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.
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.
Reach out if you feel this is something we can help you with.
One of the most overlooked moments in a workplace project is not the employee engagement phase, the executive workshops, or even the design presentations.
It is the handover.
After months of workplace strategy work, stakeholder interviews, employee engagement, adjacency mapping, space budgeting, and concept planning, many organizations assume the hard work is done. The workplace strategy receives approval, the project moves forward, and an interior design team is appointed to develop the detailed design.
Unfortunately, this is often where things start to go wrong. Over the years, we have seen a recurring pattern. A comprehensive workplace strategy is completed and approved. Then, for any number of reasons, the project pauses. Lease negotiations continue. Budgets are reviewed. Internal priorities shift.
Months can pass before designers are engaged. By the time the project resumes, the workplace strategy report may have become little more than a reference document sitting in a shared drive.
The result is predictable.
Design teams begin creating layouts without fully understanding the rationale behind the recommendations. Important insights become diluted. Design decisions revert to personal preferences, historical precedents, or assumptions about how people work rather than the evidence gathered during the strategy phase.
The workplace strategy becomes something that informed the project rather than something that actively guided it. That is a missed opportunity.
The Workplace Strategy Report Is Not the End of the Journey
A good workplace strategy is not simply a collection of findings. It is the blueprint for how the organization intends to work in the future.
The insights report typically contains a significant amount of evidence and direction, including:
Workforce personas and work patterns
Space budgets by team and function
Adjacency requirements between departments
Workplace planning principles
Concept zoning and layout strategies
Change management considerations
Future ways of working guidance
These outputs are not design suggestions. They are design inputs.
They represent months of engagement, analysis, and alignment across employees, managers, and leadership teams.
They provide the foundation upon which the detailed design should be built.
As we often say, workplace strategy is the foundation of a good workplace. The concept layouts, adjacency mapping, and space budgets are specifically developed to guide the next stage of design.
Why the Handover from Workplace Strategy to Design Matters
The transition between workplace strategy and detailed design deserves far more attention than it typically receives.
At CRUX, we view this stage as a formal briefing process rather than a simple document transfer.
The design team needs to understand not only what was recommended, but why.
For example:
A space budget is not simply a schedule of accommodation. It reflects activity data, attendance patterns, worksetting preferences, and collaboration requirements.
An adjacency map is not just a diagram. It represents critical relationships that support knowledge exchange, communication, innovation, and team effectiveness.
A concept layout is not a finished floorplan. It is a translation of workplace evidence into a spatial framework that guides the detailed design process.
Without understanding the reasoning behind these outputs, even the most talented design teams can unintentionally move away from the original objectives.
This is why a structured handover workshop is so important. The process should include a detailed briefing of the design team, a review of the workplace strategy methodology, and access to supporting information including space budgets, adjacency mapping, concept layouts, planning principles, and engagement insights.
The objective is to ensure the design team understands both the evidence and the intent behind the recommendations.
The Risk of Workplace Design Drift
Once the design process begins, it is completely natural for the project to evolve. Designers will test ideas. Stakeholders will have preferences. Budgets will be reviewed. Technical constraints will appear. New information will emerge as the project becomes more detailed.
None of this is a problem. In fact, it is part of a healthy design process. The issue arises when these decisions start to move the project away from the principles established during the workplace strategy. Often this happens slowly.
A collaboration space is reduced slightly. A neighborhood loses one of its shared settings.
A key team adjacency is adjusted because it makes the plan a little easier to resolve. A worksetting is removed to accommodate another requirement. Each decision may seem perfectly reasonable at the time. But collectively, they can begin to change the workplace experience.
This is what I think of as design drift.
It is not usually the result of poor decision-making. More often, it is the result of people making practical decisions without continually checking them against the original intent of the strategy.
How Design Governance Creates Better Workplace Outcomes
This is why I believe the workplace strategy team should remain involved during the design journey. Not to control the design, but to help protect the logic behind it.
Good design governance is not about slowing the project down or limiting creativity.
It is about creating a regular opportunity to ask whether the developing design is still doing what it set out to do.
Are the right teams still close to each other? Does the space budget still reflect the needs captured during engagement? Are the planning principles still visible in the layout? Is the design still supporting the future way of working that leadership approved? These do not need to be heavy governance meetings. They are simply checkpoints that help the client, design team, and workplace strategy team stay aligned.
In our experience, these reviews are most valuable at key moments in the design process, such as:
the initial block and stack,
concept design,
developed design,
and the pre-construction review.
At each stage, there is an opportunity to make sure the design remains connected to the evidence and decisions that shaped the strategy in the first place.
That continuity is important. It gives the design team clarity. It gives the client confidence.
And it gives the final workplace a much stronger chance of delivering the outcomes everyone agreed at the start.
Bridging the Gap Between Workplace Strategy and Design
The best workplace projects are the ones where the final space clearly reflects how the organization wants to work. Not just visually, but operationally and culturally. You can see the evidence in the layout, the adjacencies, the mix of settings, and the way the space supports the behaviors and outcomes agreed earlier in the project.
That does not happen by accident.
It happens when the thinking developed during the strategy phase is properly transferred into the design process and then protected as the design evolves. The workplace strategy creates the logic for the project. The design team brings that logic to life. The handover between those two stages is where the project either gains momentum or begins to lose direction.
So, when a workplace strategy has been approved and the designers are about to begin, it is worth pausing and asking whether the thinking behind the strategy has been properly shared, not just the report itself.
In my experience, the most important meeting in the design process may be the one that happens before design starts.
Moving from Workplace Strategy into Design?
CRUX helps organizations translate workplace evidence into clear design inputs and maintain alignment as projects progress from strategy through design and delivery.
If you are preparing to move from workplace strategy into detailed design, reach out for a conversation about how to protect the intent behind your strategy and carry it successfully through the next stage of the project.