Work Future Blog

The best workplace change happens step by step, not in one big reveal. What Tokyo's Harajuku girls can teach us about effective change management.

On a basic level desk sharing is really a consideration between the number of people and the number of desks. What many do not appreciate, is that a safety lens now also needs to be applied. Here in Western Australia psychosocial hazards were written into the Work Health and Safety Regulations back in 2022. Every Australian state and territory now has enforceable duties to manage them, with Victoria completing the set in December 2025. And this isn't purely an Australian quir

Most organisations take on a major workplace project once every seven to ten years. Everyone else at the table, the architect, the fit out contractor, the cost consultant, does this every single week. That imbalance puts you, the occupier, in the weakest seat at exactly the moment the biggest decisions get made. A capable Workplace PM evens the odds, and making them your first appointment will likely determine the success of your project.

To desk share or not to desk share? If it's hot desking, the answer is a firm no, throw it in the bin. But not all desk sharing is the same. Hot desking and Activity Based Working get treated as the same thing, when one is the evil twin. This post covers what hot desking really is, what ABW actually is, where assigned desks still belong, and how to spot hot desking masquerading as ABW, a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Workplace strategy is the thinking, research and decision-making that happens before workplace design begins. Most organisations don't treat it as a discipline in its own right, so they go from a lease event or growth trigger straight to a designer, skipping the stage that defines what the business actually needs. The output isn't a floorplan; it's a clear brief and a set of principles the design answers to. This post covers what it is, why it matters, who's involved and how

Closing a floor or building for refurbishment? Moving staff out, through temporary swing space, and into their new home is harder than it looks. This post covers the six questions to answer before you start, what “least disruptive” phasing really means, an employee-first case study, and how a free planning tool builds the move sequence for you.

More people than desks? Running out of office space? A space calculator gets you from a gut feeling to a structured assessment of the problem. This post explains what a space calculator actually is, what to look for in a good one, the five strategic options you'll be choosing between, and how two real clients used the process to land on very different answers - one added desks into existing space, the other moved to desk sharing and took more space.

Block and Stack planning sounds simple. The stack is a building, the block is a team, rearrange some blocks across some floors and you are done. It turns out there is a bit more to it than meets the eye. This post sets out what Block and Stack planning really is, the five layers it operates across, what it produces, and where it tends to go wrong.

What does Roman concrete have to do with workplace transformation?

Being asked to manage an office restack can feel a bit like being handed a Jackson Pollock painting. There is plenty going on, but working through the complexity, the messy composition, and where to even begin is another matter entirely. That is often the reality of office restacking. On the surface, it can sound straightforward. Move a few teams, free up some space, improve adjacencies, and make better use of the office. In practice, it is usually far more complex than