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.