How to Make the Right Office Decision

Choosing a new office is rarely just a property decision. It affects cost, ways of working, collaboration, culture, wellbeing and the organisation’s ability to adapt over time. That is why the office question needs to be treated as a strategic workplace decision, not only as a search for available premises.

Portally interviewed Dr Aram Seddigh, founder and CEO of WeOffice, about how organisations can make better decisions when looking for, changing or renegotiating office space. The original article is available on Portally. In this WeOffice version, we develop the same themes from a workplace strategy perspective and show how workplace analysis can create a stronger decision base before an organisation commits to a location, layout or lease.

Quick answer: what makes an office decision robust?

A robust office decision starts by defining what the office needs to do for the organisation. Before comparing rent, location and square metres, you need to understand attendance patterns, work activities, meeting demand, focus needs, flexibility, cost exposure and change risk.

The common mistake is to enter the market too quickly. When the analysis comes too late, the decision is easily driven by what is easiest to compare, such as rent per square metre, rather than by what determines whether the workplace will actually support the work.

Start with function, not floor area

When organisations start looking for an office, rent is often the first question. That is understandable. Rent is visible, comparable and easy to put into a decision table. But the factors that are easiest to compare are not always the factors that determine whether the office will work.

A low rent per square metre can become expensive if the space is difficult to use. The layout may require major adaptations. There may be too few meeting rooms. The location may make it harder for people to come into the office. The lease may lock the organisation into the wrong size for too long. Or the plan may look efficient on paper but fail in everyday use.

A better starting point is therefore: what must the office enable?

That includes questions such as:

• what types of work should take place in the office
• when and why employees need to be present
• which activities create most value when done together
• how much focus work, meetings, hybrid collaboration and informal knowledge sharing the office needs to support
• what role the office should play in culture, leadership and onboarding
• which requirements exist around confidentiality, technology, ergonomics and accessibility
• how the organisation may grow, shrink or change ways of working during the lease period

Once these questions are clear, rent can be understood in the right context. The issue is not only what the office costs, but which option provides the best combination of function, flexibility and total value over time.

Workplace analysis turns assumptions into decision support

Workplace analysis helps move the office question from assumptions to evidence. It clarifies how work is actually carried out, which needs differ across the organisation and which compromises are reasonable.

At WeOffice, workplace analysis is often the starting point before premises search, lease renegotiation, refurbishment or major changes in ways of working. Depending on the situation, the analysis may include surveys, workshops, interviews, attendance data, observations and a review of business goals. The purpose is not to collect as much data as possible. The purpose is to collect the right evidence for the decision the organisation needs to make.

If an organisation is considering reducing space, average attendance is not enough. The analysis also needs to show variation across weekdays, recurring peaks, team patterns, meeting demand, focus needs and the level of risk the organisation is willing to accept. If the organisation is preparing for a new way of working, the analysis should also capture culture, leadership, change readiness and the behaviours the office is expected to support.

This is where workplace analysis becomes the foundation for workplace strategy. Analysis describes the current situation and the needs. Workplace strategy translates the insight into choices, principles and practical workplace requirements.

You can read more about this in WeOffice’s article When Do You Need a Workplace Analysis?.

How much office space do you really need?

Space is often the most sensitive part of the office decision. Too much space ties up cost and creates inefficient utilisation. Too little space creates overcrowding, frustration, fully booked meeting rooms and the feeling that the office does not work. In hybrid organisations, this becomes more complex because attendance often varies sharply during the week.

Rules of thumb about square metres per employee can be useful early in the conversation, but they should not replace analysis. Two organisations with the same number of employees may need very different workplaces. One may have high office attendance, substantial focus work and many internal meetings. Another may work in a more distributed way, spend more time with clients and only gather on certain days.

A common simplification is to choose between two extremes: sizing the office for everyone to be present all the time, or sizing it according to average attendance. Both can mislead. The first often creates unnecessary overcapacity. The second can lead to undercapacity on the days when the office is actually used the most.

A more robust approach is to plan for a recurring high-attendance day, not the absolute peak and not the average. This allows the office to cope with a pattern that occurs regularly, without making the organisation pay for space that is almost never needed.

In the Workplace Adequacy™ framework, right-sizing is a core principle. The point is to create a workplace that is robust enough for real patterns of use while avoiding space that does not create value. To do this well, attendance data needs to be interpreted alongside an understanding of the business and the work.

WeOffice can support this through workplace analysis tools, attendance data, scenario comparison and workplace strategy.

Flexibility is more than a short lease

When companies ask for flexibility, they often mean a shorter lease, the ability to reduce space or a faster move-in. Those aspects matter, but flexibility in an office decision is broader than that.

A flexible office decision reduces the risk of locking the organisation into assumptions that may soon become wrong. It can include:

• lease length and notice periods
• the option to expand within the same building
• the option to share or sublet part of the space
• how easily the premises can be reconfigured
• whether furniture, technology and room types can be adapted over time
• whether the office can support both growth and changing ways of working

For smaller companies, flexibility may be more important than achieving the lowest rent per square metre. A company with 15 employees should often avoid overcommitting to premises based on an uncertain growth forecast. For larger organisations, flexibility is often more about portfolio strategy, scenario planning and avoiding large mistakes.

In both cases, workplace strategy helps define which type of flexibility is actually needed and which forms of flexibility sound attractive but do not address the organisation’s real risks.

Hybrid offices need more than collaboration space

Since the pandemic, many organisations have tried to redefine the role of the office in hybrid working. The office is often described as the place for collaboration, culture, innovation, onboarding and relationships. These are important functions. But they are not enough.

If the office is designed mainly as a social and collaborative environment, while lacking good settings for focus, privacy and recovery, people may use it in a fragmented way. They come in for meetings, but go home to do concentrated work. Over time, even meetings that would benefit from physical presence may move online because people are trying to protect their focus time.

A successful hybrid office therefore needs to support both collaboration and focus. It needs meeting rooms, project areas and social settings, but also quiet zones, focus rooms, phone rooms, good hybrid meeting technology and environments where people can work for a full day without being drained.

The WeOffice report Offices and Ways of Working After the Pandemic points to this balance. The office can be important for strengthening collaboration in hybrid work, but only if it also supports focus, concentration and privacy.

AI makes the office question more strategic

AI does not only change the tools people use. It also affects which tasks become most valuable to do together and which environments people need in order to produce high-quality work.

As AI takes over, simplifies or strengthens parts of routine knowledge work, human work may shift further towards judgement, interpretation, creativity, ethics, prioritisation and decision-making. That does not make focus work less important. On the contrary, the need for undisturbed analysis, review and quality assurance may increase when employees need to assess AI-generated material and understand the consequences of different choices.

At the same time, the office may become even more important as a place for shared interpretation, learning and coordination. AI can make individual work faster, but it does not automatically make the organisation more aligned. To create real value from the technology, people still need to build shared understanding, exchange experience and make decisions that are grounded in organisational goals.

AI should therefore be considered part of workplace strategy. The office will increasingly need to support:

• focus and cognitively demanding work
• digital meetings and hybrid collaboration
• shared analysis of data and decision material
• learning between colleagues
• creative processes and complex problem-solving
• confidential conversations and strategic discussion

The key question is not whether AI means the organisation needs more or less office space. The better question is which parts of the work become more valuable to do together, and which require better conditions for focus, depth and quality assurance.

Different sizes, different risks

The size of the organisation affects which risks matter most in the office decision.

For 10-20 employees, flexibility, low risk and speed are often central. Coworking, serviced offices or a smaller dedicated office can all be relevant depending on identity, confidentiality and stability needs.

For 20-50 employees, the office often becomes more important for culture, recruitment and coordination. At the same time, the business may still change quickly. Lease length, expansion options, meeting-room capacity and whether the premises work for both everyday work and shared office days become important.

For 50-150 employees, workplace strategy becomes more critical. Counting desks is not enough. The organisation needs to analyse activities, team patterns, leadership, hybrid policy, technology needs and change management.

For organisations with more than 150 employees, the office question often becomes a leadership issue. Scenarios, attendance data, stakeholder management, cost modelling and clear principles for the workplace or the office portfolio are usually required.

Five questions before choosing an office

Before moving from premises search to decision, the organisation should be able to answer five questions:

1. What role should the office play for the organisation?
2. What does attendance look like today, and how much does it vary?
3. Which activities should the office support better than it does today?
4. What flexibility do we need during the lease period?
5. Which decisions must be made before we compare square metres and rent?

If the answers are unclear, the office decision is likely to be driven by what is easy to measure, rather than by what determines whether the workplace will work.

About Aram Seddigh

Dr. Aram Seddigh is the founder and CEO of WeOffice. A licensed psychologist and economist with a PhD in work and organizational psychology, he helps organisations make better decisions about offices, ways of working and workplace change — grounding each decision in how people actually work rather than in assumptions about space.

Read more about Aram Seddigh on WeOffice and Workplace Strategist.

Source: This article is an adapted version of an interview first published by Portally — How to make the right office decision.

Portally is a Swedish digital marketplace for commercial premises — offices, coworking, warehouse and industrial space — that connects organisations looking for premises with available spaces in major Swedish cities such as Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. Learn more at portally.com.