Designing Flexible Workplaces Around How People Actually Work
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Our approach is grounded in a simple idea: workplace design should be based on real work behaviour, not outdated planning norms or generic ratios.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 While simple, this outdated approach struggles in today's work environments where people don’t work the same way, at the same time, or in the same place.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
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