The biggest workplace decisions are often made too early, before there is enough evidence about how people actually work.
Usually there is a perfectly valid trigger. A lease is approaching its end, the existing office feels too large or too small, the business is growing, attendance has changed, or leadership wants more people back in the office.
The problem comes when that trigger immediately becomes a design exercise. Before the organization has properly understood the work the space needs to support, people are already talking about square footage, desk-sharing ratios and meeting room numbers.
An architect may be producing test fits. Leadership may be debating whether people should attend two, three or four days each week. Decisions are starting to be made about what the next workplace should contain, and then somebody asks, ‘How many desks do you need?’ At that point, the weaknesses in the process can start to show.
But one fairly fundamental question can get missed along the way.
How does the organization actually work?
For me, that should come before almost everything else.
Space should be the consequence of understanding work
Historically, workplace planning was relatively straightforward. If an organization employed 1,000 predominantly office-based people, the starting assumption was broadly that it needed somewhere around 1,000 places for them to sit. Add meeting rooms, support space and amenities and you had the foundations of a space program.
That relationship between headcount and space has become much less reliable.
People now perform their work across different locations, at different times and in very different ways. Even within the same organization, two departments with similar headcounts may place completely different demands on the workplace.
One team might spend much of its week doing concentrated individual work, with relatively infrequent reasons to come together. Another might depend heavily on project collaboration, mentoring, informal conversations, client meetings and frequent interaction across several other departments.
Giving those teams identical allocations simply because they each contain 50 people misses something fairly important. It is the nature of the work, rather than just the number of workers, that ultimately creates demand for space.
That changes the questions we should be asking.
Instead of beginning with how many desks a team needs, I want to understand what people actually do during a typical week. Which activities benefit from being undertaken together? Which are more effectively performed independently? How much collaboration takes place, with whom, how often and in groups of what size? Where does knowledge exchange happen? What brings people into the office in the first place?
Once those things become clearer, the workplace requirement starts to emerge from the evidence rather than from assumptions.
We have more workplace data than ever, but not necessarily more understanding
There is another interesting contradiction in today's workplace industry. Organizations have access to enormous amounts of data about their offices. Badge systems can tell us when people enter the building. Sensors can tell us whether spaces are occupied. Wi-Fi, booking systems and other technologies can provide increasingly sophisticated pictures of utilization.
All of that information has value - but there is an important distinction between measuring what people are doing in the workplace today and understanding what the organization will need from its workplace tomorrow.
Knowing that 400 people entered a building on Tuesday does not tell me why they came in. It doesn't tell me what they were trying to accomplish, whether they found the spaces they needed, who they wanted to interact with, or whether the workplace helped or hindered them.
Most importantly, it doesn't necessarily tell me whether those same people would behave differently if the workplace itself were different. This is why I have always been cautious about designing a future workplace solely around utilization of the existing one. You risk becoming very good at measuring yesterday.
The more interesting question is what work people need to undertake in the future and what environment will allow them to undertake it most effectively.
A hybrid workplace isn't simply an office with fewer desks
This distinction has become particularly important as organizations have adapted to hybrid working. If employees are spending fewer days in the office, there is an understandable temptation to conclude that the organization simply needs fewer desks. In some cases that may be true, but reducing the number of desks in a traditional office doesn't suddenly turn it into a high-performing hybrid workplace.
We need to think about what has changed.
If people can successfully undertake a large proportion of their individual focus work elsewhere, the reason for coming to the office often shifts. Being with colleagues, collaborating, learning, mentoring, exchanging knowledge and maintaining relationships become more important components of the workplace experience. Yet many offices still devote the overwhelming majority of their space to individual desks and then wonder why employees do not see a compelling reason to travel there.
That doesn't mean every organization should replace desks with collaboration spaces. There is no universal formula. Some roles require considerably more individual workplace provision than others, and even highly mobile employees still need appropriate spaces for focus when they are in the office. The point is that the mix should be determined by the work.
A workplace might ultimately need fewer conventional workstations and more project areas, small meeting settings, quiet rooms, team spaces, social areas or other activity-based settings. Another organization might reach a completely different conclusion.
Both can be correct if they reflect how those particular organizations operate.
The same principle applies before you start drawing
I see a similar issue when organizations begin evaluating potential buildings or commissioning test fits. A test fit is an extremely useful tool, but only if the assumptions behind it are sound.
It is quite possible to give a design team a headcount, an assumed attendance level, a desk-sharing ratio and a required number of meeting rooms and ask them to fit everything into a building. They will almost certainly be able to produce a plan.
What that plan cannot tell you is whether the original assumptions were right.
A much stronger brief begins with a deeper understanding of the organization itself. We can start to explain not just how many people there are, but how attendance varies, what people will be doing when they arrive, which teams need to interact, what types of interaction take place and what range of settings those activities require. At that point, the test fit stops being an exercise in fitting furniture into a floor plate and becomes a genuine test of the workplace strategy.
That is a subtle difference, but an important one.
Understanding the work doesn't slow the project down
There can sometimes be a concern that undertaking this kind of discovery adds another stage to an already busy real estate or design program. My experience has generally been the opposite.
The time spent understanding the organization at the beginning is usually considerably less than the time lost later redesigning layouts, revisiting desk ratios, changing furniture quantities or discovering that important operational requirements were never included in the original brief. It also changes the quality of the conversation with senior leadership.
Instead of recommending a particular amount of space because it seems reasonable, we can explain the relationship between the business, its people, their activities, their interactions and the workplace required to support them.
The square footage then becomes an outcome of the strategy rather than the strategy itself. That is a much stronger basis on which to make a long-term real estate decision.
Perhaps we're starting with the wrong question
Workplace projects inevitably need to answer questions about space. How much do we need? How many desks should we provide? What should the office contain? How should teams be organized? What sort of workplace should we design? Those are all important questions.
I just don't think they should be the first ones.
Before deciding how much space you need, where people should work or how your next workplace should be designed, spend some time understanding the organization underneath it. Understand the work people actually do, the activities that bring them together, the relationships that matter and the conditions that allow them to perform at their best.
Once you understand that, decisions about the workplace become considerably easier.
And perhaps more importantly, you have a much better chance of designing a workplace around the organization you are becoming, rather than simply recreating the one you already have.
If you'd like to understand more about your organization, how everyone works, and how that will influence your future real estate and workplace needs, do reach out.
One of the more interesting things about workplace change is how often the visible part of the project gets mistaken for the whole thing.
A leadership team commissions a new office. The design is thoughtful, the space planning is intelligent, and the finished environment reflects everything the organization says it wants to become. There is more variety, more flexibility, more room for collaboration, and a clearer response to hybrid working than the office it replaced.
On paper, it all makes perfect sense.
And yet, once people move in, the hoped-for shift does not always follow. Employees look for familiar desks, teams recreate old patterns of occupation, and meeting rooms become the default solution for almost everything. The new workplace may be visually different, but the underlying behaviors remain stubbornly familiar.
That is usually the point at which people begin questioning the design. Perhaps there are not enough desks. Perhaps there are too many shared settings. Perhaps the collaboration spaces are not quite right.
Sometimes those issues are real, but more often the deeper challenge sits elsewhere. The workplace has changed, but the organization has not yet made the transition with it.
A new office, however well designed, does not in itself create new ways of working.
Why New Workplaces Don't Automatically Change Behaviors
Whenever expectations are disrupted, people experience a loss of certainty. That is true in organizations just as much as it is anywhere else. When employees move from cellular space into team neighborhoods, when assigned desks are replaced by shared settings, or when hybrid work changes the rhythm of when and how people come together, something more than furniture changes. The unwritten rules of daily working life begin to shift as well.
That is where uncertainty enters.
People start asking practical questions that are rarely answered by the design alone. Where should I sit if I am only in for part of the week? How should my team coordinate when some people are remote and others are in the office? What happens to habits and signals that used to make the working day feel predictable?
If those questions are left unanswered, people do what most of us do in periods of ambiguity. They fall back on what is familiar. They reconstruct old habits inside the new environment and, in doing so, dilute much of the value the project was intended to create.
This is why workplace change management matters so much. Its purpose is not simply to help people tolerate a move. Its purpose is to help them transition into a different way of working, one that allows the new space to perform as intended and enables employees to be productive and effective from day one.
Three Pillars of Successful Workplace Change Management
In our experience, the most effective workplace transitions tend to rest on three foundations: leadership vision and sponsorship, communication, and engagement. None of these are especially glamorous when compared with a finished office, but they are usually the difference between a workplace that merely looks new and one that genuinely supports new behaviors.
1. Leadership Vision and Sponsorship
Workplace change becomes far more difficult when leadership is not aligned on what the change is actually for.
Employees are quick to detect ambiguity. If one leader talks about collaboration, another talks about cost, and a third quietly continues to reward old presenteeism habits, the organization receives a mixed message. People may comply on the surface, but they are unlikely to commit to the shift in any meaningful way.
What successful organizations do differently is establish a common view early. Leaders take the time to align around the purpose of the new workplace, the behaviors it is meant to support, and the broader direction of travel for the organization. That clarity matters because it creates consistency. It gives managers something concrete to model, and it gives employees a rationale they can connect with rather than a set of instructions they are expected to follow blindly.
Visible sponsorship also matters more than many organizations assume. If the senior team does not embody the shift, the rest of the business will treat the new workplace as cosmetic. But when leadership signals, through language and behavior, that the change is real and that it is tied to the future success of the business, people begin to take it seriously.
2. Clear and Consistent Communication
The second pillar is communication, and not in the narrow sense of project updates or rollout notices.
Workplace change is unsettling partly because people fill in gaps with their own assumptions. If communication is sparse, overly technical, or arrives too late, rumor and interpretation take over. Employees begin constructing their own version of what the project means, and that version is rarely as balanced as the one the organization intended.
Good communication lowers the temperature. It explains what is happening, why it is happening, and what people should expect as the project progresses. Just as importantly, it helps people understand what the change means for them in practical terms. That might include how the workplace will be used, how teams will coordinate in a hybrid environment, or what new protocols will help the office function well.
The tone matters here too. The most effective communication does not feel corporate for the sake of it. It feels clear, purposeful, and human. It acknowledges disruption without dramatizing it and gives people enough information to replace uncertainty with understanding.
When communication is done well, people are far less likely to resist simply because they feel left in the dark.
3. Meaningful Employee Engagement
The third pillar, and often the most powerful, is engagement.
Too many workplace projects are still shaped by a relatively closed process in which the solution is designed, refined, and then revealed to employees once most of the important decisions have already been made. Even where the intent is good, that approach often creates distance between the project and the people expected to live with its consequences.
When employees are engaged early, the tone of the whole project changes. They stop feeling like recipients of change and start becoming contributors to it. Their involvement surfaces operational realities that would otherwise be missed, and it creates space for practical conversations about how work really happens rather than how leaders imagine it happens.
Engagement also helps address one of the biggest risks in any workplace transition: the persistence of old habits. When teams are given the opportunity to discuss protocols, behaviors, and agreements for how they will work in the new environment, the workplace becomes less abstract. It starts to feel real, usable, and relevant to the day-to-day experience of getting work done.
In that sense, engagement is not just about consultation. It is about building ownership.
How to Manage a Successful Workplace Transition
What this usually looks like in practice is not a single intervention but a structured journey.
It often begins with senior-level conversations designed to understand objectives, ambitions, concerns, and areas of resistance. From there, a leadership workshop can help create a common vision and establish guiding principles for the workplace and the behaviors expected within it.
Once that foundation is in place, the work broadens. Managers are engaged to explore the realities within their teams, including leadership style, operational needs, and the support they may require as hybrid working becomes more embedded. Change champions can then be brought into the process as a two-way conduit for communication, helping the organization build credibility and gather feedback from within the business rather than only speaking at it.
At team level, the work becomes even more practical. This is where workplace protocols and team agreements start to matter. A flexible workplace works best when people understand how to use it and when teams have had the chance to discuss what will help them perform effectively. Shared spaces, neighborhood settings, remote participation, quiet work, collaboration, and etiquette all need to be translated from design intent into everyday practice.
By the time people move into the new environment, they should not be encountering a completely unfamiliar way of working. They should be stepping into something they have already begun to understand and shape.
Why Workplace Change Management Is Often Overlooked
Part of the reason change management gets overlooked is that workplace projects are frequently framed as design or real estate exercises first. The visible outputs are tangible. There are plans, layouts, finishes, and numbers attached to them. They feel measurable and concrete.
Behavioral transition is less immediately visible, but that does not make it secondary. In many cases it is the part of the project that determines whether the investment delivers value or simply produces a different-looking version of old habits.
This is especially true in hybrid environments, where the office is no longer performing the same role it once did. If people are coming together less frequently, the time they do spend in the workplace needs to work harder. That means clearer protocols, stronger team agreements, more intentional collaboration, and leadership behaviors that support outcomes rather than presenteeism.
Without that shift, organizations can end up with workplaces designed for one model of work and cultures still operating in another.
The Opportunity to Transform How People Work
The encouraging part is that workplace change offers more than a smoother move. Done properly, it gives organizations the opportunity to let go of unhelpful legacy behaviors and replace them with something more aligned to where the business is heading.
That might mean moving away from an overreliance on ownership and territorial habits. It might mean redefining how teams come together, how managers lead dispersed groups, or how the office supports mentoring, collaboration, and social connection in a hybrid world.
In other words, workplace change is not just about helping people cope with a new environment. It is about helping the organization become more intentional in how it works.
That is where the real value sits.
Because when leadership is aligned, communication is clear, and employees have been meaningfully engaged, the office stops being a static backdrop and starts becoming an active enabler of performance, culture, and effectiveness.
Making Workplace Transformation Successful
The most overlooked risk in workplace transformation is not usually poor design. It is the assumption that people will adapt automatically once the project is complete.
They won’t, at least not in the way many organizations hope.
People need context, clarity, and involvement. They need leaders who model the change, communication that makes the journey understandable, and opportunities to shape how the new environment will actually work in practice.
Only then does the workplace begin to deliver on its promise.
Because while design can create the conditions for change, it is people who make the change real.
If you'd like to learn more about this, perhaps in the context of your own workplace, do feel free to reach out for a chat.