Office and Corporate real estate (CRE) may only absorb about one-tenth of operating expense, but it sets the stage for the other nine-tenths—people costs. An office that is chronically half-empty drains cash, energy and culture; one that is jam-packed fuels noise, stress and turnover. This article shows CRE managers, CFOs and workplace leaders how to locate—and defend—the “just-right” zone of space that maximises employee experience while minimising cost and carbon. We translate utilisation data, space-time analytics and risk-based capacity planning into a three-step playbook you can run tomorrow.

Striking the right balance between office space size and occupancy is an ongoing dilemma. Although the pandemic has stimulated this conversation, designing effective real estate strategies that respond to hybrid working and determining the optimal office size continue to be persistent challenges for many organizations.

Wearable devices, such as accelerometers, are also regarded as highly effective tools to measure employees’ stress levels, with an accuracy of as high as over 90%.

The real potential of the approach is reflected in the productivity of test fits. Automating and simplifying the generation of layouts for test fits can tremendously decrease the amount of time and resources required to generate them.

But as the future of finance grows increasingly digital and decentralized, there is an opportunity, more than ever before, for financial institutions to reimagine their branch networks and overall physical footprint. As the story of financial services will continue to evolve, we can make sensible assumptions about the key principles that will drive their real estate strategies in the future.

This study aims to investigate the performance of open-plan office layouts and to identify occupants’ concerns in existing open-plan office layouts.