Most organisations treat the space program as a single deliverable — a table of rooms and areas produced once at the start of a project. In practice, a space program is used at three distinct stages, each requiring different inputs, different precision, and serving different decisions. Getting this wrong means either over-investing in analysis too early or under-specifying when precision matters.

The foundation for all three stages is the same: an activity profile that describes how people actually work. Not how many desks they need. Not how many square metres per person the industry average suggests. How they spend their time — and what physical environments support each activity.

The activity profile: 9 categories that cover all knowledge work

We use a framework of 9 activity categories, grouped into three clusters, that covers the full range of office work. Every role, every department, every team can be described as a distribution across these nine:

Individual activities

  • Individual focus — concentrated work requiring uninterrupted cognitive attention. Low noise tolerance. Typically the largest share for engineering, legal, and analytical roles.
  • Individual routine — email, admin, task management. Tolerates ambient conversation. The baseline activity that happens at any desk.
  • Individual digital — video calls and online meetings taken alone. Requires acoustic privacy but not physical meeting space. The activity that exploded post-2020 and that most offices still under-provision for.

Collaborative activities

  • Co-creation — active collaboration with 1–3 others. Whiteboarding, pair work, design sessions. Needs flexibility and writable surfaces, not a formal meeting room.
  • Small meetings — pre-booked meetings with 1–3 others. The most common meeting type in every organisation and the one most often under-provisioned in rooms but over-provisioned in seats.
  • Large meetings — pre-booked meetings with 4–11 others. Team meetings, project reviews, client presentations. Requires good AV, acoustic isolation, and enough table space.
  • Specific gatherings — events, seminars, training sessions, town halls. Occasional but high-capacity. Often better served by flexible multi-use space than dedicated rooms.

Informal activities

  • Dialogue — spontaneous check-ins, quick questions, informal catch-ups with 1–3 others. The activity that makes the office worth coming to — and the one that open kitchens and café areas are actually serving.
  • Other activities — equipment-specific tasks, breaks, transitions, personal calls, wellness. The residual that accounts for the fact that people aren’t productive machines for 8 continuous hours.

For each team or department, the activity profile captures the percentage of a typical workday spent on each of these nine activities. A knowledge worker profile might be 30% individual focus, 15% routine, 20% digital, 15% small meetings, 10% co-creation, 10% dialogue. A client-facing profile shifts heavily toward digital (25%), small meetings (20%), and large meetings (15%) with less individual focus. A management profile is meeting-driven: 25% large meetings, 20% small meetings, with strategic focus blocks.

Three stages, three space programs

The activity profile is the constant. What changes across the three stages is the level of detail, the work setting specificity, and what decision the output supports.

Stage 1: The strategic estimate

When: early strategy phase, before any premises are identified. Often during a portfolio review or pre-study.

Purpose: answer "roughly how much space do we need?" to inform the decision about whether to stay, reduce, expand, or relocate.

Inputs: headcount, growth projection, peak presence rate (the dimensioning number — what percentage of the workforce will be in the office on a peak day), workplace model (activity-based, assigned desks, hybrid assigned, or hot-desking), and the activity profile at an overall level.

How it works: the dimensioning number reduces headcount to the peak office population. The workplace model sets the desk-sharing ratio — 1.0 for assigned, 0.7 for activity-based, 0.6 for hot-desking. The activity profile drives the split between individual settings, collaboration settings, and support areas. A circulation factor (typically 30–33%) accounts for corridors and movement space.

Output: a total area range (e.g., 2,800–3,400 sqm) with a high-level breakdown by category: individual workpoints, meeting/collaboration, support, circulation. No specific room counts. No furniture specs. Just enough to brief a search, model a business case, or compare scenarios.

This is deliberately imprecise. The margin of error might be ±15%. That’s fine — you’re not buying furniture, you’re deciding whether to start looking at new premises or negotiate a lease extension.

Stage 2: The procurement brief

When: a direction has been set (relocate, renew, consolidate) but no specific premises have been selected. The space program becomes part of the RFP, the broker brief, or the landlord negotiation.

Purpose: define the detailed space requirements so that proposed premises can be evaluated against a concrete specification. This is what goes into the procurement process.

Inputs: the same activity profile, now applied at team/department level. Detailed headcount by department. Presence patterns by team (not just a single dimensioning number). The workplace model with specific desk-sharing ratios. And critically: the full work settings palette.

Work settings are the physical environments that support each activity. We work with a system of 20+ settings across three enclosure types:

  • Room (enclosed) — single focus rooms (5 sqm), telephone rooms (2 sqm), duo work rooms (10 sqm), quiet group rooms, small meeting rooms (4p, 10 sqm), medium meeting rooms (8p, 18 sqm), large meeting rooms (12p, 26 sqm), extra-large meeting rooms (16p, 34 sqm)
  • Screened (partial enclosure) — screened desks (3 sqm), screened touchdown points (2 sqm), reading/telephone chairs, screened meeting spaces at various sizes, screened work tables (8p, 16 sqm)
  • Open — open desks (3 sqm), open touchdown points, open meeting areas, open work tables

The activity profile drives the mix. A team with high individual focus and digital meeting time needs more enclosed rooms and screened desks. A team with high co-creation and dialogue needs more open and screened collaboration settings. The model calculates quantities based on concurrent demand at peak, adjusted for sharing ratios.

Support areas are then added: personal lockers (1 per employee, 0.4 sqm), WC facilities (1 per 15 employees), coffee pantries (1 per 40 employees), lunch/dining, reception, mail/print, first aid, coat storage. These follow established ratios but are sized to the actual population, not assumed.

Output: a full space program table — every work setting with quantity, sqm per unit, total sqm, capacity. Every support area sized. Total NIA with circulation. The enclosure mix (what percentage is room/screened/open). The meeting room ratio per employee. Sqm per person against benchmarks (8–14 sqm is the typical range for activity-based workplaces). This is the document that goes to the broker, the landlord, or the architect.

Stage 3: The implementation program

When: a specific premises has been selected (or the decision is to stay in the current space). The actual floor plate, its constraints, and its opportunities are now known.

Purpose: adjust the ideal space program to fit the real building. Every floor plate has columns, cores, fire exits, window modules, and structural constraints that mean the theoretical program never maps 1:1 to reality. This stage is about making the right trade-offs.

Inputs: the Stage 2 program plus the actual available area, floor plate dimensions, structural constraints, and any landlord requirements (e.g., minimum reinstatement specification).

How it works: the program is overlaid onto the actual space. Where the available area exceeds the program, you have options: absorb future growth, add amenity space, or release a floor. Where it falls short, you make trade-offs — and the activity profile tells you where to make them intelligently.

If you need to cut 200 sqm, do you reduce meeting rooms or desks? The activity profile tells you. If the team spends 40% of time in meetings and only 20% at a desk, cutting desks and maintaining meeting capacity is the right trade-off. A ratio-based program can’t guide that decision because it doesn’t know how people work.

The implementation program also resolves the enclosure mix against the actual floor plate. A deep floor plate with limited natural light supports more enclosed rooms in the centre. A narrow floor plate with extensive glazing favours open and screened settings along the perimeter. The same quantity of desks and rooms, arranged differently, depending on what the building allows.

Output: the final space program with quantities adjusted to the actual premises, annotated with the trade-offs made and the rationale for each. This is the brief the architect and fit-out contractor work from.

The chain connects

The power of this approach is that all three stages build on the same foundation. The activity profile created in Stage 1 carries through to Stage 2 and Stage 3. When the headcount changes, or a department is added, or the hybrid policy evolves, you don’t start over — you rerun the model with updated inputs. The space program is a living calculation, not a static document.

This also means the space program can be scenario-tested at every stage. What happens if we grow 20% in 3 years? What if the presence rate drops from 70% to 55%? What if we shift from assigned desks to activity-based working? Each scenario produces a different program from the same activity data, making the trade-offs visible and quantified.

A space program built from activity profiles doesn’t just tell you how much space. It tells you what kind of space, at what mix, and why — at the right level of detail for each decision point. The estimate for strategy. The brief for procurement. The specification for implementation. Three documents, one methodology, zero assumptions.