Space & Ratios Worksheet
Size the mix — desks, meeting rooms, focus and social space — against your real headcount and in-office pattern, before you lock the layout.
Space & Ratios Worksheet
A back-of-envelope tool to get the mix roughly right, so the office fits how your team actually works (see Space that fits how you work). Rough and early beats precise and too late: these are layout calls that are painful to change once walls and furniture are in.
How to use it
- Fill in your real numbers, then sanity-check against the rules of thumb — and adjust for your team (collaboration-heavy needs more rooms; focus-heavy needs more quiet).
- Design for the busy day, not the average; a space that breaks on the fullest day isn’t great.
- Hand the result to whoever owns the layout in construction and FF&E.
The artifact
| Input | Your number | Rule of thumb | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total headcount | — | ||
| Typical in-office % (busy day) | plan for the peak | ||
| Peak people on site | headcount × busy-day % | ||
| Desks / seats | ≥ peak on-site | set a sharing ratio if hybrid | |
| Small rooms (1–4 people) | most teams are short here | ||
| Medium / large rooms | per meeting load | ||
| Focus / phone booths | ~1 per 8–10 seats | ||
| Social / café seats | grows with collaboration | ||
| Accessible + wellness rooms | never “zero” | see Belonging & inclusion |
Tip: the most common miss is too few small rooms and too many big ones. Count seats and room counts — a single 12-person boardroom doesn’t solve a shortage of 2-person rooms.