How much workspace do employees require

Here are some estimated numbers to help you get an idea of how much space some aspects of an office environment consume, and to help you calculate how much space you actually need:.

Additionally, surveying employees before creating your office plan can uncover potential needs you may have missed that could lead to increased productivity or employee morale.

When determining how much office space you need, it is vital to plan for growth. The expense of terminating a lease early combined with the costs of finding and moving offices is not inexpensive. Building in your anticipated growth helps you expand your business without costly interruptions. Some necessary questions you need to ask yourself when thinking about the future are:. Forward-thinking and flexibility are crucial when deciding how much office space per person and the type of environment you want to create.

To learn more about how a tenant rep can help you during the office selection process, read our article 7 Benefits of Hiring a Tenant Representation Broker. Once you have visualized your new office layout, you can get an estimate of how much space you need using our free Office Space Calculator. Our calculation is derived from a carefully-designed formula that weighs the number of employees, the amount of space desired for each employee and the use of common spaces.

The final projection should give you a good place to start in your search for a new office space. While this calculator will provide you with an estimate of the amount of space your new office needs, it is based on industry standards and is not intended to act as a definitive valuation.

We highly recommend that you seek the expertise of one of our brokers , who will be able to speak directly with you about your specific needs and the best ways to accommodate those needs within the market. You can also manage your subscription preferences. Ask yourself these questions: Do you want to maximize the space each employee gets, or do you want to put in as many employees as you can in the space?

Do you envision having a lot of individual offices, or open areas with employees in cubes or workstations? Does each employee need an individual desk or is sharing possible? How many people are going to be in the office part time? How many remote employees will you have? What type of space does each department need to work efficiently?

The total size of an office space will depend on the total number of employees. But the average space per employee for a general office is around sqm per person. Professional services businesses like accounting or law firms often need more private office space and generally require around sqm per person. Though many contemporary office spaces for these types of businesses are becoming smaller, as businesses become more efficient with how they use space.

This can help with attracting and retaining top talent, and with improving productivity and morale. These types of offices have similar requirements to professional services businesses, around sqm per person. A relatively new movement in office space is agile office space design, which provides layouts to suit a variety of different types of work and employees. Agile offices have open central spaces as well as smaller, private rooms for more individualized work.

These types of spaces are very flexible and can work with almost any type of business. How to plan your office space When planning your future office space, you need to take into account your unique business requirements. Key points to consider: Understand your organizational strategy. Your office space should reflect your brand and the impression you want to make on your customers and employees. It should also take into account the needs of your employees, how they work together and the type of work they do.

Business objectives. Your office space should support your business objectives, which could include reducing costs, fostering greater collaboration between teams or improving productivity. You may also be looking to create a desirable office space to attract and retain top talent.

Future needs. The average office space per employee has been a moving target for years. It has been shrinking over the past decade as flexible workspace trends have called for fewer private offices and cubicles in favor of more open, collaborative areas. While there are some guidelines you can follow, the decision of how much office space to allocate depends on your company and the needs of your workforce.

In a recent webinar , Adam Stoltz, firmwide Director of Consulting for HOK, discussed five factors every workplace leader should consider as they plan their future office. For instance, attorneys at a law firm typically work independently or host meetings with important clients in the office.

They may need more square footage per person. Prior to COVID, salespeople and consultants traveled more frequently, so they generally needed less office space. Employees who do a lot of creative work may spend more time collaborating on projects, so they need more meeting space than dedicated desk space. However, since most organizations have a mix of people in different roles, it would be wise to offer different types of spaces. In previous years, workplace design studies concluded that the average office space per employee was about 75 to square feet, according to JLL.

Now, in the midst of a pandemic, JLL reports the average amount of space per employee in was square feet. That includes dedicated desk space and the space surrounding it, and should also take into account the amount of space in meeting rooms and common areas.

If you want more detailed recommendations, commercial real estate network Office Finder has an office space calculator and guidelines for common types of spaces. They include:. To keep employees safe in the office, your workspaces will most likely need more distance between them. This helps you immediately identify which spaces are potentially unsafe and need to be reconfigured.

You can even generate new floor plans automatically within the software. Additionally, you can map new seating scenarios or assign employees to alternating shifts so they can keep the same desks and use them part time.

This helps you determine how to adjust the flow of traffic. If your lobby is too small to accommodate a crowd, you can use signs to stagger people and limit lines to just a few people.