You are moving. The chances you get are a gift.
Moves rarely have one reason. Most have several, and only some of them are said out loud.
The lease is ending, or the rent has moved past what the space is worth.
The landlord has become a problem.
A partnership ended, and the shared premises ended with it.
A market has opened somewhere else, or closed here.
The current building has become an argument you keep having with your own staff.
People are watching. Staff, funders, press. The move will be read as a statement about priorities.
What gets decided in the next few weeks
Where. Which narrows every decision after it.
How much space, on an assumption about how many people and how they will work.
Whether you take the building as it is, or change it.
What you carry over, and what you deliberately leave behind.
These are made quickly, usually by a small group, usually without evidence. They are also the ones that are expensive to reverse.
A better address that performs worse.
It happens often enough to be predictable. An organisation upgrades its location and quietly downgrades its conditions: deeper floor plates, less daylight, more open plan, worse acoustics. None of these is what a location is judged on, so none of them is argued about.
After a relocation into open plan, the work performance people report losing to noise doubles. Nobody decided that. It arrived with the floor plan.
A move is the one moment everything is available at once.
A relocation almost always resolves into the same configuration: a new location and a new building. That is the deepest change available to an organisation. New people, a new face, new infrastructure, new habits and a new culture are all on the table simultaneously, and only briefly.
That is an opportunity if it is planned and a liability if it is not. Most organisations move their old habits into a new building, and then wonder why nothing changed.
A new address becomes the front door. The old one stays, and stops being the face.
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
+42%
Higher cognitive performance score after a full week in a daylight-optimised office
The same participants also slept 37 minutes longer.
×2
Self-reported work performance lost to noise, after a transition to open plan
Questionnaire data from the same organisation before and after a relocation, so the comparison holds the people constant. The method is self-report, like most of the open-plan literature.
12%
Faster information processing when CO₂ falls from 2100 to 900 ppm
Deeper floor plates and more people per air handling unit move the reading the other way.
Published in full at The Built Review ↗
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