Is this office right for us?

I am often asked to walk through an office and give a view. I never turn it down. Floor plans tell you what somebody intended. Walking the floor tells you what actually happened and the same thing happens to most of them.

There is a collaboration area. It is usually well made. Soft seating, a whiteboard or a screen, the best daylight on the floor, the corner that appears in the recruitment photography. And for most of the working day it is empty. Somebody eats lunch there. Someone takes a call from the armchair. That is the extent of it.

Twenty metres away, every meeting room is booked from nine until four, with people standing outside waiting for the room to clear. Everyone else is at a workstation with headphones on.

That gap between where the investment went and where the people went is the most useful thing in the building. It is also the thing most often explained away.

What I Can Tell You In An Hour

Quite a lot, honestly, but almost all of it is about quality rather than fit.

In an hour I can tell you whether the space is well built. Whether the finishes are holding up two years in or already tired. Whether the wayfinding works or whether visitors are quietly stranded at reception. Whether the acoustic treatment was value engineered out of the package. Whether the branding is doing any work or is just a logo on a wall in the entrance. Whether the density on the floor plate matches what the furniture was designed for. Whether the current facilities team is doing a good job, front of wall. Back of the wall requires a different type of conversation.

Those are real findings. They cost real money to get wrong. However, they are not the question that matters most.

What I Cannot Tell You In An Hour

Whether the workplace is right for this organisation.

That is a different question and it lives outside the building. A space is appropriate when it matches how the company actually makes decisions, how managers actually behave, and how the work actually moves between people. None of that is visible in a walkthrough. It is only inferable, and inference at that speed is guessing with good manners.

So when I am asked on the spot whether the workplace is working, the honest answer is that I can tell you whether it was built well. I cannot yet tell you whether it was built for you.

Start With The Least Flattering Question. Is It Actually A Workspace?

Before reaching for culture, check whether the space can physically hold the work. Very often it cannot, and everyone in the building knows it except the people who signed off the drawings.

Soft seating does not make a collaboration space. A sofa and a low table is a lounge. Try to do ninety minutes of real work there. The laptop sits at the wrong height so your wrists and neck take the load. There is nowhere to put a notebook or a coffee without leaning forward. There is no power within reach, so the session ends when the battery does. There is no screen, so three people crowd around one laptop and one of them cannot see. There is no writable surface. There is no acoustic separation, so the group either disturbs the desks nearby or self censors and moves.

Now compare that to a meeting room. Table at working height, chairs designed for sitting upright for an hour, a screen, a door, power. Of course people go to the room. They are not rejecting collaboration. They are choosing the only place on the floor where collaborating is comfortable.

This is worth saying plainly because it is where a lot of workplace spend goes wrong. The space was specified to look like collaboration rather than to support it. Somebody visited a large multinational, photographed the amenity floor, and asked for that. What arrived was the aesthetic without the underlying decisions: the power and data strategy, the height and posture mix, the acoustic zoning, the technology, the storage, the adjacency logic. Those things are invisible in the photograph and they are the entire reason the original worked.

A copied space fails twice. It fails functionally on day one. And it fails politically about six months later, when the organisation quietly concludes that collaboration areas do not work here, which is the wrong lesson from the wrong evidence.

Then Ask Whether The Culture Allows It

If the space is genuinely fit for purpose and still sits empty, the cause is almost always one of these.

Exposure. An open collaboration area is a stage. If the culture is hierarchical or title driven, a half formed idea spoken in the open carries risk. People take the same conversation into an enclosed room because the room is where it is safe to be wrong. The space did not fail. It asked people to be visible in an organisation that punishes visibility.

Permission. Nobody said out loud that it is acceptable to spend forty minutes on a sofa with two colleagues during working hours. Where presence at a desk is still the informal proxy for effort, employees will read the collaboration zone as a place for breaks and not for work, no matter what the design intent said. And they will read the leadership behaviour, not the poster on the wall.

Hybrid reality. Most meetings now have someone remote. A conversation with a remote participant needs a door, a camera and acoustic separation. The open zone cannot serve that, so demand moves to enclosed rooms. The room shortage looks like a room shortage when it is actually a change in the shape of the work.

Adjacency. The area is on the wrong part of the floor. It sits beside a team that needs quiet, or far from the group that would use it most, or on a route where using it means being watched by leadership. People vote with their feet in about three days and then never revisit the decision.

The Fixes That Do Not Work

Adding more soft seating. Mandating that stand ups happen in the open. Installing occupancy sensors and treating the resulting dashboard as an answer.

Sensors are useful and I recommend them, but be clear about what they do. They tell you a space is used eleven percent of the time. They do not tell you why, and every reason on the list above produces the same eleven percent. Acting on utilisation data without the diagnosis behind it is how companies remove the wrong space and then pay to build it again three years later.

What Actually Answers It

Sit in the space yourself and try to work in it for an hour. It is the cheapest diagnostic available and almost nobody who commissioned the space has ever done it.

Observe across time rather than in a single visit, so you see the pattern rather than a Tuesday.

Talk to the people who avoid the space, not the leaders who commissioned it. The two groups will give you completely different accounts and only one of them is standing there every day.

Get an honest read on decision rights and management behaviour. If a manager needs to see people to trust them, no amount of open space will get used, and the organisation should design for the reality it has rather than the one on its careers page.

And look at how work actually moves. Which teams genuinely depend on each other, how often, and in what format. That is what should drive adjacency, enclosure ratios and room mix. Not a benchmark, and not what the last company in the sector did.

Where This Lands

Culture is not created by the office. Culture is exposed by it.

If your best space is empty, the building has already told you something specific. Either it was never fit to work in, or the organisation does not permit the behaviour it was built for. Both are fixable. Neither is fixed by more furniture.

The building is the evidence. It is not the diagnosis.