What today’s office reveals about the future workspace
To plan for the future, we first need to understand the present.
Think of budgeting: setting next year’s budget without even taking a look at current spending would be like steering without a map.
The budgeting process typically involves four key steps:
Understand current spending
Defining the changes needed
Assessing the impact of those changes
Making adjustments based on these insights
Just as a budget grounded in data leads to smarter financial decisions, an office plan based on real usage patterns ensures that every space serves a purpose and aligns with actual needs. When planning a new office, reviewing the current setup is essential. Skipping this step can lead to unnecessary costs—not only during the build-out but also in ongoing expenses like rent and maintenance throughout the lease term.
Understanding the underlying work patterns is key
Looking at today’s office doesn’t mean counting rooms or measuring their size; it’s about gathering occupancy data to understand the underlying work patterns in the company.
It answers essential questions like: Are employees spending more time in focused work areas or collaborative spaces? Are meetings mostly large and formal, or are they typically smaller and spontaneous? When are peak times for certain areas, and which spaces are frequently underused?
Here are some more example questions to look into through an occupancy study:
How much do we collaborate?
How large are our meetings?
When are the peak times to have meetings?
How much time do we spend on our workstations?
This information provides a clear picture of the current work culture and patterns, highlighting both strengths and areas for improvement.
To plan for the future, we first need to understand the present.
Why a baseline is essential, even with major changes planned
When planning a new office, many hesitate to use occupancy data gathered from the existing office space. They worry that the data collected from their current office won’t be relevant to the new space. This stems from a misunderstanding that occupancy data is strictly tied to a particular building’s layout or design, sometimes along with thinking that the new way of working in a new office will be radically different from today.
While the physical space will change, how employees work—their behaviors, preferences, and workflows—often remains consistent. Changes in behavior and work are much more often evolutionary than revolutionary - meaning they do not just happen overnight or even simply because the office design changes. Occupancy data offers a snapshot of these patterns, providing insight into employee work patterns and habits that can inform the design of a new space.
For many organizations, changing the way people work or collaborate is often a key goal when designing a new office. If the new space is intended to spark shifts in work culture, that's a great strategy. Using the new office as a catalyst for changing how employees collaborate, communicate, and work is smart and forward-thinking.
But you still need to know the situation today.
As with budgeting: take a look at the current situation, and then have a look at the desired changes that is then implemented as assumptions in the future office plan. Let’s take a closer look at how this adjustment for certain assumptions can be made.
Structured and fact-based scenario planning
“Study the past if you would define the future”
Occupancy data from your current office helps not only to understand how employees work today but also to predict future space requirements - even when the future office will be significantly different from the current one, or when there are major changes planned in the way people work. In fact, it is especially in these instances that you should study the current situation extra carefully, to avoid costly mistakes and unhappy employees.
For example, if the goal is more collaboration, today’s data might reveal that people don’t actually meet much at all. In this case, it is not sufficient to say that today’s situation is not relevant, and simply just build lots of collaboration areas, expecting that in the future office this will automatically make employees collaborate more.
Or, if data shows that large meetings are the norm but the organization wants fewer, smaller and more effective meetings, understanding how the meeting patterns looks today helps target exactly where to make changes. Simply building smaller meeting rooms will not lead to the organization having smaller meetings. Instead, you risk huge dissatisfaction from the employees in the new office due to a lack of correctly sized rooms.
Expecting that the office in itself will lead to changes like this is unrealistic without initiating organizational changes - but combining the two can really lead to significant positive changes for the company - and the best possible office space.
Talk to us about how you can study the current work patterns and utilization in today’s office using our office planning platform. It’s easy to set up and you can get started within a day.