What is Workplace Strategy?

I’ll give you a clue. It’s not about the furniture.

“What is a workplace strategy?” is an interesting question in itself, because most organisations don’t realise it exists as a discipline in its own right, and so the question rarely gets asked as much as it should. Instead, the questions tend to sit around the edges of it. We have a lease break coming up, what should we do? Now that we’re working hybrid, do we need this much space? We’re growing and don’t fit any more, should we relocate to larger premises?

More often than not, they go straight from a property trigger to a designer without ever stopping to do the thinking that should sit in between, and they have no idea how much value that thinking would have added, or how much time, cost and frustration it would have saved them. Workplace strategy is the layer of thinking that should happen before anyone signs a lease, briefs a designer, or moves a desk, and the organisations that understand that are usually the ones who have successful workplace transformation projects and offices that actually work long after the project has finished.

The two most recent strategies I’ve delivered were both commissioned as “accommodation strategies” rather than workplace strategies, and in practice the terms are used interchangeably for the same discipline, the same process and the same output. If there’s a pattern to which term gets used, it seems to be this: “workplace strategy” tends to fit when the focus is a single workplace, while “accommodation strategy” tends to come up when an organisation is dealing with multiple offices, or with a portfolio that stretches beyond the office altogether to depots, plant or warehouses. It’s a tendency rather than a hard rule, and if your organisation uses one term and your consultant uses the other, you’re likely talking about the same thing.

To answer the question, what is a workplace strategy, I’m going to work through it as follows: what it is, why you’d do one, who’s involved, when it happens, where it applies, and how it’s actually done.

Key Takeaways: What is Workplace Strategy?

1. Definition: the thinking, research and decision-making that happens before design, resulting in a clear brief and a set of principles for the workplace.

   
   

2. Also known as: an accommodation strategy. The two terms are used interchangeably, with “accommodation strategy” tending to appear where multiple sites or non-office workplaces are involved.

   
   

3. What it produces: a report, not a floorplan. A bespoke set of answers for one specific organisation, not a generic off-the-shelf solution.

   
   

4. What it considers: a long list of drivers and questions, from ways of working to space efficiency to sustainability, carefully considered and answered for that client.

   
   

5. Who delivers it: a workplace strategist, working in close partnership with an interior designer or architect who translates the strategy into the initial visuals and drawings.

   
   

6. When it happens: it adds the most value at the start of the process, and certainly before the design commences.

What is workplace strategy?

At its simplest, workplace strategy is where you work out what matters to the organisation, what its people do across the week, who it employs, and how they need to work today and into the future. Then, and only then, you decide what kind of environment supports all of that. Diagnosis before prescription.

The output isn’t a floorplan. It’s a report that contains a clear brief and a set of guiding principles that every design decision downstream has to answer to. Think of it as the constitution for the project. When a question comes up later, and hundreds of them will, the strategy is the document everyone returns to in order to settle it.

The word I’d underline is bespoke. A real workplace strategy is built around one organisation and could not be lifted and dropped onto another. It reflects that business’s culture, its people, its operational reality, and its ambitions. A recycled deck with the logo swapped out is not a strategy, it’s a template, and people can usually tell the difference the moment they start to read it.

What does a workplace strategy consider?

A workplace strategy doesn’t hand back a fixed list of features. It works through a set of drivers, uses them as the questions, and the strategy is developed from answering those questions specifically for that particular client.

On a recent strategy for a large government-owned essential services organisation, with several thousand staff spread across a head office and a sizeable number of regional sites, the work was anchored around ten key drivers. They make a useful illustration of the kind of questions a strategy actually asks:

1. Ways of Working: How assigned desks, private offices, hybrid, activity based working and desk sharing actually fit the teams

   
   

2. Space and Cost Efficiency: Right-sizing the footprint to how the space is actually used, so the organisation isn’t carrying space it doesn’t need

   
   

3. Connection and Culture: Designing for the culture they have and the one they’re trying to build

   
   

4. Health, Safety and Security: Safe by default, considered in the design rather than bolted on after

   
   

5. Employee Engagement: Change done with the people, not to them

   
   

6. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: Facilities and spaces that work for everyone, planned in from the start rather than retrofitted

   
   

7. Wellness and Wellbeing: Light, air, acoustics and the things you can’t see but absolutely feel

   
   

8. Technology: The tools that make hybrid collaboration genuinely work, with a frictionless user experience

   
   

9. Talent: A workplace people want to come into, and a reason to stay

   
   

10. Customer and Community: Using the space to welcome the people the organisation serves, not just the people it employs

Workplace Strategy Top 10 themes

Two things to understand about that list. First, these were a top ten, not the complete set. A full strategy works through considerably more than ten considerations, and an obvious one sitting just outside that particular cut is sustainability, which on another project might well make the top tier. The drivers that matter most are themselves a bespoke decision. Second, none of these are answered with a generic response. The strategy’s job is to take each question and produce an answer that is true for this client, in their workplace, with their people, on their budget, in support of their future direction.

Why do a workplace strategy?

Get the order right, with strategy first, and a design team has something solid to anchor every decision to. They are no longer guessing at what the business needs, because someone has already done the work of finding out and challenging it so it stands up against scrutiny.

Dive straight into design or furniture solutions without a strategy and you risk a workplace that looks current for about eighteen months but solves none of the real problems your people have, because nobody ever defined what those problems were. The design might be beautiful. It might win an award. It will still be the wrong outcome for your organisation, because it was never grounded in evidence-based design.

A good strategy is also the place to have the hard conversations early, while they’re still on paper and still cheap to resolve. Do we need this much space? How much of it, and configured how? What are we actually trying to achieve here? Resolving those questions before design protects the budget, protects the timeline, and protects everyone from the most expensive outcome of all, which is delivering a project that isn’t the right fit for the organisation.

Done well, the workplace supports the culture you’re trying to build, helps you attract and keep the people you need, and makes sense of the different ways of working you could choose from. Done without strategy, it’s a fit out with a deadline and a cookie cutter design.

Who is involved in a workplace strategy?

A workplace strategy is not a solo act. It draws on several groups, each bringing a different and necessary view.

At the top sits an executive sponsor, someone senior enough to set direction, unlock the right conversations, and make the calls that shape the whole piece. On the government project I mentioned above, the most valuable early input came from one-to-one interviews with the chairman, the chief executive, and the executive team, because the strategy has to start from where the leadership genuinely wants the organisation to go.

Then there is the business itself, the functions and divisions whose working lives the strategy will affect. Where the organisation wants it, their input is gathered through interviews, focus groups and workshops, and it’s what keeps the strategy grounded in operational reality rather than in assumption. That said, not every organisation wants that depth of engagement. Some deliberately keep staff involvement light, wary of raising expectations they may not be able to meet if the strategy isn’t fully implemented, so how far you go here is itself a decision the organisation has to make.

There are the end users, the employees who will live in the result every day, and whose engagement is the difference between a workplace that is adopted and one that is resented.

And there is the workplace strategist, who runs the process, asks the questions, collects and interprets the data, and turns all of it into the strategy. Which brings me to the most important relationship of the lot.

The strategist and designer partnership

This is the part that gets missed, and it’s the part that separates a good result from a frustrating one.

A workplace strategist and an interior designer or architect are not the same profession, and the best outcomes happen when they partner rather than when one tries to do the other’s job. The strategist’s role is to unearth the requirements, collect and analyse the data, and understand where the organisation wants to be in five or ten years. The designer’s role is to take all of that and translate it into a physical environment, into space, light, materials, and flow, and to do so with an eye on where the industry itself is heading.

Neither discipline produces the best result alone. A strategist without a designer ends up with a brilliant brief and no way to make it real. A designer without a strategy ends up creating in a vacuum, making beautiful decisions with nothing underneath them to confirm they are the right ones. The magic is in the handoff and the collaboration, where the strategist’s understanding of the people and the business meets the designer’s ability to give that understanding form, and where both keep half an eye on the trends that will keep the workplace relevant well beyond opening day.

When I deliver a workplace strategy, partnering closely with a talented interior design or architecture practice is not an optional extra. It is how the client gets the full value of both sets of expertise.

When do you do a workplace strategy?

The honest answer is that it adds the most value at the very start, and certainly before the design commences.

Not alongside the design, not catching up after the concept has already been drawn, and not as a box-ticking exercise once the layout is half-committed. The whole point of a workplace strategy is to inform the design, so the earlier it happens the more it is worth. Everything downstream, the concept, the test fits, the documentation, the build, draws its logic from the strategy. Get the sequence wrong and the strategy ends up rationalising decisions that have already been made, which isn’t really a strategy at all. And if there’s no strategy at all, you’re effectively at sea without a map.

When to do a Workplace Strategy

Where does workplace strategy apply?

Workplace strategy is geography-agnostic. The discipline does not change because the office happens to be in Perth rather than Sydney, London or Singapore. The questions are the same, the rigour is the same, and the process is the same wherever the workplace exists. For what it’s worth, we’re based in Perth, so while the discipline travels anywhere, delivering workplace strategy across Western Australia is our home ground.

What I’d add, for anyone who has been around this industry long enough to know the difference, is that workplace strategy and workplace transformation travel together. The professionals who deliver workplace transformation properly are the same people who take strategy seriously, because they understand that the strategy is what gives the transformation its direction. Skipping the strategy and going straight to design is a tell. It signals someone who is perhaps underestimating the needs of the business and the project. If you want to know whether you’re dealing with a professional, find out whether they value strategy or not.

How is a workplace strategy done?

A workplace strategy usually moves through a clear arc, from discovery to strategy to design brief. It isn’t always this linear, but it’s a reasonable rule of thumb.

It starts with discovery and research. This is the listening phase, and it is qualitative and quantitative at the same time. On the government project, this meant leadership interviews, business unit focus groups, and an ideation workshop, supported by data on the existing portfolio, occupancy data collection to establish how the space is genuinely used, and benchmarking against comparable organisations. The goal here is simple to state and hard to do well, which is to genuinely understand how the organisation works, what its people need, and where it is heading.

Then comes interpretation and strategy development. The raw findings are turned into the key drivers, a clear vision for the future workplace, and a set of guiding principles. A quick point of precision here, because it trips people up: a vision for the strategy and a vision for the project are not the same thing, and it pays to be clear which one you are writing. This is where the bespoke answers take shape, where “we heard people are frustrated by an inability to collaborate across silos” becomes a clear principle that the future workplace must break down those silos, and a view on how. A genuinely useful strategy will also recommend a way to de-risk the change, and on that government project the recommendation was to prove the concept with a pilot space before committing to a full rollout, which is exactly the kind of practical, build-confidence-first move that good strategy produces.

Finally, the strategy is translated toward design, and this is where the partnership I described earlier comes alive. The strategist hands the designer or architect a brief and a set of principles that are rich, specific and grounded in evidence, and the two work together to turn that into concept design, test fits, and ultimately a future workplace that can be built. The strategy does not stop being useful at this point. It remains the reference document that every design decision is measured against, right through to handover.

What workplace strategy is not

It helps to be clear about the boundaries.

Workplace strategy is not a test fit. A test fit takes a specific floor and works out where the desks and rooms physically go. The strategy comes well before that.

It is not a final design or a furniture schedule. It informs both, but it does not produce either.

It is not workforce strategy. That is a human resources discipline about how you manage and develop people. The two are occasionally confused because the words look similar, but they are different fields entirely.

Get the Workplace Strategy right

Frequently asked questions

Is a workplace strategy the same as an accommodation strategy?

Yes, the terms are used interchangeably for the same discipline, process and output. Both of my most recent strategies were commissioned as “accommodation strategies.” If there’s a pattern to it, “accommodation strategy” tends to surface where an organisation is juggling multiple sites, or workplaces beyond the office such as depots or warehouses, while “workplace strategy” tends to be used for a single workplace. It’s a tendency, not a rule.

How long does a workplace strategy take?

It depends on the size and complexity of the organisation and its portfolio. A larger, multi-site strategy naturally takes longer because the discovery phase carries more ground, but it doesn’t have to be a drawn-out exercise. Where the data is accessible, the stakeholders are willing, and you’re working with someone who does this for a living, it moves a good deal faster than people expect.

Do I need a workplace strategy if I’m only refreshing one office?

Even a single-site refresh benefits from the thinking, though the strategy can be lighter in scope. The principle holds at any scale: understand the problem before you design the solution. The smaller the project, the leaner the strategy, but the order never changes.

Can the designer just do the strategy as well?

Some designers offer workplace strategy as part of their service, and the good ones do it well, usually because they have a dedicated in-house strategist rather than asking a designer to wear both hats. The principle holds either way: the strongest results come from a genuine strategist and a genuine designer, each doing what they do best. Where one person is stretched across both roles without that specialist depth, one half of the job tends to get the lighter touch.

Do you provide workplace strategy in Perth?

Yes. Work Future is a Perth-based workplace strategy consultancy, and Western Australia is our home market. We deliver workplace and accommodation strategies for organisations across Perth and WA, on site where it adds value and remotely where it doesn’t, and we work with clients nationally as well.

What’s the difference between workplace strategy and workplace transformation?

Workplace transformation is the broader project of creating an improved workplace, covering space, technology, people, change and delivery. Workplace strategy is one stage within that journey, the interpretation stage, where research becomes direction. Strategy is part of transformation, not a separate thing.

In closing

Answering “what is a workplace strategy?” turns out to be straightforward. Delivering one is the hard part, because it asks you to resist the temptation to jump straight to the fun, visible, design-led stage and instead do the patient work of understanding the organisation first.

But that patience is the whole point. A workplace strategy, or accommodation strategy if that’s the term your organisation prefers, is how you make sure the design that follows is solving the right problem for the right people, anchored to a clear brief, and built in partnership between those who understand the business and those who can give that understanding form. Get that right, and everything downstream has a fighting chance. Get it wrong, or skip it, and you find out the cost about eighteen months after you move in.

This blog was written by Work Future, a workplace strategy and workplace transformation consultancy based in Perth, WA. We unearth the requirements, collect the data, and understand your future aspirations, then partner closely with talented interior designers and architects to translate all of that into a future workplace that genuinely works for your people. If you would like to discuss a workplace strategy or accommodation strategy for your organisation, contact the team at hello@workfuture.com.au or +61 0435 824 305.