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.
Updated: Oct 23
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.
CRUX Workplace
The team are currently preparing for an executive vision workshop for one of our clients, which means much of their attention at the moment is focused on conversations with members of the client leadership team. These interviews are part of the preparation for the session, but over the years we’ve come to see them as something much more important than that. In many respects, the workshop has already started.
When you bring a senior leadership team together, particularly around a subject such as future ways of working or workplace strategy, you are asking people to step away from the demands of running the business and think differently for a few hours. That takes some preparation. Most executives spend their days dealing with immediate priorities, clients, people, financial performance, operational issues, and an endless stream of decisions.
Asking them to walk into a workshop and immediately switch into longer-term strategic thinking is a fairly big ask.
The individual conversations beforehand create some space for that thinking to begin.
We usually want to understand how each leader sees the organization today, what they believe is changing, and what they think the business will need over the next several years.
We will talk about growth, people, culture, operations, technology, clients, and the challenges they are seeing within their own parts of the organization. The workplace is obviously part of the conversation, but the discussion is usually much broader because the workplace ultimately has to respond to what the business is trying to achieve.
One of the most useful things about these conversations is seeing how differently leaders can look at the same underlying issue. That is entirely understandable because each is viewing the business through the lens of their own responsibilities. One may be thinking about growth and operational flexibility, another about talent and employee experience, another about capital investment and long-term commitments, while others may be focused on technology, organizational culture, collaboration, or how effectively expertise moves across the business.
Those perspectives are all relevant, but they do not always arrive at the same starting point.
That is one of the reasons the pre-work matters so much. Before the leadership team comes together, we can begin to understand where those perspectives naturally align, where they differ, and what sits underneath the differences. Often, people are not disagreeing on the overall ambition. They may simply be approaching it from different parts of the business and using a different definition of what success looks like.
The interviews also give each executive an opportunity to consider the future without having to immediately reach a group position. A one-to-one conversation is very different from a leadership meeting. People can explore an idea, express a concern, or talk through something they are still forming a view on. That openness is useful because it gives the project team a much better understanding of where the organization really is before everyone comes together.
As those conversations progress, the questions often become more interesting. They may begin with something very practical such as office attendance, the amount of space the company occupies, or whether employees should continue to have assigned desks. As we explore the subject, the discussion usually widens. How do we want teams to collaborate?
Where are we losing opportunities for knowledge exchange? How are younger employees learning from more experienced colleagues? What does managing a distributed team require from our leaders? What do we want people to experience when they come into the office?
Those are the conversations that begin to move the thinking forward.
Across a series of interviews, patterns begin to emerge. There are usually areas where the leadership team is already closely aligned, even if they have not yet discussed the issue collectively. There may also be areas where people are looking at the same challenge from quite different perspectives. In some cases, what initially appears to be a workplace issue turns out to be connected to a wider business question around growth, organizational design, talent, operational resilience, or the way teams work together.
Understanding that beforehand makes the eventual workshop much richer.
It also means the workshop can be designed around the organization rather than around a standard agenda. By the time the interviews are complete, we should have a good sense of the subjects that need discussion, the areas where the group is likely to find agreement fairly quickly, and the questions where some healthy debate will be useful. We can also begin to form hypotheses based on what we have heard and on any other evidence being gathered through the project.
That preparation matters because time with an executive team is valuable. When you have the right people together in one room, you want to use that time well. If the first hour is spent discovering basic facts about the business, understanding everyone’s starting position, or working out what the key issues actually are, then a significant opportunity has been lost.
The pre-work allows the conversation to begin further down the road.
It also helps leaders start considering the art of the possible. Most workplace projects begin with the existing situation because that is what everyone knows. There is an office today, there are leases, desks, meeting rooms, policies, attendance patterns, and established behaviors. Inevitably those things shape the initial conversation.
Good preparation gradually widens the lens. Rather than only thinking about how to modify the workplace that exists today, leaders can start considering what the organization may need three, five, or seven years from now. They can think about how work itself may change, where employees will need to interact, what technology will enable, how teams will be organized, and what role the office should play in supporting all of that.
That shift in mindset rarely happens instantly. People need some time to think about it, particularly when the implications affect people, operations, real estate, technology, and culture all at once. The conversations beforehand give those ideas a chance to develop so that, when the leadership team eventually comes together, people are already thinking beyond the immediate constraints.
From a facilitation perspective, the pre-work is equally valuable because the team arrives at the workshop with context. We have heard the different viewpoints, understood some of the sensitivities, and identified the questions worth exploring. That allows us to bring the right evidence into the room, challenge assumptions where appropriate, and help the group focus on the decisions that matter.
Every organization is different, so the purpose of the workshop is to bring the collective experience and judgment of the leadership team into the process. Our role is to create the conditions for a productive discussion and help the group work toward a shared direction.
When the preparation has been done well, the difference is noticeable. The conversation can move more quickly into the subjects that matter, and the leadership team can spend its time exploring choices, considering the implications, and building greater alignment around what the future workplace needs to achieve.
The outputs will vary. They may include guiding principles, greater clarity around future ways of working, or priorities for real estate, technology, and change management. Often, one of the most valuable outcomes is a more consistent understanding across the leadership team of what they are trying to achieve and why.
That shared understanding matters because the decisions that follow can influence significant investment, the experience of thousands of employees, and the way an organization operates for years to come. Against that backdrop, the time spent on interviews, evidence gathering, and thoughtful preparation is a relatively small investment.
So, as we prepare for another executive vision workshop, the reminder is a useful one.
By the time everyone walks into the room, the workshop has already begun.
If you have an executive strategy workshop coming up, give as much thought to the conversations that happen before the meeting as the agenda for the meeting itself. The quality of that preparation has a significant influence on how far the leadership team can move the conversation when everyone finally comes together.