Yes, this is a real photograph, not AI. It is Paragon Insurance’s convertible table tennis meeting table, in their City of London office.
The checklist we first published in 2011, rewritten for an age when hybrid working has changed where people work and AI is changing the work itself.
In 2011 we published ten things to consider before you do anything with your office. Much of it still holds: get the budget right, don’t try to do it all yourself, choose your partner carefully. But the questions have moved on. Here is the list rewritten for an office brief today.
1. Don’t start with headcount
The old brief began with a number: how many people, how many desks. That number now tells you less than it used to. The British Council for Offices found that average office utilisation across the working week has settled at about 30%, compared with 44% before the pandemic 1. And as AI takes on more routine work, headcount will tell you even less about what your business actually does. Start with activities instead: what people need to do, together and alone, and how often.
2. Plan for your busiest day, not the average
Most offices have a busiest day, and it is well above the weekly average. In the same BCO research, Tuesday to Thursday averaged 40%, against 30% across the whole week 1. Plan for the average and there will be nowhere to sit on your busiest day, and people will quietly stop coming in. Measure your own pattern, add a sensible margin and give the overflow somewhere good to go. Our guide to how much office space you need now shows how.
3. Ask what makes the journey worthwhile
A desk alone isn’t always enough to justify the journey. People come in to work through problems together, learn from colleagues, meet clients and feel part of something. Design for those first. If the honest answer to “why come in?” is “because we told you to”, the office has already lost.
4. Seat your juniors near your experience
Hybrid working quietly broke the way most people learned their trade: by sitting near someone who was better at the job. AI can now supply much of the knowledge, but not the judgement, the relationships or the commercial instinct. Plan shared office days and seating so the people who are learning sit near the people they are learning from.
5. Don’t shrink in a panic
Less space can be exactly the right answer. But in CBRE’s 2025 survey of European office occupiers, companies that had previously downsized too much and were now expanding made up 21%, up from 7% in 2024 2. Cut on evidence, keep your options open with break clauses and room to grow, and treat the space you free up as an opportunity, not just a saving.
6. Make the quiet as good as the buzz
The collaboration hub gets the photographs, but the quiet room does the work. Leesman found that 89% of employees say focused individual work is an important activity, yet only 35% are satisfied with noise levels 3. If AI absorbs more of the routine tasks, the balance of work may shift towards tasks requiring greater concentration and judgement. Build places to think.
7. Design for the people who aren’t in the room
Most meetings now include someone on a screen, and increasingly an AI assistant taking the notes. Cameras, microphones, acoustics, room booking and power need designing in from the start, not adding at the end. A handsome meeting room where half the meeting can’t hear is a failed room.
8. Leave room to change your mind
Nobody knows exactly how AI will reshape your teams over the life of a lease. That is not a reason to wait. It is a reason to stay flexible: furniture that moves, rooms that can change use, technology that can be upgraded and a lease that doesn’t lock you in. Test more than one future: fewer people, a growing business, different teams. A good brief should accommodate more than one forecast.
9. Be honest about the budget, and the carbon
Fit-out costs are easy to misjudge. Knight Frank’s spring 2026 guide puts a medium-specification London fit-out at about £175 per sq ft, delivered from a landlord’s Cat A and including furniture, AV and professional fees, but excluding IT hardware 4. So ask exactly what every quote includes. The cheapest and lowest-carbon fit-out is often the one you don’t rip out: keep what works, reuse what you can and check the building’s energy rating before you sign. Our guides to Cat A and Cat B fit-out and sustainable fit-out go into the detail.
10. Don’t outsource the thinking
AI will happily produce a floor plan, a mood board and a cost plan before lunch. Use it: it is quick, and it will prompt good questions. It will also get better at understanding people and buildings. But the lasting difference is accountability. Someone has to verify the assumptions, coordinate the design and take responsibility for delivery, including being on site when the ceiling grid doesn’t line up with the partitions. The 2011 list warned against trying to do everything yourself. The new version: don’t hand the responsibility to the machine either. Choose people who have done this before, ask to see completed projects and speak to their clients.
And one thing that hasn’t changed
The original list ended with image, and it still holds. Your office is the clearest signal of what kind of organisation you are. What it signals is changing: less about how many people you employ, more about how well they work together.
If you would like a second opinion on any of the ten, start a conversation.
Sources
- British Council for Offices, Review of Post-Pandemic UK Office Utilisation (July 2025), p. 7
- CBRE, European Office Occupier Sentiment Survey 2025
- Leesman, Noisy spaces, quiet consequences (March 2026)
- Knight Frank, Occupier Fit-Out Cost Guide, Spring 2026
Figures checked against these sources on 22 October 2026.
