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
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.
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.