:00 is an optimal time to schedule meetings. Talking about these details gives people an opportunity to share what works for them while also considering what works for everyone else.
From there, the team can establish what makes sense most of the time, grounded in organizational guidance and with room for flexibility when business needs require it.
Documenting what emerges can also make the team’s unwritten practices easier for new employees to understand. Instead of spending months observing, interpreting, and trying to figure out how the team operates, they have a clearer starting point.
As new people join, priorities shift, and new technologies are introduced, these conversations can be revisited, allowing the team’s ways of working to evolve alongside the people and work.
Do Team Norms Mean More Rules?
One understandable concern is that discussing this level of detail could create unnecessary rigidity. Does every communication preference or workplace behavior really need its own rule? The purpose isn’t to create a policy for every interaction or accommodate every individual preference.
It’s to build consensus and align on expectations for how the team can work together effectively, while being supportive of different working styles. Sometimes, a point of friction that has persisted for some time can be relatively simple to address once it is brought into the open.
In one workshop, a team realized their standing meeting consistently overlapped with the on-site staff’s break. Those employees had been quietly missing their only opportunity for lunch, assuming leadership already knew. Once it was raised, the leader could consider whether another time would work better. The change barely registered for anyone else, but it meaningfully improved morale for the people affected.
Team Norms Can Support Workplace Change
We often recommend these conversations alongside workplace change initiatives, when teams are already adapting to new environments or ways of working. They can help connect changes to the physical workplace with the everyday behaviors that make those environments work.
Making time for conversations doesn't require a workplace change initiative or a formal Team Norms process. Any team can become a little more curious about the invisible practices shaping how its members work together.
Better Teamwork Starts with Better Understanding
Having conversations about how we work may require a little more openness than some of us are accustomed to. It can feel unnecessary to explain something that seems obvious, particularly when teams have managed for years without discussing these details.
Yet the way we work has changed. We have more platforms, more locations, more flexibility, and more individual ways of navigating the workday. Making some of our assumptions and preferences visible can help us understand where they align and where they don’t.
The goal isn’t to discuss everything. It’s to talk about enough of the right things that people can spend a little less time navigating one another’s invisible systems and more time focused on the work itself.
Want to Have Better Conversations About How Your Teams Work?
CRUX helps organizations and teams establish clearer ways of working as part of workplace strategy and change.
Team Norm conversations can help make expectations more visible, support new ways of working, and give teams a practical framework for discussing how they communicate, collaborate, and use the workplace.