The old brief was simple: count the staff, allow an area per person, draw the desks. It produced offices that were correct on paper and wrong on the two days a week everybody came in.
Attendance is no longer flat, and planning for the average guarantees the space fails at peak.
Measure the peak, not the mean
We ask for twelve weeks of actual attendance data — badge counts, not policy. The number that matters is the busiest day in a normal week, plus headroom.
Planning to the average produces a floor that is oversubscribed every Tuesday and echoing every Friday, and staff quickly learn to stop coming in on the day it is unpleasant.
Meeting space is the real shortage
When half the room is on a call to the other half, the constraint is not desks. It is enclosed space with decent acoustics and a camera position that does not put a window behind the speaker.
We now plan significantly more small enclosed rooms than a pre-hybrid brief would have suggested, and fewer large boardrooms that sit empty for most of the week.
Acoustics before aesthetics
An open floor with hard surfaces and a high reverberation time is unusable for calls, and no amount of finish quality compensates. Partitions to slab, sealed doors and an absorbent ceiling treatment are not upgrades — they are the difference between a floor people use and one they avoid.
It is also the one thing that genuinely cannot be added later without returning to the ceiling.
