Office space planning for headquarters: sizing before designing.
Office space planning has a reputation for being a back-office activity — desks counted, zones drawn, drawings approved. For a headquarters investment that framing is expensive. The footprint of a headquarters is the single biggest cost driver over a decade, and the decision most prone to being made on assumptions nobody examined. This article describes how board-grade space planning differs from the desk-count variety.
Three questions to answer before any drawing
Each one is independently necessary; together they protect against the most common mis-sizing patterns:
- What does usage actually look like today — by day of week, hour, zone — not what HR says headcount is.
- What working model do we commit to for the next decade, and is it shared at executive level.
- What scenarios for growth, contraction and hybrid intensity does the building need to absorb.
Evidence beats benchmarks
Industry benchmarks (m² per FTE, desk-sharing ratios) are useful as sanity checks and dangerous as design inputs. They aggregate organisations that look nothing like yours, in markets with different leases and labour dynamics. A serious plan starts with your own occupancy data — badge logs, room bookings, sensor data where available — over a representative window.
Zoning by activity, not by department
Departmental zoning made sense when teams stayed put. Hybrid work has broken that assumption. Activity-based zoning — focus, collaboration, hosting, deep social — sized to actual demand patterns, consistently outperforms department blocks on both utilisation and satisfaction. The trade-off is governance: someone needs to own zone-level capacity over time.
For the trade-offs in detail see activity-based working pros and cons.
Stress-testing the plan
A plan is only board-grade if it survives stress tests at the extremes: peak Tuesday with 110% attendance, low Friday with 25%, a 20% headcount swing in either direction, and a shift in hybrid policy. If any of those breaks the layout, the plan is too brittle for a ten-year investment.
Where the plan meets the TCO model
Every square metre saved in the plan compounds across the Total Cost of Occupancy model — and every square metre added does the same in the other direction. Space planning that ignores TCO is optimising the wrong variable. Plans that explicitly feed TCO scenarios are the ones boards approve quickly.
Frequently asked questions
How long does proper space planning take?
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Six to ten weeks for a headquarters of typical complexity, including the occupancy baseline. Faster is possible only by skipping the evidence layer — which is exactly the layer that makes the plan defensible.
Should we engage an architect at this stage?
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Not yet. Architects engaged before the plan exists tend to shape the plan to the design rather than the other way round. Engage them on a brief that the plan produces.
What's a healthy desk-sharing ratio?
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It depends entirely on attendance patterns. We see ratios from 0.6 to 0.9 work well in different contexts; numbers chosen without occupancy evidence almost always over- or under-shoot.
Does space planning include meeting rooms?
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Yes — and that's where most plans under-deliver. Meeting demand grows faster than headcount in hybrid models, and is the most common cause of post-occupancy complaints.
Total Cost of Occupancy: beyond the construction cost of a headquarters
Construction costs are only part of what a headquarters really costs over a decade. A TCO model exposes the actual investment decision — and stops boards from fixating on the build budget.
Activity-based working: where it fits, where it doesn't
Activity-based working is neither universal solution nor disproved fad. The outcome depends on three conditions — most failures trace back to one of them being missing.
Hybrid working and the office concept: rewriting the brief
Hybrid hasn't reduced the role of the office — it's changed it. Designing a headquarters on a pre-hybrid brief produces the wrong building at the wrong cost.