EN — Size Your Office for Tuesday, Not for the Average

Most companies size their offices from a single figure: the number of employees. A more useful one is how many are actually present on the busiest day of the week. CBRE's 2026 benchmarking puts global average office utilisation at 53%, while peak days reach 80% on average. Offices planned around the first figure will disappoint on the days that count most.

The average is a day nobody actually experiences

In organisations working to a hybrid model, attendance generally concentrates in the middle of the week. An office sized for average occupancy will be comfortable on Friday but under strain every Tuesday, when people arrive to find no workstation available, no room left to book and nowhere quiet to take a call. That runs counter to the very purpose of having them in the office.

The most intuitive fix is often the most costly

The visible symptom is congestion, and the natural reaction is to consider more space. Yet the problem usually lies in how the space is distributed rather than in how much of it there is. Better attendance planning, a capable booking system and a review of the room typology will often resolve it for a fraction of the cost of leasing additional square metres for six or nine years.

Measure before you commit

Analyse the real utilisation of your offices over a full quarter, breaking the results down by day and by floor rather than settling for a single portfolio average. Then test your space programme against your busiest Tuesday rather than an average day. Only once it has passed that test should you translate it into a floor area and begin your search for premises.

This thinking belongs in the design process, well before a lease is signed.

Adapting the size of your offices to your needs does not necessarily mean reducing them. It means making the building match the way your organisation actually works. That can mean less space, sometimes the same area organised differently, and in some cases more.

If you are approaching a lease event and cannot yet define precisely what you need on peak days, that is probably the first subject to address.

Let's talk it through.