Office Refurbishment: How Do You Phase the Staff Moves With the Least Disruption?

The three stages of an office decant

At some point in most office refurbishments, it’s likely that a floor, a wing, or a whole building has to close, and the people sitting in it have to go somewhere else. Then, when the work is done, they have to come back, or move on to wherever they are meant to end up.

Get that sequence wrong and you have potentially moved the same team three times or more.

This post is about phasing staff moves during an office refurbishment: how to move people out of a space that is being refurbished, and back again, with the least disruption. It is the second of three workplace questions we see again and again, and it sits neatly between Q1) working out how much space you need and Q3) working out who sits where at the end.

We will focus on moving people. A refurbishment often drags other things with it that deserve their own plan: a customer counter / customer-experience space that has to keep serving the public throughout the refurbishment works, or, if you are in local government, a temporary relocation of the council chambers, dais and public gallery. Those are real moves with their own considerations, and worth flagging early to whoever owns them. But the Work Move tool, and this post, are built for moving staff around, closing and opening buildings, and swing space requirements usually due to a refurbishment.

1. What is an office decant?

In this context “decant” is a workplace industry word but worth understanding.

A decant is the temporary relocation of people out of a building so that work can be done, with the intention of moving them back afterwards or on to a final home. The word likely comes from wine. Decanting means pouring wine off into another vessel, slowly, so the good stuff transfers and the sediment stays behind undisturbed (with younger wines it also aids aeration). That turns out to be a useful way to picture an office decant: you are trying to pour people from one space into another without stirring up the sediment, meaning the disruption, frustration and lost productivity that come with being uprooted.

Office Decanting

Two additional terms you will need throughout:

•     Swing space is temporary space people occupy while their permanent space is unavailable. It is a staging post, not a destination.

•     Final home is where a group ends up once everything is done.

A move can be direct (impacted space straight to your final home) or it can route through swing space first. The number of times any one person has to move is the single biggest driver of how disruptive a decant feels, and that thread runs through the rest of this post.

2. Why phasing staff moves in an office refurbishment is critical to success

You usually cannot empty a building over one weekend and refurbish it all at once while everyone works from home for months on end. So, refurbishments are nearly always phased: close part of the building, do the work, reopen it, close the next part, and so on.

That phasing is what creates the people problem. Every phase displaces a group, and every group has to land somewhere that is actually available at that point in the timeline.

Get the phasing wrong and the impacts will be felt by both the employees and the business:

•     the same team moved more than twice because the sequence was never thought through

•     people parked in swing space that wasn’t intended to be set up for longer term use

•     a critical team disrupted at exactly the wrong moment in their year

•     a program that slips because a group has nowhere to go

•     a budget quietly eaten by repeat moves, churn and downtime

•     a plan you cannot sell to staff or stakeholders because it looks chaotic

There is rarely one “right” answer to a decant. There is usually a least disruptive one, and what counts as least disruptive depends on what you are optimising for. Which brings us to the two questions that actually settle the plan: who matters most, and what does “best” mean.

3. Who is the decant plan really for?

A decant has a lot of stakeholders: the affected staff, the critical teams you cannot afford to interrupt, the project and move team running the logistics, and the executives who have to understand it and approve it.

It is tempting to optimise for the project team, because they are the ones in the planning meetings and they feel the pain of every extra move wave. But the principle we plan to, and the one the Work Move tool is built around, is employee-first: the fewest moves for the employee matters more than the fewest moves for the project team.

Picture Steve in HR. If one plan moves Steve once and another moves him twice, the plan that moves him once wins, even if it is slightly more work for the project team to deliver. Steve does not care how many move waves sit on the project plan. He cares that he has packed a crate, possibly temporarily lost his second monitor in the swing space, and learned a new floor twice. Multiply Steve by a few hundred people and you can see why employee disruption, not project convenience, is the thing to minimise first.

Steve from HR

What does “best” actually mean?

That said, “least disruptive” is not a single number. When people ask for the “best” phasing, they usually mean one of these, and they do not always agree on which:

•     Fewest moves: minimise how many times people have to relocate.

•     Least swing space: minimise the temporary space you have to find and burn money on to lease and fit out.

•     Fastest building exit: vacate the closing space as quickly as possible to avoid costs / save money.

•     Least disruption to critical teams: protect the teams the business can least afford to interrupt.

•     Fastest refurbishment program: hand the building over in the order that finishes the workplace transformation project the soonest, but which could mean moving people multiple times.

•     Lowest cost: minimise total spend on moves, swing space and downtime.

•     Simplest stakeholder story: the plan that is easiest to explain and defend to your most challenging and vocal stakeholder.

These can pull against each other. The fastest building exit might need more swing space. The cheapest plan might move people more often. So, the job is not to find a plan that wins on everything, it is to decide which of these matters most for your situation and optimise for that, while defaulting to least disruptive for staff wherever there is a genuine choice. This is why the Work Move tool auto produces the scenario(s) that trigger the fewest people moves to minimise employee disruption, but also allows the user to manually edit their own phasing solution.

4. Where do people go?

Every group in a decant follows a journey: out of the impacted space, possibly through swing space, and into a final home. Tracing these journeys end to end as they overlap and impact each other is honestly half the battle.

For each space that could receive people, you need to know:

•     how many physical desks it will have

•     the desk-sharing ratio it will run at, which sets how many people those desks can actually support e.g. 1 person to 1 desk (100%) or 10 people to 8 desks (80%).

•     when it becomes available

•     whether it can be used as swing space, a final home, or both

If this has got you thinking about how much space you will need at the end, then the Work Space Calculator tool can assist here.

5. When: sequencing and timing

The order things happen in needs to be carefully understood. A space can only receive people once it is genuinely available. You cannot move a team into a refurbished floor before it reopens, and you cannot use a building as swing space for the first group you need to move if it only becomes available three quarters into the program.

This is what makes phasing a real puzzle of moving and co-dependent parts. A floor that reopens partway through the program can become the swing space, or the final home, for the next group to be displaced. Sequence the closures one way and everything dominoes neatly. Sequence them another way and you create a gap where a group has nowhere to go. The closure and reopening order is the backbone everything else hangs off, which is why the Work Move tool treats it as a rule and will not generate a route that sends people somewhere before it exists.

6. How to plan and run it

Work Move follows five key steps that handhold you through the decant process.

1.   Enter the spaces being affected. The buildings, floors or areas that have to close. For each: the people affected, the desks currently used, and whether the space returns later as future capacity. Each affected space becomes a move group.

2.   Enter the destination and swing space. Everywhere people could go: temporary swing space, refurbished floors that come back online later, final destinations, and anything with timing still to be confirmed. Add the desks, ratio, availability, and the swing / final / both flag for each.

3.   Set the closure sequence. The order spaces close and reopen. This is the constraint that keeps the whole plan honest.

4.   Review or edit the move-group journeys. The tool generates the journeys for you. You can then adjust whether a group moves together or splits, whether it uses swing space, where it finishes, and whether any swing space still needs finding. The End State Preview shows whether the final plan has enough desks and what is still unresolved.

5.   View the proposed move sequence. The route, how many times each group moves, whether final capacity works, what swing space is still required, and the actions and checks to clear before you rely on it, with a visual flow.

Every plan comes back with one of three statuses:

•     Workable: the route and final capacity stack up on the information given.

•     Workable With Actions: it will work, but something needs confirming first, such as swing space, timing, or a working from home (WFH) assumption.

•     Not Workable Yet: there is a blocker to fix first, such as a group with no final home, or a destination over capacity.

Case study: two routes, one decision

This example takes a three-phase refurbishment of a 312-person site:

•     Phase 1, Sq Entry: 78 people, reopening later as a brand-new “Pilot Space” with 119 desks operating at 75% desk sharing, allowing 158 people to be pointed at the space.

•     Phase 2, Admin Building: 153 people

•     Phase 3, Bridge Wing: 81 people

Closures run as per the phases 1, 2, 3, and each space reopens after it is refurbished. Feed that into the Work Move tool and it automatically shows you the scenario deemed least disruptive to the employees, i.e. fewest employee moves. Scenario 1 below is that option. However, whilst it is the least disruptive for employees, there are often a range of business drivers that mean other options need to be carefully considered. The Work Move tool can then be manually edited to show alternative scenarios such as Scenario 2 below. Here’s how they compare:

Scenario 1. Phase 2’s people swing into the new Pilot Space and settle there. Phase 1’s people move once into swing space, then into the refurbished Admin Building. Phase 3’s people move once, into that same refurbished Admin Building. Nobody moves more than twice, and only the 78 Phase 1 people move more than once. In this scenario the Bridge Wing is left unoccupied, providing the business with options to move other parts of the organisation into the newly refurbished space.

Scenario 2. This time Phase 1’s people swing out and then move into the Pilot Space as their final home instead. To make this workable the Phase 2 move group needs to be split into two groups, sending 80 people to the Pilot Space and the other 73 into swing space before moving again into the Admin Building when it reopens. Phase 3 Bridge Wing people also end up moving twice, once into the Admin Building as swing space and then back into the Bridge Wing.

Side by side:

Metric	Scenario 1	Scenario 2
Max moves per employee	2	2
People moving more than once	78	232
Total person-moves	390	544
Project move waves	4	5
Peak swing desks	78	78
Group splits	None	Phase 2 split

Both max out at two moves per person, and both need the same peak swing space desk capacity. But Scenario 1 disrupts far fewer people repeatedly (78 against 232), involves fewer total moves and fewer waves, and avoids splitting a team across two destinations. On an employee-first reading it is the clear pick, and it is the one the tool recommends.

Scenario 2 is not wrong, though. If there were a genuine business reason to want the Sq Entry team to end up in the Pilot Space, it stays on the table, with the extra disruption visible and deliberate rather than accidental. That is the whole point of generating both: the tool does the planning; you make the call.

Summary: what a decant tool does, and where it stops

A decant planning tool does one job well. It gets you from “a building has to close, and these people have to move” to a sequenced, sense-checked move plan with the least disruption, fast enough to test a few options in a single sitting, and rigorous enough to take to a steering group.

What it does not do is tell you who sits at which desk in the refurbished space. That is the next conversation, and it is usually a bigger one.

This is where the three questions line up. The Work Space Calculator answers how much space you need when you have more people than desks. Work Move answers how to get everyone out and back while the building is being refurbished. And Work Stack, the block-and-stack tool, answers who goes where on each floor once the work is done. Each stands on its own, but they run in sequence: size it, move out and back, stack the teams in.

If you are staring down a phased refurbishment and trying to work out how to move people without moving them three times, Work Move is free.

Frequently asked questions

What is an office decant?

A decant is the temporary relocation of people out of a building, or part of one, so it can be refurbished, with the intention of moving them back afterwards or on to a final home. The term comes from the property, real estate, and workplace industry. Outside of the industry it is used for wine! Most people just say, “moving staff out during the refurbishment”.

What is swing space?

Swing space is temporary space people occupy while their permanent space is unavailable. It is a staging post rather than a destination, and the same swing space is often used more than once across a multi-phase refurbishment, so it is worth setting up as a proper workplace rather than a stop gap (even though it is).

How many times should an employee have to move during a refurbishment?

As few as possible, and ideally no more than twice. The number of moves per person is the single biggest driver of how disruptive a decant feels. When you are comparing plans, minimise the maximum moves any one employee faces first, then minimise the number of people who move more than once. Ideally, they move straight into the new space; if that is not possible then they move out and back. Really try to avoid anything more than that.

What is the difference between a decant and a restack?

A decant is about getting people out of a space, and back, while it is being worked on. A restack, or block-and-stack, is about deciding who sits where, team by team and floor by floor, in the finished space. A refurbishment often needs both: the decant during the works, the restack at the end.

Do I need swing space, or can working from home cover it?

Sometimes WFH can absorb a phase, but leaning on it too heavily is a risk, especially if your organisation’s culture is not already used to it. A decant phasing solution that has heavy WFH reliance as the answer is likely at high risk of coming unstuck when reality hits.

How do I decide the best phasing?

Decide what “best” means for you first: fewest moves, least swing space, fastest exit, protecting critical teams, lowest cost, or the simplest story. Then optimise for that, defaulting to least disruptive for staff wherever there is a genuine choice. Generate more than one option so the trade-offs are visible before you commit.

This blog was written by Work Future Workplace Consultancy. We specialise in developing workplace tools and leading & delivering workplace strategy and transformation projects in Perth, WA. Contact us at hello@workfuture.com.au or +61 0435 824 305 to discuss your workplace project needs.