How to accelerate your office transformation and turn your user needs into a future-proof office space

As remote work, flexible schedules, and advancing technologies reshape the business landscape, companies are rethinking their corporate real estate and office layouts to accommodate evolving work patterns. Let’s explore a user-centric approach to accelerate your office transformation, and how spaciv can help you ensure the resulting space is not only cost-effective but also adaptable for the future.

The importance of understanding your users’ needs

When embarking on an office transformation journey, it’s important to challenge your assumptions about what your users really need to be effective in the workplace. This means taking a methodical, data-driven approach, including existing data sources and current insights into user activity.

Factors such as occupancy rates (e.g. badge swipes), user preferences (e.g. utilisation rates) and the current state of the corporate real estate portfolio (e.g. lease durations) provide a basic understanding of where and what your users need.

However, there are limitations to relying solely on usage and occupancy metrics. To create user-centric spaces, your focus needs to shift from ‘when’ to ‘how’ space is used.

Three depths of user needs data

With spaciv, you can use three convenient options to integrate user activity data:

Manual modelling

Ideal for high-level projects and broad assessments, manual modelling allows for a data base without direct user involvement. Bear in mind, however, that insights generated by this method may be susceptible to individual bias.

spaciv benchmark data

Leveraging spaciv’s industry-specific benchmark data provides accurate insights quickly and easily. This option allows for scalability without user involvement, making it a fast and reliable choice.

spaciv crowd-modelling

Crowd modelling provides a quick and direct route to user involvement, allowing users to contribute their needs directly. This approach not only improves the quality of your data base, but has also been proven to increase acceptance and buy-in for the final results.

It’s also important to systematise what you learn from this process. This means moving away from the most traditional space calculation ratios, such as sqm per workstation, and instead developing a strategy that revolves around your users’ needs. To do this, we recommend using a standardised space module catalogue and evolving space rules.

Space modules are a comprehensive catalogue of easily sourced furniture or space configurations. These could be different sizes of meeting rooms, combinations of individual workstation sizes or specialised modules such as laboratory setups.

Linking these space modules to your user needs is the job of space rules. They define for which specific activities and under what circumstances modules are used.

Space rules

The combination of these three key aspects will drive your transformation and inform your decision-making. spaciv can help you combine these aspects and easily calculate your ideal space – from team space to an entire portfolio, today and tomorrow. Always ensuring that your space is user-centric and cost-effective.

That’s why we’ve made it easy and accessible to import and customise your organisation’s space modules and rules to support even more accurate calculations.

By embracing this fluidity, you can continuously adapt your office spaces to remain aligned with the evolving requirements of your users. And by that, ensuring long-term relevance and effectiveness of your spaces. Furthermore, by analysing your crowd-modelling over time, you can identify patterns and trends that can inform proactive decisions around your future workplace strategy.

Simplifying your workplace transformation

As you navigate the changing landscape of work dynamics, prioritising a user-centric approach is essential to ensure sustainable office transformation.

With spaciv, you gain the tools to fully understand your users’ needs, establish space rules and use a customised space module catalogue. This enables you to create future-proof spaces that are both cost effective and adaptable.

Guiding you through this transformation is the process of challenging your own assumptions and adopting a data-driven approach. This will enable you to make informed decisions based on robust data insights.

Leveraging advanced analytics and AI-powered space planning will streamline implementation, allowing you to project future space needs and align space with evolving requirements.

By adopting this approach, you can navigate office change with ease and efficiency. And by ensuring that spaces remain adaptable and user-centric, you can maximise productivity in the evolving workplace landscape, setting your organisation up for continued success.