The Boardroom Nobody Used, and Why It Was Worth Every Penny

Insurance is a waste of money, until it isn’t. The same goes for the empty spaces in an office.

A waste of money, until it isn’t

Insurance is a waste of money. Every year you pay the premium, nothing burns down, nobody sues, and the money is simply gone.

Until the year it isn’t.

Nobody sensible reads their policy as wasted because they didn’t claim on it. They understand they were paying for readiness. Yet when it comes to the office, that same logic disappears. A room that sits empty most of the week is called slack, and slack is something to be designed out.

Two boardrooms, used once a year

Some years ago we worked with Paragon Insurance on their offices on Leadenhall Street, in the City of London. The brief included not one but two boardrooms. They were large, beautifully finished and very expensive.

For most of the year, they were barely used. When they were, it was usually two people perched at the end of an enormous table in an enormous room, holding a meeting that would have worked just as well in a room a tenth of the size. On paper, even that counts as use.

Then, once a year, the client’s biggest customers came to London to hold a beauty parade for their professional indemnity cover. Insurers competed for the business face to face. For those few days, those two rooms were the most important space in the building. They were where the year’s largest decisions were made about where the business would be placed.

Run those rooms through a utilisation report and the answer is obvious: get rid of them, or at least shrink them. Run them through the business and the answer is just as obvious: you can’t afford not to have them.

What the numbers say

The industry has never measured offices more closely, and the averages all point the same way: less.

• UK desk provision fell from 79 desks per 100 employees in 2022 to 56 by late 2024, according to AWA’s Hybrid Working Index.
• The British Council for Offices says utilisation has settled at 66%, against the old 80% benchmark (BCO).
• CBRE puts average building utilisation at 53% (Facilities Dive).

Read those figures alone and the conclusion writes itself. Fewer desks, fewer rooms, less space.

But look at the peaks. CBRE’s 2026 benchmark found that Tuesday and Thursday occupancy now runs above the levels seen before the pandemic, while Friday attendance has halved (CBRE). Average peak utilisation reaches 80%. A building that looks 40% full on paper can run out of meeting rooms before eleven on a Tuesday morning.

Why the average is the wrong brief

An average tells you what is cheap to provide. It doesn’t tell you what the business can’t do without.

The Tuesday scramble and the boardroom used once a year are the same mistake, seen from opposite ends. Both come from sizing a workplace by its typical day instead of by the moments that matter. Design to the average and you get an office that works perfectly on a day nobody remembers, and fails on the days everyone does.

No one measures a navy by how often it fires. The value of readiness is that it’s there when it’s needed. A good office works the same way: some of its most important spaces will look idle on any given afternoon.

That doesn’t mean every empty room is justified. Plenty of slack is just waste, and a lot of space can work harder. But the test isn’t how often a room is used. It’s what it costs the business on the day the room isn’t there.

How to brief for need

A good brief starts with what people need to do, not how many of them there are. In practice that means asking different questions at the first meeting.

1. What are the moments that matter? The client pitch, the board meeting, the company meeting, the busiest Tuesday. List them before you count a single desk.
2. What does each moment need? A room that impresses, quiet for focused work, space for the whole team at once, somewhere private to take a call.
3. What does it cost to get it wrong? A lost client, a team that stops coming in, a meeting held in a café. That cost is your premium.
4. Design for those moments first. Then let the everyday fill the space around them.
5. Accept the slack, and manage it. Some space will sit idle. Decide which idle space is worth paying for, and stop apologising for it.

There is more on this in ten things to consider before starting an office project in the age of AI.

An insurer understood it first

Looking back, it’s no surprise the client who insisted on those two boardrooms was an insurer. Their whole business is selling readiness. They knew the value of a policy isn’t measured in the years nothing happens. It’s measured on the day something does.

Their boardrooms were a premium, paid every year, for a few days that decided where their biggest customers’ business went. Nobody in that building called them a waste.

The empty room isn’t always the problem. Sometimes it’s the policy that pays out.