What a workplace strategy answers
How much space you actually need, sized on peak demand rather than headcount times a ratio. What mix of settings earns the commute. What the change costs, and what it avoids. The evidence behind it comes from occupancy data, interviews, surveys and benchmarking against comparable organisations.
Plenty of workplace strategy ends as a presentation: recommendations with no prices attached, which then meet real costs and lead times and fade away. Ours come costed and buildable, because the company making the recommendations is the one that delivers them.
For a four-minute read on why these decisions so often go wrong, download our briefing, The 10% that decides the 90%.
Workplace strategy for universities
A university estate has its own rhythms. Teaching space fills in term and empties in the vacations. Academics need quiet for writing as much as rooms for meeting. Professional services teams now work like any hybrid office, and libraries double as study space for thousands of students.
A strategy has to plan for all of these on one estate, often across listed buildings and new ones. We have furnished buildings for UCL, including Marshgate in east London, and for King’s College London, so our advice reflects how campus space is actually used, and how it is bought.
Scenario planning for decisions you have not made yet
Lease events, growth, consolidation and policy changes all force space decisions on someone else’s timetable. Modelling two or three plausible futures before the deadline is considerably cheaper than reacting to one.
Change management for an office move
New space only works if people use it the way it was designed. So change management is part of the plan, not an afterthought: involving staff early through interviews and focus groups, agreeing how the new settings will be used, and showing people around before the move.
After the move we stay close, adjusting what is not working rather than leaving people to work around it. The aim is a move people understand and support, not one they put up with.
Measuring whether it worked
Post-occupancy evaluation is agreed at the start, not added at the end. After the change we measure again against the same baseline, and ask the people using the space what has improved and what has not. Where something falls short, we put it right.
Most clients start with a conversation about the decision in front of them. Use the form below, or see the related services.
What does workplace strategy cost?
Most strategies start with a utilisation study, which is a four-figure piece of work rather than a five-figure one. What moves it within that range is the number of buildings, the floor area, how many people, and whether you already hold usable data or it needs a fortnight of structured observation. The strategy that follows is scoped once the study shows what needs answering, and like the study it is priced as a defined piece of work rather than a day rate, agreed before anything starts.
On evidence, we would rather be careful than impressive. One client, an online bank, has seen profits double in the years since their workspace project. We would not claim the office did that; the business grew for many reasons. But the people who work there will tell you the space played a part, and that is as far as anyone can honestly go.
