Why Your Office Brief Should Start With How People Work, Not How Many Desks You Need

One of the first pieces of information we're often given when discussing a new office is the number of people who need to fit into it.

“We have 120 employees.”

“We need 80 desks.”

“We're planning for 20% growth.”

All useful information.

But none of it tells us how the office actually needs to work.

And increasingly, that's where the workplace brief needs to start.

No two businesses work in exactly the same way

Every industry is different.

And within every industry, every company is different too.

A legal practice doesn't operate like a technology business. A financial services company doesn't work like an engineering consultancy. A creative agency has different requirements from a call centre.

But even two businesses operating in exactly the same sector may use their workplaces completely differently.

Their culture may be different. Their management structures may be different. Their clients may interact with them differently. Their teams may collaborate differently. Some people may spend most of their day on calls, while others need long periods of uninterrupted concentration. Some teams may be highly mobile, while others need to be in the office every day.

How people work is influenced both by the work the company does and the work individual people do within that company.

That distinction matters.

Because if we start designing with a headcount and a desk count, we can very easily create an office that accommodates everybody but doesn't particularly support anybody.

The office brief needs to go deeper

Before we start deciding how many workstations, meeting rooms or collaboration areas a workplace needs, there are more useful questions to ask.

What actually happens during a normal working day?

Which teams need to work closely together?

Who needs privacy?

Who spends large portions of the day on Teams or Zoom calls?

Where does focused work happen?

How often do clients visit?

Do teams need somewhere to spread out drawings, samples or documents?

Are meetings generally two-person conversations or twelve-person workshops?

How frequently is everybody actually in the office at the same time?

What equipment, technology or storage does the business rely on?

And importantly, what isn't working in the current office?

Those conversations begin to tell us far more than a headcount ever could.

There really aren't many rules anymore

One of the most interesting things about workplace design today is that many of the old rules have disappeared.

An office doesn't have to consist of rows of desks surrounded by meeting rooms.

Nor does every modern workplace suddenly need to be filled with hot desks, booths, collaboration lounges and informal seating simply because those are the things we're seeing in contemporary office design.

The question isn't whether a particular type of workspace is fashionable.

The question is whether it serves a purpose for the people who will actually use it.

That opens up an enormous opportunity.

Instead of asking, “What should an office look like?”, we can ask:

“What could our office look like if it were designed specifically around the way our business works?”

That's a very different design brief.

Different work deserves different settings

Once we understand the work, we can begin thinking more creatively about the settings needed to support it.

A team that spends much of its day collaborating around documents or drawings may need large shared project tables rather than individual desks.

People doing highly concentrated work may benefit from smaller quiet zones or enclosed focus spaces.

A business with frequent client interaction may need its front-of-house environment to do considerably more than simply provide a reception desk and a boardroom.

A team that is regularly on video calls may need more acoustic separation and smaller call spaces.

Some organisations may need project rooms that can remain set up for days or weeks. Others may need flexible spaces that can move between training, presentations, collaboration and events.

And yes, some businesses genuinely do need traditional workstations for almost everybody.

There is nothing wrong with that either.

The point is that the solution should come from the work, rather than the work being forced into a predetermined office formula.

This is where workplace strategy becomes valuable

For more complex organisations, developing the brief can require a deeper workplace strategy process.

That might involve talking to different departments, understanding workflows, analysing attendance and utilisation, identifying adjacencies between teams and looking at how the organisation expects to change over the next few years.

Sometimes what a client initially believes they need changes considerably once we start asking those questions.

They may discover that they don't need more desks at all.

They may need more places for focused work.

More small meeting spaces.

Better collaboration areas.

Improved acoustics.

More flexibility.

Or simply a completely different relationship between the spaces they already have.

The design brief becomes much more useful because it is based on evidence and behaviour rather than assumptions.

Give your design team the problem, not the answer

There is another part of the briefing process that I think is important.

You don't necessarily need to know what the solution is before speaking to your workplace designer.

In fact, sometimes it's better if you don't.

Tell us what isn't working.

Tell us what frustrates your teams.

Tell us where people struggle.

Tell us what you would like the workplace to enable your business to do better.

A good commercial workplace designer should be able to take that information and bring creative thinking to the solution.

That's part of the value of using an experienced design team.

We aren't simply there to arrange a predetermined number of desks within a floor plate. We should be challenging assumptions, identifying opportunities and thinking about ways the space can work harder for the business occupying it.

Your workplace doesn't need to look like everybody else's

Perhaps that's the biggest opportunity in workplace design today.

There is no single template that every organisation needs to follow.

Your workplace can be quieter.

More social.

More structured.

More flexible.

More private.

More collaborative.

More formal.

Or a combination of all of those things in different places.

The only rules that really matter are the ones that make the space functional for the people and the business occupying it.

So before you start your next office project by asking:

“How many desks can we fit?”

Start somewhere else.

“How do our people actually work, and what kind of workplace would help them do that work better?”

The answer to that question is where the design should begin.