One standard desk space per person

Increasing the number of people on teams into the same size of office space comes with challenges, not least of which, where are they going to sit.

Office layout

A design company draw up plans for increasing the number of desks by giving everyone smaller desks. I think this is a bit of an obvious approach and fails to understand the problem. It occurred to me that the proposed layout was based on two unvalidated assumptions; that there should be one desk per person, and that those desks can be standardized.

I think that different people work in different ways at different times and designing office space to allow for flexibility provides a far more ‘human’ environment. My suggestion was three different types of workstations that provide for different ways of working. There would be the usual desk, chair, monitor, docking station combo, empty tables which might not even have chairs as these could be taken from desks if needed, and standing desks with large monitors. These different types of workstation allow for more than just head-down working at a computer, they also allow for meetings, discussions, quiet thinking work, spreading out lots of things work, etc., etc.