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Our approach is grounded in a simple idea: workplace design should be based on real work behaviour, not outdated planning norms or generic ratios.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 While simple, this outdated approach struggles in today's work environments where people don’t work the same way, at the same time, or in the same place.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
Turning Workplace Strategy into an Enterprise Design Guide
For enterprise organizations managing dozens of offices and hundreds or thousands of employees, a standard design guide can be an invaluable tool. It helps internal teams move faster, align nationally, and retain a sense of brand cohesion across sites.
But if the foundation of that guide is a default layout or a dated idea of seniority, it risks falling short of what modern work actually requires.
The best approach starts not with precedent, but with evidence. And we’ve found that the most successful design guides are those that are strategically standardized and locally adaptable, informed by how people need to work, not just where they sit.
Why Enterprise Workplace Design Guides Matter
Our enterprise clients often request design guides for good reason. These tools help internal ownership by enabling in-house design, project and FM teams to act autonomously within a defined framework.
They support scalability, allowing for rollouts across regions and business units to move more quickly. They offer clarity for vendors, landlords, and architects and ensure consistency in experience and compliance across a portfolio.
Activity-Based Working: Designing for Needs, Not Titles
While some organizations still ask us to include layouts that reflect leadership seniority, and we accommodate this where appropriate, we approach it as a design tweak, not the underlying framework.
The core of our methodology is Activity-Based Working: matching worksettings to workstyles, activities and interactions - not titles.
That means private spaces are available not just for executives, but for anyone who needs deep focus, confidentiality, or specialist functionality.
Leadership needs such as acoustic privacy and high-stakes meetings are real and valid, but they don’t dictate the core of the workplace model. Instead, they are thoughtfully integrated where and when they are truly needed.
Building an Evidence-Based Workplace Design Guide
Our enterprise design guides are not templates. They’re evidence-based playbooks that begin with deep engagement:
Workplace Experience Platform: Captures data about tasks, locations, collaboration needs, and builds personas and activity profiles.
Space Budget Module: Translates that data into a spatial recipe – how many seats, rooms, booths, hubs, and informal settings each team actually needs.
Concept Zoning & Neighborhood Planning: Zoned spaces around team needs and adjacencies, supporting both structured and serendipitous interaction.
Creating a Flexible Toolkit of Workplace Settings
Our worksetting taxonomy is wide-ranging and fully illustrated, ready to slot into any guide:
Focus Settings: Quiet Booths, Study Pods, Phone/VC Pods -
Individual Work: Open Plan Desks, Touchdowns, Perches
Collaboration Spaces: Informal Lounges, Media VC Rooms, Huddle and Project Spaces
Leadership-Ready: Private Offices, Boardrooms, Training Zones
Support & Amenity: Resource Hubs, Wellness Rooms, Tea Points, Storage, Reception
Each setting is matched with purpose and use case, acoustic and visual privacy levels, tech integrations, and planning examples. This enables procurement teams to select furniture and tech with confidence.
Translating Workplace Strategy into Interior Design
Once we’ve defined the spatial framework and functional requirements, we bring in interior design collaborators to add depth and character. This stage translates the strategy into spaces that reflect brand, inspire creativity, and elevate the user experience.
We focus on materiality, ambiance, and sensory design — elements that help people feel both supported and energized in the space. Approved vendor products are integrated at this point to streamline specification and procurement, while ensuring consistency across projects.
Balancing Workplace Standardization and Local Flexibility
What results is not a static document, but a flexible toolkit — one that brings structure without rigidity. These guides allow internal teams to design with confidence while adapting to local constraints, cultural nuances, or lease conditions. They’re detailed enough to offer guardrails, yet open enough to foster creativity and responsiveness.
The outcome?
Workplace experiences that are aligned to business goals, yet still tailored to teams.
Spaces that scale with purpose, not just preference.
Getting Started with an Enterprise Workplace Design Guide
If your business is considering a workplace design guide, or your current one feels out of step with how your teams actually work, we’d love to help. Our Workplace Experience platform, space budgeting, and layout planning tools create a ready-made foundation for any workplace playbook.
And when paired with the right design partner, it becomes a powerful blueprint for the future of work — wherever you work.
Let's turn your insights into action.
Updated: Oct 15
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.