The office that shrank and got busier

For years, the accounting practice on the third floor of a downtown Halifax building had forty desks for forty people. By the time its lease came up for renewal, it still had forty desks, and on most days about fifteen of them had someone sitting at them. The partners knew this the way everyone knows it: by walking past rows of empty chairs. What they did not know was what to do about it.

The firm is a composite, but the situation is common. Hybrid work has left many small offices holding leases sized for a working week that no longer exists. This is the story of how one of them got smaller, and why the result was an office that felt busier, not emptier.

Counting before cutting

Leah, the operations manager, resisted the obvious move of simply halving the space. Instead, she ran a utilisation study, which is a formal name for counting. Four times a day for six weeks, she walked the floor with a checklist and noted which desks, meeting rooms and phone booths were in use. Badge-entry data, where a building has it, can do some of this, but it shows who came in, not where they sat or what they did.

The numbers surprised everyone. Desk occupancy peaked on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at around twenty-five people and fell into single digits on Fridays. The two large boardrooms were booked often but usually held three or four people. Meanwhile, staff were taking calls in the stairwell because the single phone room was always full. The office was not too big. It was the wrong shape.

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We didn’t have too much space. We had too much of the space nobody wanted and not nearly enough of the space everybody needed.

Designing for the busiest Tuesday

The firm agreed on a few rules before talking to the landlord. Teams would share two anchor days a week, so people who needed each other would overlap. Desks would be bookable, with enough for the busiest normal day plus a margin, not for the full headcount. Anyone could still come in any day.

That set the brief: twenty-eight desks rather than forty, lockers for personal items, four small meeting rooms for two to four people instead of two large ones, five phone booths, one room that could open up for all-staff sessions and a larger kitchen, because the kitchen was where people actually talked to each other. The new plan needed roughly 6,000 square feet instead of 9,000.

The negotiation

Giving back space is easier at renewal than in the middle of a term, and easier still when the landlord has a use for what you are giving back. In this case, the firm’s broker proposed keeping the better half of the floor and returning the rest as a separate suite the landlord could lease to someone else. The landlord agreed, in exchange for a longer renewal term.

As an illustration of the stakes, at a gross occupancy cost of $35 a square foot, giving up 3,000 feet saves about $105,000 a year. The firm put part of that into the fit-out: new walls for the small rooms, acoustic treatment for the booths, a booking system, lockers and better video equipment. The landlord contributed an allowance for the work and covered the cost of the demising wall that split the floor.

What changed when people came back

The first month in the smaller space was bumpy. The booking system was ignored, then over-used, with people reserving desks they never sat at. Leah introduced a rule that unclaimed bookings were released at ten o’clock, and the problem mostly went away.

Then something else happened. Because the anchor days brought teams in together, the office felt full on those days, and people started coming in more because there was someone to come in for. The small meeting rooms were in use most of the day. Phone calls moved out of the stairwell. Several staff said the office finally felt like somewhere to work rather than somewhere to be seen.

Not everything was a win. Some senior staff missed their own desks and the firm kept a small number of assigned desks for people whose work needed them. Storage was tighter than planned. And the anchor days meant Mondays and Fridays were quiet, which some people liked and some did not.

Lessons for a smaller footprint

Downsizing is not right for every business. A firm that is growing, or whose work needs people side by side every day, may need every foot it has. But for many small offices, the question is not whether to have less space. It is whether the space they have is the kind anyone wants to use.