Humanising Office Space Planning

Traditionally workspaces are designed for efficiency, fitting in as many workers in a floor plan as possible. We know now this arrangement does not make happy employees. In this ethnographic research project, we wanted to understand what office workers expected from their spaces and how they decide where to take hybrid meetings in the office.

Role: Project lead in cross regional team
Client: Steelcase Business
Date: 2023 - 9 weeks

Photos showing a range of meeting spaces in offices from open to closed settings.

The Problem

Our customers were unsure whether the meeting spaces and open floor plan settings designed and implemented pre-COVID were meeting the needs of their employees in 2023. Customers wanted to provide spaces that are highly utilised and valued by their employees.

Now that every meeting can be a hybrid (mixed-presence) one, the needs of the individual workers attending and participating in those meetings are due for a re-assessment.

What motivates people to get up from their desk to take a hybrid meeting? What are their expectations of meeting spaces?

Scope and Method

Project Lead: Jackie Hon
Team Members: Andrada Iosif, Naina Shenoy

  • 6 countries (India, China, Singapore, Germany, France, UK)
  • 57 Virtual & In-person Interviews with working professionals across 18 industries
  • 45 Diary Studies taken over 4 days of in-office routine
  • Over 650 survey participants across the 6 countries to employees working in companies with more than 1000 employees

I was responsible for the scoping and planning of the project, with help from the team to provide feedback and execute on the research strategies and synthesis.

We asked participants specifically about their in-person and virtual meeting experiences with less than 4 people in the office. We also asked them to describe their lived experiences and used image prompts to help get more accurate feedback.

Screenshots of our data analysis process, showing some correlation between need to control information flow and cognitive demands of a meeting

Some screenshots of our data analysis process

Findings

Some highlights from the research.

  • Preparing for hybrid meetings often requires significant cognitive effort
    ‍
  • Many factors are considered consciously and subconsciously by individuals when deciding where to hold/attend their meetings.
    ‍
  • An individual's privacy needs fluctuates throughout the day depending on their activities
    ‍
  • Integrated technology in meeting spaces is growing to be more than a nice-to-have.
Cognitive demands, and the need for control of information flow, influences where users choose to hold hybrid meetings.

Insights Translated

1. Provide easy access to variety of meeting spaces

Having a variety of meeting spaces within close proximity to their desk allows workers to easily go to spaces to suit their fluctuating privacy needs.

4 photos of individual office workers in their meeting spaces.

2. Meeting Attitudes help determine choice of space

Understanding individual and team meeting needs is crucial to an organisation's success in fully utilising their office space.

Meeting attitudes defined as Laid back, Negotiator and Conductor.

3. Prioritize integrated technology and acoustic privacy

Workers are happier when they don't have to sacrifice one or the other when choosing a meeting location in the office.

Users find it difficult to choose between acoustic privacy and integrated technology when deciding where to have a hybrid meeting

Impact

We identified opportunities for teams across different business units to pursue

  • New product and spatial application development based on insights translated.
  • Development of a new planning tool that takes into account the specific needs of users in the particular office space.
  • 10+ sharing sessions and workshops with customers and sales teams where sales teams were able to use our research insights to connect with customers on their space planning needs during customer engagements.
Home PageNext Project
© 2025 Jacqueline Hon.