What Is Office Space Planning?

1. Analyse your current space

Before starting any design work, it is important to understand how your current office is performing. Depending on whether you have surplus office space or too little space, there will be different options available to you. Review your current workplace and look for opportunities to repurpose areas with the help of workplace data, so you can analyse your space based on evidence.
It’s a good idea to carry out a workplace survey to uncover what works for your team members and what could be improved. Asses how much time is spent in each area, factor in IT and communications infrastructure and consider how your staff communicate. If you want to reduce your space or optimise how you use your office, you will need to take the findings of the workplace analysis and use them to drive meaningful change in your organisation.

2. Define your workplace needs

Once you’ve analysed your workplace, you will need to establish how you want your office to perform and the types of activity it will need to support. Do you want to encourage cross-departmental collaboration, encourage agile working, provide employees with private spaces for high-concentration work or allow space for future growth?
An office can be designed to encourage creativity, improve connectivity or accommodate growth. There may be an opportunity to reduce your office space if your needs can be accommodated in a smaller space. The process of defining your needs is about assessing your ambitions and aligning those with your workplace.

3. Plan your office space

The planning phase is about exploring how your new space will look and feel as well how your workplace can support your business. If you haven’t engaged with a design and build company by this stage, it’s a good time to partner with a specialist so they can help you execute the ambitions for your office. They’ll have a much clearer idea of how the space can be tailored to suit your needs and what the best options are for your ways of working.
 
 

Example of an office space plan