Understand attendance over time
Look beyond average attendance to days when teams overlap, visitors arrive or projects bring people together. Shared seats need an operating plan as well as a furniture plan.
Support the reason to be there
Decide which activities benefit from being together and which need concentration or privacy. Give those activities appropriate settings instead of making the whole office uniformly collaborative.
Make change easy to manage
Movable furniture, shared storage and clear room-use conventions can help. Assign responsibility for reset and upkeep so flexibility does not become daily uncertainty.
Ask people what gets in the way
Invite input on distractions, access, comfort and the settings people cannot currently find. A workplace brief should allow different experiences to be heard.
Take this into your brief.
- Map peak and typical attendance separately.
- Test a shared-seat day from arrival to departure.
- Agree storage and reset conventions.
Write down one priority, one constraint and one question you still need to answer. Review them beside the plan or material sample before agreeing the next design decision.