Before You Plan the New Office, Ask the People Who Actually Use It

Employee input can uncover how the business really operates. The challenge is separating useful requirements from individual preferences.

When a company starts planning a new office, the early conversations often happen among a relatively small group.

Leadership discusses business objectives. The broker looks for space. The architect begins translating requirements into a program and eventually a floor plan.

But there is another source of information I want before those decisions get too far along:

The people who actually do the work.

Employees know things about the operation that may never appear in an organizational chart or executive briefing.

That doesn’t mean employees should design the office. It means the project team should understand how the business actually works before deciding what the workplace needs to support.

The Organization Chart Doesn’t Tell You How People Work

A department may have 20 people on the organization chart.

That tells me something about headcount.

It doesn’t tell me whether those people spend most of their day at individual workstations, in meetings, on confidential calls, collaborating with other departments, working with specialized equipment or away from the office entirely.

It doesn’t tell me which groups need to sit near one another.

It doesn’t tell me whether a department has visitors, deliveries, files, samples, equipment or storage requirements that consume space.

And it doesn’t tell me what happens on the busiest day of the week.

Those are programming questions.

Employees and department leaders can often answer them better than anyone else.

Ask About the Work Before Asking About the Furniture

One of the easiest ways to get poor employee feedback is to ask the wrong questions.

• “Would you prefer an office or a workstation?”
• “Do you want more conference rooms?”
• “What amenities would you like?”

Those questions invite preferences.

I want to understand requirements first.

• What do you do during a normal day?
• Who do you need to work with?
• What activities require privacy?
• What equipment, files or materials do you use?
• Where does the current workplace make your job harder?
• What happens when everyone who needs to be here is here?

The answers may lead to conclusions about offices, workstations, meeting rooms, acoustics, storage or technology.

But the conversation starts with the work.

Listen for the Exceptions

Average conditions are relatively easy to plan for.

Exceptions are where projects get interesting.

A department may normally have six people in the office but hold a monthly meeting for 20.

An executive may rarely use a conference room but regularly meet with visitors who should not travel through secure work areas.

A team may appear paperless until someone explains the regulatory records that must be retained.

An employee may work remotely three days a week but need specialized equipment whenever they are in the office.

Those details can materially affect the space program.

If nobody asks, they may not emerge until employees see the completed floor plan—or worse, after construction.

Employee Input Is Information, Not a Vote

This distinction matters.

Asking employees for input does not mean every request should be incorporated into the design.

Employees see the workplace from their individual and departmental perspectives. Leadership has to consider the organization as a whole, including cost, culture, real estate strategy, future growth and business objectives.

Some requests will conflict. Some will be impractical. Some will be preferences rather than requirements.

The purpose of employee engagement is to give the decision-makers better information.

The owner still has to make the decisions.

Don’t Wait Until the Floor Plan Is Finished

Timing matters.

If employees first become involved when they are shown a nearly completed floor plan, the project team may hear useful information after it has become expensive to act on.

The broker may already have selected the space. The architect may already have established the program. Major adjacencies may already be set. Engineering may already be underway.

At that point, feedback can quickly become redesign.

I would rather learn during programming that a department needs additional storage, specialized power or separation from another function than discover it after the construction documents are underway.

Use Different Ways to Gather Information

Employee engagement doesn’t have to mean putting everyone in one enormous meeting.

• Leadership interviews can establish business objectives.
• Department interviews can uncover operational requirements.
• Employee surveys can identify broader patterns.
• Workplace observations can reveal how space is actually being used.
• Furniture mockups can test workstation assumptions before a standard is finalized.

The method matters less than making sure the project team gets the information it needs while there is still time to use it.

Then Close the Loop

There is another reason to be deliberate about employee engagement.

Once you ask people for input, they may reasonably expect to know what happened to it.

That doesn’t mean explaining every individual decision.

But employees should understand the larger workplace strategy, what the organization learned from the process and why certain decisions were made.

Otherwise, asking for input can feel performative.

A well-run process makes clear from the beginning that employees are providing information to help leadership make decisions—not individually approving the design.

The Owner’s Question

Before the space program is finalized, I would ask:
Have we talked to the people who understand how this business actually operates?

If the answer is no, I wouldn’t assume the project team has all the requirements simply because it has an organization chart, headcount and square-footage target.

Those tell you how many people you need to accommodate.

They don’t necessarily tell you what those people need the workplace to do.

Leadership Takeaway: Employee engagement should uncover operational requirements before they become design problems. Ask about how people work, test what you hear against the organization’s objectives, and keep decision authority clear. The goal isn’t to let employees design the office. It’s to make sure leadership isn’t designing it without information the employees already have.