How much office space do you actually need?

The two numbers, and why both are right

Ask how much space a person needs and you will be told ten to fifteen square metres. That figure is sound — for a conventional lease. When you lease a floor, the area you pay for has to contain everything: workstations, meeting rooms, a boardroom, the kitchen, reception, storage, the server cupboard, and every corridor connecting them. Ten to fifteen square metres per head is what that adds up to.

A serviced office is measured on a completely different basis. The suite area is the private room and nothing else. The meeting rooms, kitchen, breakout, reception and circulation all exist — you use them daily — but they sit in the operator's shared areas and are not in your number.

So a four square metre per person serviced suite is not a cramped office. It is the same person, with the same amenity, counted differently.

Sizing a conventional requirement

Start with headcount at the end of the term you are signing, not today's. A five-year lease sized to today's team is a problem in year two, and the cost of taking slightly too much is almost always lower than the cost of moving early.

Then adjust for how you actually work. A team that is in three days a week does not need a desk per person, but it does need more meeting space, because the days people come in are the days they meet. Sizing to peak attendance rather than to headcount is the single most useful correction for a hybrid business.

Efficiency also varies with the floorplate. A long narrow floor with a central core wastes more in circulation than a square, open one, so the same headcount can need meaningfully different areas in two different buildings. Two proposals quoting the same rent per square metre are not necessarily the same deal.

Sizing a serviced requirement

Here you are choosing a room, so headcount is the unit and the operator has already decided how many desks fit. The judgement is whether their number is comfortable: an eight-person suite that seats eight people with nowhere to put a printer is a different proposition from one with room to breathe.

Our own inventory shows the smallest suites are the least efficient per head — one and two-person offices carry a higher area per person, because a room has a minimum practical size regardless of how many people are in it. Efficiency improves through the middle sizes and flattens out on larger suites.

The other question is what happens when you grow. Ask whether a larger suite in the same building can be taken mid-term and on what terms, because moving buildings to add two people is an expensive way to solve a small problem.