How much room does one person actually need to do good work?
It sounds like a simple question. It isn’t.
Get capacity planning wrong in one direction and you have to pay rent every month on empty desks. Get it wrong in the opposite direction and staff arrive on a busy Tuesday to find there’s nowhere to sit.
Generally speaking, the margin between those two results is only a few square metres per capita.
Here’s the good news:
Workspace planning is mathematics. Knowing the benchmarks, the clearances and how people actually behave when they arrive at work, you can accurately size a floor plan rather than estimating.
What you’ll uncover:
- The Benchmark Numbers Worth Knowing
- How Much Space One Desk Really Takes
- Density Bands And What They Cost
- Planning For Peak Days, Not Headcount
- The Support Spaces Everyone Forgets
The Benchmark Numbers Worth Knowing
Begin with industry averages. They won’t give you a definitive answer, but they will quickly show you if a floorplan is way out of whack.
Recent benchmarking has shown that the average office allowance has fallen to somewhere between 100 to 150 square feet per employee, down from approximately 225 square feet pre-2020. In metric terms, that’s about 9-14 square metres per person, down from approximately 21.
Well how did that happen? Hybrid work emerged. Hot desking emerged. Companies began only paying for space they needed based on desks booked, not headcount.
But averages hide a lot…
A bullpen of customer service reps isn’t the same beast as a group of lawyers. One will sprawl happily at 9 square metres per person. The other will be crowded at twice that area.
How Much Space Does One Desk Really Take?
Break it down and the numbers get real very fast.
An average 1500mm desk takes up roughly 1.2 square metres of floor space by itself. Seems small enough. But then you put the seat under it…
Comfortable ergonomic office chairs should have space to breathe. They recline, they rotate, and they scoot back whenever someone gets up. Which is why designers factor in a clearance area of about one metre behind every chair — and that space isn’t optional.
Give it that room, and the office chairs you invested in can recline, roll back and swivel exactly as they were built to. Take it away, and every adjustment feature somehow becomes pointless. Employees sit on the very edge of the seat all day long. This is what ergonomic chairs are designed to eliminate.
So a single workstation really needs:
- The desk footprint (around 1.2 to 1.6 square metres)
- A one metre chair clearance zone behind the seat
- A share of the walkway running past the desk
- Room for storage, cabling and a bin
Take everything into consideration and one “little” desk silently adds up to between 5 and 7 square metres before anyone has even passed by it.
Don’t Forget The Walkways
Primary circulation routes require approximately 1.2 metres clear width. Secondary routes between banks of desks require around 900mm.
They aren’t just aesthetic numbers. They’re what lets someone walk behind someone sitting down without asking them to scoot over first.
Density Bands And What They Cost
Space planners categorize offices into three general tiers. Choosing your tier early eliminates endless debating.
- Low density: 250 to 500 square feet per person. Private offices and executive floors are prime examples. Environments that have low density foster space and freedom.
- Average density: 150 to 250 square feet per person. Combination of enclosed offices, open workstations and meeting space. This is where most offices fall.
- High density: 80 to 150 square feet per person. Cramped, cozy, tolerable if done correctly.
High density isn’t automatically a bad choice. It’s only bad when it’s done carelessly…
Why fit out floors too tight? Well, when you fit out floors too tight, people move less optimally, desk sharing goes awry, and good posture goes out the window. It’s far more important than most designers care to realise. Musculoskeletal injuries are responsible for over 50% of all claims across Australia’s worker compensation systems, and poorly configured workstation setups are part of the problem.
Saving two square metres per person won’t be worth it if you lose an injury claim.
Planning For Peak Days, Not Headcount
This is where most workspace plans fall over.
Assigning every employee a desk because you count each person was logical when everyone worked five days a week. Offices don’t work that way these days.
Attendance is becoming far more standardized. One recent benchmark showed that 62% of organisations now mandate a set number of days in the office per week, compared to 49% the year before. Predictable? Yes. Also more crowded? Definitely. When you tell everyone to come on Tuesday-Thursday, those days are going to get hectic.
So plan it like this:
- Work out your realistic peak day attendance
- Size your desks to that number, not your total headcount
- Add 10 to 20% on top for growth
Occupancy ratios can help with this as well. Office space planning benchmarking worldwide is now 1.3 people per seat, so a company with 100 employees may only need 75 desks. Ensure your ratios reflect how your teams actually work, not how you wish they would though.
The Support Spaces Everyone Forgets
Desks are simple things. It’s what surrounds them that makes an office functional.
Budget floor area for:
- Meeting rooms in a couple of different sizes
- One or two focus rooms for calls and quiet work
- A kitchen or breakout area that fits more than three people
- Reception, storage, printing and comms
Don’t make the mistake of cramming desks closer to save a few bucks, only to realize there’s no private place to take a video call. Employees come to the office for what they can’t do at home. Take that away and the space isn’t paying its way.
A Simple Sanity Check
Divide your net floor area by the number of desks deducting non-desking areas such as WCs and support areas. If the resulting ratio is less than 5 square metres per desk space, then chances are good that your workspace is cramped.
Putting It All Together
Workspace planning stops being guesswork the moment it gets treated as numbers.
Begin with a baseline of approximately 9 to 14 square metres per person. Then adjust for your sector and how your teams really work. Size desks for busiest day attendance, not headcount. Reserve the clearance behind every seat so seating won’t be blocked for use as intended. Allow for meeting rooms, quiet zones and circulation to make it all work.
Accuracy of figures ensures an office environment that’s generous – not cheap.
Mistreat them and you’ll feel it — in the price of rent, or injury claims or employees who silently wish they were working from home.
Also Read
Add a Comment