The ratio nobody applies
In most organisations, people account for around 90% of operating cost, and property and everything in it for the remaining 10%. So a small improvement in how well the workplace supports people is worth more than almost anything that could be saved on the space itself.
Yet workplace decisions are usually governed by the smaller number, because that is the one with a budget line and an approval process attached. The more useful question is not what the space will cost, but what it is for, and whether it is doing it.
Everything happens in the wrong order
A lease event or refurbishment starts the process. A layout is drawn, a furniture schedule is written from it, and suppliers price the schedule. By then, the floor area, the desk count and the mix of settings are already fixed, and the only thing left to decide is unit price.
The decisions worth influencing all came first: how much space is genuinely needed, what people come in to do, and whether the desk count reflects observed attendance or an old assumption.
What happens when someone measures
The data usually exists, in badge records, room bookings and network logins, but rarely reaches the person writing the brief. When it does, two findings come up again and again.
First, space sized on an average fails on a busy day, and when people can’t find a seat they stop coming in. Second, the answer is often not fewer desks but a different mix of settings. Neither needs a large programme to establish.
Reuse is a commercial argument, not an ethical one
Reuse is easy to promise and hard to specify, because existing furniture is rarely surveyed until the design is fixed. Done early, the numbers are not marginal.
At Sky Studios Elstree, 3,507 items were sourced without buying new, £450,902 below the cost of new. At BRE’s Science Park, 240 items were reworked, saving £29,930. A full refurbishment for the RO Group halved both cost and embodied carbon, with the carbon calculations externally verified.
Five questions worth asking at board level
- What is our busiest realistic day, measured rather than estimated, and when was it last measured?
- Who holds our utilisation data, and are they in the room when furniture and layout decisions are made?
- At our next lease event, will the question of how much space we need be genuinely open?
- Before our next refurbishment clears a floor, will anyone have surveyed what is worth keeping?
- When a client asks about our supply chain, can we point to evidence someone independent has checked?
Where this usually starts
With a space utilisation study: small, quick, and it produces evidence a board can act on rather than an opinion. It is deliberately the least committing thing we do, because the honest answer is sometimes that an organisation should buy less than it planned.
That is an odd thing for a furniture business to say. It is also why the rest of our advice is worth anything.
