Designing a user-centric workspace

A significant part of our daily lives is spent in the workplace. But office spaces aren’t just places to get tasks done—they’re environments where people connect, collaborate, and find purpose. To make these spaces work well for employees, it’s important to design offices based on real needs - a true understanding of both spaces and the people.

Designing an office that truly meets employee needs starts with understanding how people use the space day-to-day. It’s about recognizing the variety of tasks that happen in a workplace—from focused, individual work to collaborative sessions and everything in between. When we look closely at how people interact with their environment, we can start to identify the types of spaces that encourage productivity, satisfaction and a healthy organizational culture.

Occupancy data for the benefit of the users

Combining occupancy data with survey insights provides a powerful foundation for designing user-centric buildings. While some may see occupancy data as a tool for just reducing space, our approach centers on the needs of the people who work there. This data helps architects and space planners focus on what employees need to perform their best, beyond just numbers and square meters.

Through this approach, we’ve seen that our partners are able to remove user friction while planning new offices, shift the discussion over to ‘what does it take to create the best possible office’ rather than being stuck on the discussions of ‘I need more space’ or ‘this will never work’.

Make every square meter count - from quantity to quality

Patterns of space usage tell us a story about employee needs and work culture. Let’s take a look.

When analyzing over 4,800 room observations across nearly 50 buildings, we found that only 16% of seats are in use during work hours, leaving 84% of seating unused!
The data also sheds light on how rooms are utilized across an office building. On average, only 36% of rooms are occupied at any given time, with peak usage reaching just 55%. This tells us that nearly half of all rooms remain empty even during the busiest times. With this knowledge, space planners can shift the focus from sheer quantity to quality, ensuring that each room is designed and used purposefully.

If you’re a CFO you might think ‘let’s cut some square feet’. And this is tempting - which is probably part of why occupancy data has gotten the bad reputation that it has somewhere. We instead propose - let’s take a look at what the user needs, focus on building that with the best possible qualities - and then try to reduce the wasted space. And I can tell you - there is wasted space, and there is certainly room for improvement.

At first glance, these numbers might tempt a CFO to say, “let’s cut some square feet.” And while this is a common reaction, it’s also part of the reason why occupancy data has sometimes earned a bad reputation. Instead of rushing to reduce space, we propose looking deeper at what it tells ut about what employees actually need. The focus should be on designing spaces with the best possible quality that meets real needs, and then working to reduce wasted space. There is plenty of wasted space, and definitely room for improvement.

Complete mismatch between meeting patterns and meeting space

Averages across entire buildings where all rooms and all seats are taken into account is interesting. But considering that of course an office building needs to account for varied work tasks and varied needs throughout days, weeks and years, it might not tell us all that much. So lets deep-dive a little bit into an area: meeting rooms.

Looking specifically at meeting rooms, our data reveals some surprising patterns. The average meeting has 3.3 participants. But it can actually vary a lot. The highest average we have seen for an organization, is 4.3 participants, and the lowest is 1.8 participants. It is not surprising that this is varied - some organizations both like and need larger meetings while others prefer smaller meetings.

Yet all organizations still design rooms for much larger groups. The average meeting room has 9.1 seats. Across all organizations, we see that 19% of meetings have only one participant. This was somewhat surprising for two reasons: one, many of the organizations have breakout rooms and phone booths that are designed for this type of meeting. At least that is the space planners’ meaning behind these types of rooms - to be used for individual focused work, 1-person video meetings or phone calls. But despite this, 19% of all meetings occurring in a meeting room has only one participant physically present in the room. 64% of these single person meetings occur in a meeting room designed for 6 or more people.

Furthermore, half of all meetings, 51%, have 1 or 2 participants. If we set the number to 4 or fewer participants, this cover 78% of all meetings.

Instead of planning for extra space, thinking that is the best for the users, we should instead create fewer but better-designed spaces that meet actual needs. By using data-driven insights, we can shift the focus from “more is better” to “quality over quantity.” When every room serves a clear purpose and is designed with specific use cases in mind, employees benefit far more than simply building extra space that we are not sure are needs-based.

Recommendation algorithms to ensure that users will not lack rooms they need

We’ve seen how meeting rooms often don’t align with the way they’re actually used. So, the natural question is: how should these rooms be designed to fit real needs?

To answer this, we developed an algorithm that analyzes meeting patterns to determine the optimal number and size of meeting rooms for any organization. Designing meeting spaces based on simple averages—like empty seats or total attendance—doesn’t give the full picture. Instead, our algorithm dives deep into actual usage patterns to recommend the right balance of room sizes and numbers.

In a study of 15 different buildings with 100+ employees in each, we found that it’s possible to reduce the number of meeting rooms by 32% while still accommodating all meetings. Additionally, the number of seats was reduced by 53%.

When predicting utilization (how the rooms would be used) with the reduce number and sizes of rooms we saw the following:

At peak hour(s), all rooms wedere occupied, but on average, there were always available rooms. At no time was there a lack of meeting rooms.

Build offices based on occupancy patterns to ensure the space that is built is the space that is needws

By focusing on real usage data (occupancy data), we can ensure that spaces are built to truly serve the people who use them—without wasting resources on rooms that go underutilized.

Each organization is unique and it’s important to find out your organization’s (or your clients’) occupancy patterns in order to plan the perfect space. We always recommended starting the planning process with understanding the space and understanding the users. With our space planning platform ‘The Office Planner’ you can easily do this.