You have more building than people.
What is actually driving this
The organisation has contracted, and the building has not.
Capital is short, and property is the largest line that can still be moved.
There is spare space to sell or let, and a decision about which.
A rebrand is underway, and the building is part of it.
The transformation is negative, and everyone inside already knows.
This is the situation where the reason for the decision and the story told about it are furthest apart. It is also the one where the building can do the most work, because the people who stayed are watching very closely.
What gets decided in the next few weeks
How much space to release, and which parts of it.
Whether to consolidate people together or let them thin out across what remains.
Whether the remaining space is improved, or simply reduced.
What all of that signals to the people who stayed.
A new face over an unchanged organisation.
Contraction produces the strongest temptation to spend the little remaining money on what is visible: the entrance, the meeting rooms, the photographs. Meanwhile the conditions people work in eight hours a day stay exactly as they were.
How much space a person has is the strongest single predictor of workplace satisfaction, at an odds ratio of 1.57. The entrance is not on the list.
That is the one intervention we can say with confidence does not work. It also costs credibility with the staff who can see precisely what was and was not spent.
Nothing renews itself here. Every improvement has to be deliberate.
Consolidation usually resolves into the shallowest configuration: the old location, the old buildings, the same people. There is no move to carry change along with it, and no new building to reset habits.
Which means each thing you want to change has to be changed on purpose and one at a time — the face, the infrastructure, the habits, the culture. It is the hardest of the four situations, and the one where evidence matters most, because there is no budget for a second attempt.
Nothing new is built. The front door stays, and so does everything behind it.
A smaller address becomes the front door. The old one is released.
The configuration decides how much of the organisation changes with it. It is settled before an architect is hired, usually by whatever was available.
The evidence that applies here
1.57
Odds ratio for satisfaction, driven by how much space a person has
The strongest single predictor in the study, ahead of visual privacy at 1.26. Consolidation decides both.
0.64
Odds ratio for wheezing after damp and mould are remediated
A Cochrane review of remediation trials. Fixing the fabric changes measured respiratory symptoms, and it is invisible in photographs.
d −0.7
Lower anxiety with a view of nature, up to d −2.42
When space is released, who keeps the windows is decided early and rarely written down.
Published in full at The Built Review ↗
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