Workplace Strategy In Perth
Most organisations arrive at workplace strategy through a property trigger. A lease break is coming up and you’re not sure what to do with it. Hybrid has settled in and you’re wondering whether you still need this much space, or this little. You’ve outgrown the floor and you’re weighing a move against staying put and reworking what you already have. Whatever brought you here, the decision in front of you is bigger than a floorplan, and it rewards some clear thinking before you sign anything, brief anyone, or move a single desk.
Work Future is a Perth-based workplace strategy and transformation consultancy, and that thinking is what we do. We work out what matters to your organisation, what your people actually do across the week, and how the business needs to work today and into the future, then we work with you to determine what kind of workplace supports all of it. Diagnosis before prescription. You get a clear strategy report and a set of principles the design team can use to develop a customised layout that meets your needs.
If you want the full breakdown of what is workplace strategy, I’ve written about it in more detail.
What you get
A workplace strategy from us is a report, not a floorplan. It contains a clear brief and a set of guiding principles that every design decision downstream has to answer to, the constitution for your project that everyone returns to when the hard questions come up later, and hundreds of them will.
It is bespoke by definition. The strategy is built around your organisation, your culture, your people, your operational reality and your ambitions, and it could not be lifted off another client and dropped onto you. A recycled deck with the logo swapped out is a template, not a strategy, and you can usually tell the difference the moment you start reading.
How we work
A workplace strategy moves through a clear arc, from discovery to strategy to design brief.
It starts with discovery and research, the listening phase, qualitative and quantitative at the same time. Depending on the engagement that means leadership interviews, business unit focus groups and workshops, occupancy data to establish how your space is genuinely used, and benchmarking against comparable organisations. The goal is simple to state and hard to do well, which is to understand how your organisation works, what your people need, and where you’re heading.
Then comes interpretation, where the raw findings become a set of key drivers, a clear vision for the future workplace, and the guiding principles. This is where “Leadership is frustrated their people can’t collaborate across silos” turns into a principle that the future workplace has to break those silos down, and a view on how. Good strategy also recommends a way to de-risk the change, and proving the concept in a pilot space before committing to a full rollout is often exactly that.
Finally, the strategy is translated toward design, where we hand the designer or architect a brief that is rich, specific and grounded in evidence, and work alongside them to turn it into concept design and test fits. The strategy doesn’t stop being useful there. It stays the reference document every design decision is measured against, right through to handover.
The strategist and designer partnership
A workplace strategist and an interior designer are not the same profession, and the best outcomes happen when they partner rather than when one tries to do the other’s job. Our role is to unearth the requirements, collect and analyse the data, and understand where you want to be in five or ten years. The designer’s role is to translate all of that into space, light, materials and flow. A strategist without a designer ends up with a brilliant brief and no way to make it real, and a designer without a strategy ends up making beautiful decisions with nothing underneath to confirm they’re the right ones.
When we deliver a strategy, partnering closely with a talented design or architecture practice isn’t an optional extra, it’s how you get the full value of both sets of expertise. If you already have a designer you trust, we work with them. If you don’t, we’ll help you find the right one.
Why Perth organisations are rethinking their space now
Perth’s CBD has seen barely any new office supply in years, and that single fact changes the landscape for almost every tenant in the city. When there’s nowhere better to move to, and nothing being built that justifies the upheaval and the premium, staying where you are and reworking the space you’ve got becomes the smart play far more often than it used to. Restacking a tenancy, consolidating floors, right-sizing a footprint that hybrid has left half empty, these are the decisions in front of most Perth occupiers right now, and they’re exactly the decisions a workplace strategy is built to answer. Get the thinking right and the building you’re already in can often deliver more than a relocation would, without the cost of a new lease or the upheaval of moving the whole organisation across the city. A refit carries its own disruption, since people usually have to be decanted while the work is done, but that is a sequencing problem good strategy plans for rather than a reason to move.
Why Work Future
When you engage us, you work directly with the person delivering the strategy, not a junior team running a process off a template. We have over fifteen years of workplace strategy and workplace transformation delivery behind us, across Australia and overseas. We’ve delivered for organisations ranging from single sites to large multi-site portfolios, including a recent accommodation strategy for a government-owned essential services organisation with several thousand staff across a head office and a sizeable regional network. We know this discipline and we know the Perth market, and we’ll give you a straight, evidence-based read you can make confident decisions from.
Perth and Western Australia are our home ground. We deliver on site where it adds value and remotely where it doesn’t, and we work with clients nationally as well.
Workplace strategy or accommodation strategy
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If your organisation calls it an accommodation strategy, we’re almost certainly talking about the same thing. The terms are used interchangeably for the same discipline, process and output, with “accommodation strategy” tending to surface where multiple sites or non-office workplaces such as depots and warehouses are involved. Whichever term you use, it’s work we do.
Frequently asked questions
How quickly can you deliver a workplace strategy?
It depends on the size and complexity of your organisation and portfolio. A larger, multi-site strategy carries more discovery and naturally takes longer, but it doesn’t have to be drawn out. Where the data is accessible, your stakeholders are willing, and you’re working with someone who does this for a living, it moves a good deal faster than most people expect. Tell us your timeline and we’ll be straight about what’s realistic.
Do you deliver workplace strategy outside Perth?
Yes. Western Australia is our base, but we work with clients across Australia. The discipline is geography-agnostic, the questions and the rigour are the same wherever the workplace sits, and we’ve delivered for clients interstate and overseas as well as here in WA.
Do I need a full strategy, or something smaller?
Both exist for a reason. If the question in front of you is broad, a full workplace strategy is the right tool. If it’s a single, well-defined problem, a fixed-price Work Sprint can resolve it in a week. If you’re not sure which you need, tell us what’s in front of you and we’ll point you the right way.
Who will I be working with?
You work directly with Peter Stansfield, Founder and MD of Work Future. He leads every engagement personally and has delivered workplace strategy and transformation projects for organisations from single sites to large multi-site portfolios.
How do we get started?
Start with a conversation. Tell us about your lease event, your growth question, or the workplace that no longer fits the way you work, and we’ll scope what a strategy would involve for your organisation.
Start a conversation
If you have a lease event, a growth question, or a workplace that no longer fits the way you work, the cheapest time to think it through is now, while the options are still open and still on paper.
Email hello@workfuture.com.au, call +61 0435 824 305, or use the contact form at the foot of the page. We’re based in Perth, Western Australia.