Hybrid work is here to stay, and with this shift, how we plan offices must also follow suit. The office space planning process involves optimizing your space based on a data-informed understanding of your company’s current and future spatial needs. This phase of the design process allows you to create a workplace that can positively impact your company culture, team cohesion, and employee productivity. Understanding the factors and goals of office space planning is key to setting your business up for successful growth.
What is Office Space Planning?
Office space planning is a part of the workplace strategy and design process that can help maximize space, improve efficiency and productivity, and reduce occupancy costs. The goal of the office space planning phase is to optimize space usage. An effective office space plan helps you minimize change orders during the redesign process, increase employee engagement, and prepare for growth.
Effective office space planning involves considering several factors simultaneously, such as how your space is currently being used, plans for potential growth, employee work styles, brand guidelines, and stakeholder engagement. Once this data is collected, it can be used to create an office space plan that provides your company with the space to foster collaboration and productivity.
Before you can plan a space, you need to understand occupancy. For more, click here.
What Affects Your Office Space Planning?
Office space planning involves gathering data about several aspects of your company’s function to create a workplace that maximizes employee productivity and engagement.
Some of these factors include the following.:
1. Available Space
This factor is one of the most important considerations during office space planning. If you do not understand how space is being used currently, your office space plan will not align with your future goals and may not be effective long term. Understanding the amount of space you have available, as well as its current and potential functionality, is the first step in office planning.
2. Cost Analysis
An office space plan must accurately predict project costs. Change orders later on in the design process are costly and can significantly slow down your renovation timeline. An effective plan should minimize wasted space while maximizing productivity.
3. Spatial Usage
Office space planning also depends on the number of people your space can comfortably accommodate, both now and in the future, if your company grows. It requires you to understand how your employees use the built environment, as well as how often they work in the office or at home. As hybrid continues to be the norm, this factor has become more complex. It requires a thorough understanding of how and where your employees work best, as well as determining your company’s goals and guidelines for time spent working remotely or in the office.
Key Goals for Office Space Planning
A good office space plan can have a lasting impact on your business. Here are three of the most important goals to keep in mind when creating an office space plan.
1. Productivity
The first step is to accurately analyze how your employees are using the current space and involve employees and stakeholders in the planning process to make effective decisions. Collecting actual employee feedback and sentiment data allows workplace teams to contextualize raw usage data, allowing them to determine how they can best design productive spaces.
2. Flexibility
Offering a flexible work environment involves a true understanding of employee work habits and their sentiments towards space, as well as accepting that spatial demands come in ebbs and flows. Offices must be morphable to meet constantly changing requirements. Proper office space planning that analyzes historical and current data, paired with employee sentiment data, can help you develop a better picture of what your flexible office should look like.
3. Employee Engagement
In order to drive office engagement, companies must make space engaging and, furthermore, offer a unique working experience that doesn’t exist in remote work settings. To increase employee engagement and collaboration, as well as build a cohesive workplace culture, your workplace must deliver what your employees actually want (and then some). Gathering employee feedback and analyzing which features your office employees actually use can help you optimize your office space plan and create a workplace that employees will want to engage with.
The Future of Office Space Planning
As work continues to evolve, new emerging technologies have come to help to address these dynamic shifts. Workplace optimization software makes the office space planning process more efficient by consolidating all your data in one place and automating processes to increase efficiency and reduce errors. These platforms allow you to clearly understand how employees use spaces and highlight peak occupancy times during the week. With this software, you can develop data-informed office space plans that update your workplace and align with your business’s goals for future growth. A workplace optimization platform enables you to update and evolve your workplace confidently. Using such software can help you streamline and interpret contextual insights to develop an office plan uniquely suited to your company.
Create an Ideal Office Space Where Employees Love to Work
Creating an effective office plan will allow your business to develop a human-centric workplace that improves productivity and your employees’ experience. Making confident, data-informed decisions using a workplace optimization platform is the key to successful office space planning. With such software, your business can effectively update your space and evolve to suit the needs of your employees.
Office space planning has shifted from focusing purely on achieving operational goals to prioritizing employee experience and effectiveness. Click here to learn about the metrics for enhancing both the effectiveness and experience of your employees.
FAQs
Creating an effective office space plan involves:
- Analyzing the current use of the workspace
- Including your employees in the process
- Considering your workplace culture and values
- Prioritizing a floorplan configuration based on usage trends and required flexibility
- Assessing your future office space planning needs
Use a workplace optimization platform to create an office space plan that responds to real-time data and can be shared with stakeholders for feedback.
The work environment is changing rapidly; therefore, you need to ask the following questions when planning an office space:
- What are the workflow and privacy needs of your employees?
- How often are employees working in the office vs. at home?
- What are the space requirements for each employee?
- At what rate will your business expand?
A workspace optimization platform can help you accurately gather and understand this data to make sound designs.
Workplace optimization platforms help you design an agile work environment that accommodates employees’ evolving work patterns, encourages optimum space utilization, and fosters employee engagement. Using such platforms throughout the office space planning process can help you correctly interpret key metrics and make confident design decisions.
