What to Do Before You Redesign Your Office

Audit What's Actually Happening in Your Space Now

Most redesigns start with a wish list: more collaboration space, better light, a nicer lobby. That's a reasonable starting point for inspiration, but it's the wrong starting point for diagnosis. Before deciding what the new space should include, get specific about what's going wrong in the current one.

This is well-trodden research territory. The Center for the Built Environment at UC Berkeley has run a long-standing occupant survey used across more than 800 office buildings, and analysis of that database consistently finds that acoustics, space, and privacy are the sources of dissatisfaction most likely to show up together for the same employees, meaning these problems tend to compound rather than exist in isolation. If your team hasn't named these specifically as pain points, it's worth checking before assuming the fix is more open collaboration space or a fresh coat of paint. A lot of redesigns solve for what leadership assumes is wrong rather than what's measurably wrong, and those are often different lists.

Talk to the People Who'll Actually Use the Space, the Right Way

Employee input matters here, but how you gather it matters just as much as whether you gather it. A single survey asking people to rate their satisfaction is a reasonable starting point, but self-reported feedback alone has real limits. People are prone to memory and recency bias: a bad week colors how someone answers a question about their workspace overall, and a string of good ones does the opposite. Relying on survey results alone risks steering a redesign based on whoever happened to have a frustrating month when the survey went out.

The more reliable approach combines a few different sources: employee surveys, actual space utilization data (which rooms and areas are used, underused, or avoided entirely), and direct interviews with people across different roles and seniority levels, since preferences often vary meaningfully by role, tenure, and team function. No single method tells the whole story, but together they build a picture that's harder to second-guess later, and it gives you something concrete to point to when stakeholders disagree about what the space needs.

Define What the Space Needs to Support, Not Just How It Should Look

Once you know what's driving dissatisfaction and how people are really using the current space, the next step is translating that into requirements, not aesthetics. This is the shift we've written about elsewhere between a traditional design brief, built around headcount and square footage, and a diagnosis-driven one, built around how people need to think and work.

In practice, this means naming specific needs: how much dedicated quiet space is required for focused, heads-down work versus how much open space genuinely gets used for spontaneous collaboration versus how often it sits empty. It means being honest about whether your team's stated preference for an open floor plan is supported by what the utilization data and dissatisfaction patterns reveal, since these two things frequently don't match. A brief built this way gives a design team something far more useful to work from.

When building our own Richmond, Virginia offsite space, the Lost Office team dove deep into this very principle. We knew that we wanted our environment to be more than just a beautiful space with a couple of big rooms for groups to gather. We designed our space by starting with the outcomes and psychological states that it needed to cultivate, focus, creativity, collaboration, openness, and so on. This grounded our discussions with our architects in very concrete terms, even before we made any hires or hosted a single customer (we also interviewed countless colleagues and prospective clients for feedback on what they'd look for in an offsite space, as recommended in the previous step).

Build Your Brief Around Diagnosis, Not Assumptions

The final step before bringing in an architect or design firm is capturing and conveying this information in a way that is easy to digest. Most program briefs tell a design team how many people need desks. A stronger brief tells them what those people need to focus, collaborate, and feel supported, backed by the specific findings from the audit and employee input gathered earlier.

This matters most at the RFP stage, if you're evaluating multiple design or architecture vendors. A brief built around real diagnosis lets you hold every vendor's proposal accountable to the same specific standard, rather than comparing renderings and finishes in isolation. It also protects the project later: when budget pressure inevitably pushes toward cutting something, having a documented reason for each requirement makes it much harder for the wrong things to get cut first.

The best redesigns start with evidence, not inspiration. If you're planning a redesign, relocation, or vendor RFP, Lost Office's Workspace Consulting practice can help you build the diagnosis before the floor plan gets drawn.