A Pattern Worth Recognising
Picture a fairly ordinary planning meeting. A facilities director has prepared a proposal to renovate a floor. HR wants more collaboration space because that’s what keeps appearing in employee feedback. Finance wants a comparison against simply renewing the lease.
None of these perspectives is wrong. Each represents a legitimate business concern.
The problem is that they’re often trying to answer different questions.
By the time organisations begin discussing layouts, budgets, and occupancy, they frequently haven’t agreed on the purpose of the investment itself. Is the priority to reduce operating costs? Improve productivity? Support recruitment? Enable innovation? Strengthen company culture?
Without a shared objective, every stakeholder naturally evaluates the project through the lens of their own function.
What looks like disagreement is often something simpler: the workplace strategy decision has been skipped.
McKinsey found that only around half of the 617 executives it surveyed believed their organisations effectively align resource allocation with corporate strategy. Workplace investments rarely escape that broader pattern.
Why Workplace Strategy Decisions Have Become More Complex
The challenge isn’t simply poor communication. Workplace strategy decisions have become structurally more complicated.
Real estate, HR, IT, finance, and executive leadership all influence decisions that were once owned primarily by facilities teams. Each function brings different priorities, different metrics, and different definitions of success.
At the same time, decision-making has become increasingly centralised. Leesman’s 2025 Focus Forward research found that 57% of surveyed Corporate Real Estate leaders say office attendance decisions are now made organisation-wide rather than locally.
Meanwhile, organisations themselves are pursuing different workplace strategies. CBRE identifies three dominant approaches: operational efficiency, cost optimisation and employee experience.
The difficulty is that these priorities often exist inside the same organisation.
A CFO may focus on utilisation. HR may focus on retention. Operations may focus on collaboration. None of these objectives is incompatible, but unless leadership establishes which business outcome takes precedence, every conversation becomes a negotiation between competing priorities.
The Hidden Cost of Starting with Space
When organisations begin with layouts instead of objectives, projects rarely fail dramatically.
They drift.
Design options multiply. Budgets are revised. New stakeholders join the discussion. Every planning cycle introduces another perspective, another requirement, and another compromise.
Eventually, renewal becomes the safest option because it demands the fewest new conversations.
The cost of that delay is easy to underestimate.
An office that no longer supports the way people work continues to generate hidden operational costs. Recruitment becomes harder. Teams develop workarounds instead of better workflows. Capital investments are postponed until more favorable market conditions. The original business problem remains unresolved.
The financial impact rarely appears on the project budget, but it accumulates elsewhere across the organisation.
What High-Performing Organisations Do Differently
Research across several disciplines points to a remarkably consistent pattern.
Leesman found that many organisations redesign workplaces without ever agreeing on what it calls the workplace “why”, the underlying purpose the office is expected to serve.
McKinsey’s research on capital allocation consistently shows that organisations create more value when investment decisions are tightly linked to business strategy. Its work on governance argues that this depends on clear decision rights, with the CEO and an empowered investment committee providing the authority needed to move from discussion to decision.
Gensler reaches a complementary conclusion from the employee perspective. Organisations with highly regarded workplaces are significantly more likely to retain employees, reinforcing the idea that workplace investment affects far more than facilities management.
Although these studies examine different aspects of business performance, they converge on the same principle.
Successful workplace projects begin with strategic clarity long before they begin with design.
Turning Workplace Investment into a Strategic Decision
The solution isn’t another workshop about vision statements. It’s better decision-making.
Before discussing layouts, furniture, or renovation budgets, leadership should be able to answer five questions:
- What business outcome should this investment improve?
- Which organisational problem are we trying to solve?
- How will success be measured?
- Which trade-offs are acceptable if priorities conflict?
- Who has the authority to make the final decision?
Once those answers exist, design becomes far more straightforward. Every subsequent decision can be evaluated against a shared objective instead of individual preferences.
The workplace stops being a facilities project and becomes what it has always been: a business investment.
Not sure where to start with your workplace project?
Every successful workplace project starts with clear priorities, not floor plans.
Our short questionnaire helps you identify your business objectives, understand your team’s needs, and define the priorities that should guide your workplace investment.
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