Some of the most useful collaboration in a business happens in between the meetings. It might be a question asked over coffee or a quick look at someone’s screen to test an idea, and it’s often the chat on the way back from a client visit that moves a project on. These moments are hard to plan for, and easy to encourage when the workplace gives people room to cross paths.

As a business grows, people can no longer pick up what’s going on just by sitting nearby. The informal knowledge that once moved easily around a small team needs a little more help to reach everyone, and how you bring people together, and where, starts to play a real part in how well the business grows.

The encouraging part is that collaboration responds well to a little support. Give your team clear reasons to come together, spaces that make it easy, and a culture where sharing ideas is part of everyday work, and it tends to build on itself.

What are the benefits of collaboration?

Collaboration does far more than speed up projects. When people work closely together, knowledge moves faster, problems get solved by the people closest to them, and newer team members develop much more quickly than they would on their own.

• Better ideas: different perspectives in the same conversation lead to stronger, more rounded solutions.
• Faster learning: junior colleagues pick up skills and context by working alongside experienced people.
• Shared knowledge: information spreads across teams rather than sitting with one person, which makes the business more resilient as it grows.
• Stronger relationships: people who know each other well communicate more openly and support each other through busy periods.
• A sense of belonging: being part of a team that works well together is one of the things that makes people want to stay.

Each of these compounds over time. A team that shares what it knows becomes easier to grow, because every new person joins a culture that is already helping them learn.

How has the UK way of working changed?

The way the UK works has shifted considerably over the past few years. Hybrid working has settled into a lasting pattern for many office-based teams, and since April 2024 employees have had the right to request flexible working from their first day in a new role.

Employers have responded thoughtfully. Alongside the practical questions of desks and days, more businesses are asking what they want the office to do for their people, and the answers increasingly centre on connection, learning, culture and the kind of collaboration that works best face to face.

Information sharing has evolved with it. Day to day updates now move easily through digital tools, which frees up time together in person for the conversations that benefit most from it: talking through a complex problem, giving feedback, building trust with a new colleague or shaping an idea from scratch. Time in the office has become more valuable because it’s more intentional.

What are the different types of collaboration?

Collaboration covers several quite different ways of working together, and each one benefits from something slightly different in the space and the culture around it.

Project collaboration

Teams working towards a shared goal over weeks or months – a product launch, a client project, a new process. This kind of work benefits from a place for teams to gather, see progress at a glance and pick up where everyone left off. See how this kind of collaboration space could be included in your office layout.

Spontaneous collaboration

The quick question, the passing conversation or the idea that comes up during a chat by the coffee machine. It happens most where people naturally cross paths, which is why the position of kitchens and breakout areas matters as much as their design.

Creative collaboration

Brainstorms and workshops where the aim is to generate ideas rather than refine them. Room to move, surfaces to write on and the freedom to be a little louder all help ideas flow.

Learning and mentoring

Much of what people learn at work is absorbed rather than taught – hearing how a colleague handles a tricky call, or being shown a quicker way to do something. Mentoring and coaching add the deliberate side, and both work best when people sit within easy reach of each other.

Cross-team collaboration

Some of the most useful conversations happen between departments: sales hearing from operations, finance working alongside project teams. Shared spaces used by several teams give these connections a chance to form naturally.

Hybrid collaboration

Meetings where some people are in the room and others join remotely. Good audio-visual set-ups and rooms designed with both groups in mind help everyone contribute equally, wherever they are.

Social collaboration

Lunch together, a team celebration, a chat at the end of the day. It looks informal, and it’s where much of the trust that makes every other kind of collaboration possible is built.

What does your team need to come together to do?

A helpful way to plan for all of this is to start with the reasons people come together, then match each one to the space and support it needs:

Few businesses weight all ten equally. A creative studio might lean towards creating and brainstorming, while a professional services firm may place more emphasis on client meetings and important conversations. Asking each team lead which reasons matter most to their people is a quick and useful way to shape the brief.

How can you encourage your team to collaborate more?

Space gives collaboration somewhere to happen, and culture gives people the confidence to use it. A few approaches that work well in growing businesses:

• Give office days a shared purpose. Coordinating when teams are in together means people arrive knowing who they’ll see and what they’ll work on.
• Lead by example. When leaders are visible, approachable and open about their own work, others follow.
• Make sharing a habit. Lunch and learns, short show and tell sessions and project walls help knowledge move between teams without adding meetings.
• Pair people up. Mentoring partnerships and buddies for new starters build relationships across experience levels from day one.
• Celebrate together. Marking wins, milestones and anniversaries in person reinforces that the team succeeds as a team.
• Ask your team. The people using the space every day often have the clearest ideas about what would help them work together.
• Offer choice. A range of settings – quiet, collaborative, social – lets people pick the right place for the task in hand.

How does office design support collaboration?

People make a considered choice each time they decide to come into the office. When the workplace offers something home can’t – colleagues to learn from, rooms to create in, a place that feels part of something bigger – that choice becomes an easy one.

That makes the fit-out an important part of your hybrid working offer. A floor plan built mainly around individual desks suits focused solo work well. One that balances desks with project rooms, breakout areas, focus rooms and comfortable places to take calls gives people the full range of reasons to come together.

Zoning helps both sit comfortably side by side. Grouping livelier collaborative and social areas away from quieter focus space, with good acoustic treatment in between, means teams can talk freely while colleagues who need to concentrate can do so. Phone booths close to where teams sit give people a private place to take a call without stepping far from their colleagues.

Identity matters too. An office that reflects your brand, values and work gives people a sense of belonging the moment they walk in, and gives visitors a clear picture of who you are.

Why does collaboration outside work matter?

The bonus of a team that collaborates well at work is that it often carries on beyond it. Colleagues who enjoy each other’s company start organising their own lunches, five-a-side games, quiz nights and charity challenges, and those shared experiences feed straight back into how they work together.

Relationships built outside the day job make everyday collaboration easier. People who have trained for the same run or raised money for a cause together tend to ask each other for help more readily, share ideas more freely and give feedback with more trust.

The office can play a part in this as well. A kitchen or breakout area that doubles as a venue for a team breakfast, a celebration or an event after work gives these moments a natural home, while volunteering days and community partnerships give teams the chance to work together on something completely different. Each one strengthens the connections that make collaboration feel natural.

Can you encourage collaboration within the space you already have?

In many cases, yes. Hybrid patterns often free up desks that can be reallocated to project rooms, breakout and focus space, creating a more collaborative office within the same footprint. Getting the balance right for how your team works today, and working out how much office space you need as the business grows, is where careful planning pays off.

If you’re planning a move, the same approach applies earlier. Size the new office around the activities it needs to support as well as the number of people, and collaboration is built in from the start.

How do I get my team to collaborate more?

Every team collaborates in its own way, so no single layout or policy suits every business. The starting point is the same for all of them: understand why your people come together, then give them the spaces, habits and encouragement that make those moments easy and enjoyable. A few questions to guide the conversation:

• What does your team come together to do? Which types of collaboration matter most to each team?
• Where do conversations happen today? Notice where people naturally gather, and build on it.
• How is knowledge shared? Look at how information moves between teams and reaches new starters.
• Does the space offer variety? Check for a good balance of collaborative, social and quiet settings.
• Does it feel like yours? Consider whether the office reflects your culture and values.
• Can it grow with you? Make sure the layout can adapt as teams grow and ways of working change.

BSE UK’s office fit out team designs workplaces around how your people work together, now and as your business grows.

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There’s a point in most growing businesses where the office stops being just somewhere people come to work and becomes somewhere they come to see each other. Hybrid working has brought that point forward. On office days, the conversations people came in for happen at the coffee point, over lunch and in the ten minutes before a meeting, and the breakout space is where all of that has room to happen.

If yours is quieter than you’d hoped, look at it the way your team experiences it – how far it is from their desk, how it sounds when they sit down, what draws them over – before looking at what’s in it. Those details decide whether a space gets used, and each of them can be planned for.

What should your breakout space be used for?

Size changes the answer more than anything else. In a team of ten, breakout might be the only space that isn’t desks. In a business of a few hundred, it can be a floor in its own right, with its own calendar of events.

Smaller businesses – one space, several jobs

This is where breakout works hardest. A coffee point, microwave, fridge and seating comfortable enough for half an hour covers lunch, and the same space doubles as reception, informal meeting room and the place a candidate decides whether they’d like to work with you. For many smaller businesses it’s front of house, which makes it worth a bigger share of the budget than its floor area suggests. Some put less into desking and more into breakout, where everyone, visitors included, will see and use it. Take a look at our article ‘what should I include in my office fit-out’ for how a reakout space fits in with other elements of your workspace.

Growing businesses – social space with a working edge

As a team grows, the meeting rooms fill up first. Booths, a long bench table or a few high tables give breakout a working edge, so a quick huddle or a one to one has somewhere to happen without a booking – and hybrid teams tend to save exactly those conversations for office days.

Larger businesses – a destination in its own right

At scale, breakout becomes a destination: a café counter, varied seating, games and screens, sometimes alongside a gym or terrace. The ones that stay busy have a rhythm built around them, whether that’s a Friday lunch, a monthly all-hands or a coffee cart on the day the whole team is in. The furniture gives people somewhere to sit, and the rhythm gives them a reason to.

Does a breakout space need a pool table?

Games earn their place where there’s a social habit to build on. A team that already stays on for a game on a Friday will use a pool table every week. Where that habit hasn’t formed yet, flexible seating and a large shared table give you more from the same floor area, and leave room to add games once you’ve seen how the space is used.

How do you get your team away from their desks at lunchtime?

Desk lunches usually start as a habit of convenience – the breakout space is a trip away, full at one o’clock or in full view of the whole office. Shortening the walk, adding seats for the lunchtime peak and giving people a little privacy tends to turn that habit around, and people come back to the afternoon with a clearer head.

The benefit reaches the desks as well. Food eaten in one place, on surfaces made for it, means fewer spills on keyboards and carpets, less cleaning and an office that doesn’t smell of lunch all afternoon – the kind of thing that otherwise ends in a list of rules about what can be eaten where. The Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 also require suitable facilities for eating meals where people regularly eat at work, so a good place to eat is a baseline as well as a benefit.

Not everyone will want to stay in, and the people who head out for a walk, a coffee shop or the gym are taking a proper break too. What works is choice: somewhere good to eat on the days people stay, showers and lockers for lunchtime runners and cyclists, and leaders who visibly take their own lunch. That last one changes habits faster than any fit-out.

Where should a breakout space go in your office?

Where breakout sits shapes how it’s used more than anything you put in it. Close to the entrance or the main route through the office, it catches people naturally – on the way in, on the way out and between meetings. Set apart from the desks by a meeting room, a storage wall or a bank of lockers, it can be as lively as it likes without anyone on a call feeling it. Daylight matters too, and a bright corner draws people in a way an internal room rarely does. Your company size will also impact how much space is needed.

Planning what sits next door

Toilets work best close enough to reach easily, without opening onto where people eat. Kitchens need water, drainage and often extraction, so placing breakout near existing services can keep fit-out costs and disruption down. Planning ventilation to carry cooking smells away from the desks keeps the whole office comfortable.

How do you get the acoustics right in a breakout space?

Breakout spaces are built from hard materials – worktops, hard flooring, glass – and a full table at lunchtime can quickly sound like a canteen. Acoustic rafts, upholstered seating, wall panels and high backed booths soften that, while doors or glazed partitions keep the sound on the breakout side.

Plan for the opposite too. A breakout space within earshot of a quiet office can feel too exposed to talk in, and a little background sound – music, the coffee machine – gives people the cover to relax. The aim is a space that’s lively inside and calm at its edges.

Should the coffee point be in the office or in the breakout space?

The coffee point is the one thing almost everyone visits several times a day, which makes it the most effective way to bring people into the breakout space. Put it there and every coffee run becomes a chance to bump into someone. Put it among the desks and those same conversations happen beside someone trying to concentrate. In a small or medium office, one coffee point in breakout usually works best. On larger floors, a main hub in breakout with a smaller tea point or water station nearer the desks keeps things convenient without losing that pull. The same 1992 regulations require drinking water to be readily accessible, so a water point near the working area makes sense whichever approach you choose.

What else can sit alongside a breakout space?

As businesses grow, breakout often becomes part of a wider set of spaces – a gym, showers and changing rooms, a wellbeing or quiet room, an outdoor terrace – and some of these, showers and a quiet room especially, scale down well to smaller offices. The breakout space remains the anchor, as the one space everyone uses on an ordinary day.

How has our own breakout space changed as BSE UK has grown?

Our own office has been through the same process. As the BSE UK team grew, the breakout space had to grow with it. It used to double as a hybrid meeting space beside the private meeting rooms, which suited a smaller team, though it meant calls, catch-ups and lunch were all competing for the same corner. Today it’s a breakout space in its own right, with acoustics planned so it can be busy without carrying into the meeting rooms, and a good coffee machine that gives everyone a reason to stop by.

It’s also where we take visitors. Sitting down with a coffee there gives them a real sense of what BSE UK is about, and the kind of team we are, before anyone has opened a laptop.

Why doesn’t anyone use our breakout space?

There’s rarely one reason, and rarely one fix. The breakout spaces people use most were planned as early and as carefully as the desks, around how the team spends its day. If you’re reviewing yours, these questions are a good place to start:

• Purpose: What would you like the space to do for your team – lunch, quick meetings, welcoming visitors, events?
• Location: Is it on a route people already walk, with daylight and a little distance from the desks?
• Surroundings: Are toilets, kitchen services and ventilation planned to support the space?
• Acoustics: Does it feel comfortable to chat in, without carrying across to the desks?
• The coffee point: Is it helping draw people together in the breakout space?

Whether you’re refreshing an existing breakout space or planning a new office, talk to BSE UK about an office fit-out that gives your team good reasons to come in.

The post Why doesn’t anyone use our breakout space? appeared first on BSE UK.

The list is the easy part. What makes an office work is how those spaces are planned and set up – where meeting rooms sit in relation to desks, whether breakout space draws people in or gets ignored, and how clever storage, acoustics and flexible furniture let one area do two jobs. Investing in the look, feel and culture of a workplace used to be the preserve of the likes of Apple Park, the Googleplex and Meta’s MPK 21. Now businesses of every size are doing the same, giving their teams a practical place to work, a reason to come in and a space that reflects who they are.

Ten years ago, this was mostly a headcount exercise. Count the desks, add a couple of meeting rooms, find a corner for the kettle. Now your team can do a good share of their work from anywhere, which means the office has to earn the commute. It’s where your people collaborate and get a feel for what the business stands for, and often the first real impression a candidate or client gets of you.

There comes a point where a growing business notices the gap between the office it has and the one its team expects. The sites that set that expectation had budgets most businesses will never see, but the thinking behind them has filtered down – a 30 person business can offer the same sense of a place designed around its people, if it’s deliberate about where the space and budget go.

Why is the office being asked to do more than it used to?

Your office used to have one job: give people somewhere to sit. Now it needs to be a practical place to get work done, a reason for a hybrid team to come in on the same days, and a reflection of your culture. The essentials stay the same – what’s changed is how much thought goes into them.

Recruitment has pulled it in the same direction. Candidates tour offices the way they once read job descriptions, and a space that feels like an afterthought says something about how the business treats its people. The office has become part of the offer.

What does every office fit-out need?

Almost every office has these spaces. What separates one that works from one that doesn’t is how they’re sized, placed and set up.

Workstations

Desks are still the backbone of most offices, but the ratio has shifted. If your team is in three days a week, a desk for every person means paying for space that sits empty for two. Many businesses now plan for fewer desks than people, with bookable spaces alongside fixed desks for the roles that need them. So how much office space do you really need?

Meeting rooms

A single large boardroom that sits empty most of the week does less for your team than a mix of small rooms for two to four people, a couple of mid-sized rooms and one space that can open up for bigger sessions. Placement matters as much as size – rooms near the entrance for visitors, rooms close to teams for quick calls – and every room should be set up for hybrid, so people dialling in can take part as fully as those around the table.

Breakout and kitchen space

Breakout space is where a lot of the reason to come in lives – the unplanned conversation, the lunch with someone from another team. Tucked into a back corner, it gets ignored. Placed on a natural route through the office and next to the kitchen, it becomes the part of the floor people gravitate towards

Toilets and welfare

Often treated as a box to tick, and noticed straight away when it’s done badly. Plan provision around your busiest days rather than your average, and think beyond the minimum: accessible facilities, showers if you want to encourage cycling in or lunchtime exercise, and a small private room that can flex between uses.

Storage and lockers

When people don’t have a desk of their own, they need somewhere to leave a laptop, a coat and a gym bag. Lockers and properly planned team storage keep surfaces clear, so shared desks work the way they’re meant to. Clever storage can do double duty too – a storage wall that zones one area from another, or seating with storage built in

Tech and AV

Reliable Wi-Fi across the whole floor, power where people sit rather than where the sockets happen to be, room booking that works, and meeting room AV that anyone can start without calling IT. It’s the least visible part of a fit-out, and the first thing people notice when it goes wrong.

How does your business change what you include?

How your team works

A client-facing business needs somewhere to host. A team doing focused, individual work needs more quiet space: phone booths, quiet zones, acoustic separation from the busier parts of the office. A creative or project-led team leans the other way, with room to spread out, pin things up and work together around a table rather than a screen. Most businesses are a mix, which is why zoning matters – it lets different kinds of work happen in the same office without getting in each other’s way.

Your sector

Sector shapes the detail. A professional services firm may need more private rooms for confidential conversations. A tech business may want more collaborative space and a stronger social hub. A business with products to show may want the office to double as somewhere to display its work.

Your size

A 15-person business can’t give a floor over to a gym, and doesn’t need to. At that size every area needs to be flexible – a kitchen that doubles as the space for team meetings. As you grow, you can give spaces a single purpose and add the features that set you apart. Treat the size bands below as a guide – how your team works will move things between columns.

Office fit-out brief builder

Your essentials, your priorities, your brief

Answer eight quick questions about how your team works and get a fit-out brief built around your business.

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How can your office show off your culture to staff and visitors?

Your office says something about your business whether you plan it or not. Brand in an office works best when it goes further than a logo on the wall. It’s in the materials and colours you choose, how open or private the space feels, and what you put in the places people pass through every day. A business that values collaboration shows it by giving the best spot on the floor to shared space instead of the directors’ offices.

The arrival experience does a lot of the heavy lifting. The first few metres through the door set the tone for staff, candidates and visitors alike. For clients, agencies and partners, that means a clear arrival point, somewhere comfortable to wait, a meeting room close to reception so they’re not walked through the whole office, and a screen and Wi-Fi that work first time. If you host often – agencies running workshops, partners in for a day of planning – a client suite or bookable space for longer sessions is worth building in. Get it right and visitors leave with a sense of how your business works as well as where.

Do you need an Apple Park or a Googleplex to compete for talent?

For years, the benchmark for a great office was set by the big tech campuses – Apple Park, the Googleplex, Meta’s MPK 21 – with their gyms, cafés, gardens and games rooms, a world away from the average UK office. That gap has narrowed. People at a 40-person business now expect a space that feels designed around them, and candidates compare.

The part people value most was never the slide or the ball pit. It’s the sense that someone has thought about how they work and what makes a day in the office better than a day at home. Much of that is achievable at any size:

• Wellbeing you can use: showers, bike storage and changing space make it easier to cycle in or train at lunch. An on site gym is a statement for larger offices – for smaller ones, a partnership with a local gym can do a similar job.
• Food and social space: a kitchen people want to eat in, and space that works for a Friday team lunch or an evening event.
• Choice of where to work: a range of settings so people can pick the right space for the task in front of them.
• Space that feels good to be in: natural light, plants, good air and a comfortable temperature.

Each of these is a planning decision first and a budget decision second – putting the money where people will feel it.

What have I forgotten in my office fit-out?

• Acoustics: open plan offices get loud quickly, and noise is one of the most common complaints once teams are back in. Panels, soft finishes, booths and zoning all help.
• Inclusion: quiet space for people who find open plan overwhelming, a room that works for wellbeing or prayer, a private space for new parents, and step free access throughout.
• Room to change: flexible furniture and modular layouts let the office adapt as your team grows or your working pattern shifts, without a full refit. Reusing existing furniture where it works and choosing lower carbon materials keeps the sustainability side in check too – something clients and candidates increasingly ask about.

What comes with the building, and what doesn’t?

Most commercial offices are let at Category A (Cat A) – a finished but empty space with raised floors, suspended ceilings, lighting, heating and cooling, and toilets, with some landlords now offering Cat A+ with a kitchen, meeting rooms and furniture already in. Everything that makes it your office is Category B (Cat B): partitions, meeting rooms, kitchen and breakout, furniture, AV, branding and finishes. That’s where most of the decisions in this article sit. If budget is tight, get the infrastructure right first – power, data, meeting rooms, acoustics – and add the features that set you apart as you grow, because infrastructure is far harder to add later than furniture.

What should I include in my office fit-out?

There’s no single list that fits every business. Two offices with the same headcount can need very different things. The essentials are much the same for everyone. What sets an office apart is how much thought goes into planning them.

Before you start, ask yourself:

• How does your team work? The balance of focused, collaborative and social work.
• Why would people come in? What the office offers that home doesn’t.
• Who visits? Clients, candidates, agencies and partners, and how often.
• What should the space say about you? The culture and brand you want people to feel.
• Where will you be in three years? Headcount, working pattern and how the space needs to flex.

Planning an office fit-out? Talk to our team about a space designed around how your business works.

The post What should I include in my office fit-out? appeared first on BSE UK.

Headcount is where nearly every office search begins, and it’s rarely where the right answer comes from. You only really find out how much space you need once people are in and you can see how they use it. The businesses that get this right aren’t the ones with the most accurate headcount – they’re the ones who’ve worked out what the office is actually for, before they start counting desks. Some people are in five days a week, others split time between home and the office, and the busiest day of the week rarely resembles the quietest. Headcount tells you almost nothing about which of those two days you should be planning for.

Hybrid working doesn’t mean no office

Your team might be perfectly happy working from a small home office or a desk in the corner of a bedroom, and the office was never meant to compete with that. ONS data shows hybrid working is now an established part of UK working life, not a pandemic hangover still working its way out of the system, and the evidence points towards people wanting hybrid rather than no office at all.

That’s an important distinction for anyone planning a fit-out, because it means the office hasn’t disappeared – its purpose has changed. Home tends to win on focused work, convenience and flexibility; the office earns its place on collaboration, mentoring, spontaneous conversation and the kind of team cohesion that doesn’t happen over a screen. Design for that split, and the question stops being how many desks you need and starts being what you actually want people doing when they’re here.

None of that makes bigger automatically better. A cramped office makes collaboration harder the moment everyone’s in; a floor of half-empty desks doesn’t make it any easier, it just trades one problem for a more expensive one.

How much office space do you need per person?

As a broad planning guide, office space tends to fall into one of three ranges.

These are planning ranges rather than fixed requirements. BCO’s 2026 guidance sets 10m² per person as the general workspace design standard, though the right figure for your business depends on how the space actually gets used, particularly once your team starts splitting time between home and office.

Your office space, per-person

Office Space Calculator

Put your team size and working pattern into the calculator and it gives you an estimated office size, along with the space per person that suits how your team works. Treat it as a starting point, then check it against the ranges above.

Calculate your space

Is desk space the same as office space?

It’s an easy distinction to miss, but a desk itself accounts for only around 1.2 to 1.5 m² of floor space, while an office needs to do considerably more than provide somewhere to sit. People need room to move, to meet, to make a coffee, to store what they’ve brought in, and, depending on the business, to welcome customers or suppliers when they visit – all of which matters more, not less, once a team goes hybrid.

Where a permanent desk for every employee isn’t needed, that saved space doesn’t have to disappear into an underused corner; it can become exactly the kind of shared space that gives people a reason to come together when they are actually in. Office space is better thought of as a total workplace footprint than a tally of desks.

Do you need a desk for every employee?

Where everyone’s in the office every day, the calculation is fairly straightforward: one desk, one person. Once part of the team is working from home for some of the week, though, a permanent workstation for every person becomes harder to justify, and the more interesting question becomes what that freed-up space should do instead. It might become:

• a meeting room for face-to-face discussions
• somewhere informal to catch up
• space for project work and collaboration
• a quiet area for focused work
• touchdown desks for people without a permanent workstation
• a proper breakout area

Fewer people at desks on any given day isn’t a shortfall to plan around; it’s room to think properly about what people actually need from the office when they do come in.

How much office space do you need if your team is hybrid?

Office occupancy should be judged by peak-day attendance, team clustering patterns, and the underlying reasons people choose to come in, rather than by a single day’s headcount. An office used mainly for independent work needs a different footprint to one built around meetings and bringing people together, even at identical headcount – that mismatch is the single most common reason a fit-out ends up wrong for how a business actually operates.

Get the balance wrong in either direction and it shows. Too little space and collaboration strains the moment everyone’s in; too much, particularly as rows of empty desks, doesn’t fix that – it just changes what feels wrong about the room.

Recent BCO research puts average UK office utilisation at around 66%, well below the long-standing 80% benchmark. This is worth sitting with, given how much of the week “everyone’s in” only means the building’s fuller, not that anything’s actually happening because they are. The real question isn’t how many desks you need. It’s where in your week presence genuinely creates something, and where it’s just people sitting near each other.

Desks aren’t the only thing competing for space

Once you’ve worked out your desks and occupancy, everything else your team needs still has to fit somewhere.

Meeting rooms

How many meetings tend to run at the same time, and do customers or suppliers visit regularly? Where people are coming in specifically to spend time together, meeting space earns a proper place in the calculation, not just what’s left over after desks are counted.

Breakout and collaboration space

A meeting room isn’t always what a conversation needs. Two or three people working through an idea over a comfortable corner of the office can do the job just as well, and for hybrid teams that kind of informal space tends to matter more, not less – it’s where the face-to-face interaction people miss while working remotely actually happens.

Quiet space

People don’t only come into the office to collaborate. Sometimes someone just needs to concentrate, take a private call, or get through a piece of work without interruption, and a good layout gives them somewhere to do that rather than expecting one type of space to suit everybody.

Storage

What needs storing depends entirely on the business – paperwork, equipment, samples, supplies, personal belongings – and none of those requirements shrink just because part of the team is working from home for part of the week.

Growing the team doesn’t have to mean paying for empty desks today

If a move is being driven by growth, it’s worth thinking beyond today’s headcount, though rarely by paying to sit a row of empty desks in the meantime. Working patterns tend to shift alongside growth too – a mostly office-based team can drift towards hybrid, just as a highly remote business sometimes decides it needs more time together as it scales.

That shift often has a generational edge to it, too: as the workforce keeps skewing younger, the same hybrid-not-remote pattern in the ONS data tends to show up more strongly, which changes what “room to grow” should mean in practice.

Flexibility can matter as much as extra floor space here: a layout that can absorb a few more people, a meeting room that could be reconfigured, furniture that can move, an underused corner that becomes workspace the day it’s needed. Building in that kind of give counts for more than trying to predict exactly how the business will work in five years’ time.

So, how much office space do I need?

There’s no single number that works for every business. BCO’s benchmark of 10m² per person is a genuinely useful starting point, but your real requirement comes down to headcount, occupancy, working patterns and what you actually need the workplace to do for you. Before settling on how much space to look for, it’s worth being honest with yourself about a handful of things:

• how many people you have now, and how many are typically in on the same day
• whether everyone genuinely needs a permanent desk
• what you want people to come into the office for
• how much meeting, collaboration and quiet space would actually get used
• what storage and welfare provision the business needs
• how your working patterns might shift as the business grows

The calculation matters, but it’s only the starting point. A good office fits your people today and keeps working as the business changes around it. For a growing company, that mostly comes down to finding the balance between enough space for the team to work comfortably together, and space you’re not quietly paying to leave empty – which is exactly where good office space planning earns its keep.

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