Beyond Desk Ratios: Designing Workplaces Around How People Work

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.