How much office space per employee for hybrid work? Why the rule of thumb will lead you astray
Guidelines often cite 8 to 12 m² per employee, with a factor of 0.6 to 0.8 workstations per person being common for desk sharing. These figures aren't wrong, but they answer a question that shouldn't be asked anymore. They assume the office is a place for desks. In a hybrid work environment, that is no longer the case, which is why any calculation that doesn't first clarify what the office is actually needed for will be off the mark. We outline how to determine these needs in five steps below.
Why doesn't the old calculation work anymore?
The rule of thumb comes from a world where the chain was unbroken: one person, one desk, five days a week, one location. Headcount times a benchmark, add meeting rooms, and you're done.
That chain has broken in two places.
The first break: Your own desk is no longer the only place to work. If you want to read in peace, you do it at home. If you need to make a call, you look for a quiet spot (or should). If you are developing something as a team, you need a smartboard, a wall, a model. The personal workspace is shrinking while shared space is growing: project rooms, focus booths, and areas for conversations that don't require a conference room. The space per person is decreasing, while the share of communal space is rising.
The second break runs deeper. Work has decoupled from location. We are no longer building a place where work is performed, but a tool that supports collaboration. Providing a desk is no longer the core task of the office. That might sound like a loss, but it is the opposite: only when the office no longer has to be a storage facility for workstations can it become what it does best.
Work ≠ Location
You don't measure a tool by square metres per user, but by whether it fulfils the purpose for which it was acquired.
What does the Workplace Ordinance (ASR A1.2) actually say?
It provides minimum values, not a planning basis.
The wording of ASR A1.2 itself specifies: at least 8 m² for the first workstation, at least 6 m² for each additional one. These values refer to workstations—meaning furniture units—not people. They define when a room may be used as a workspace. They say nothing about how many such spaces an organisation needs.
A lower limit easily turns into a planning requirement. But a minimum requirement doesn't answer what a company needs. It answers what is permitted.
Why reduction formulas don't help either
As soon as hybrid work enters the picture, second-order rules of thumb appear. A reduction in space requirements of 20 to 40 percent is often cited as an industry standard. If you look at how this range is derived, you find the same logic among several providers: one day of working from home per week equals 20 percent less space, two days equals 40 percent.
In other words: for 100 employees, the formula mathematically turns one home office day per week into 20 fewer desks, and two days into 40. Except not on the day when everyone is in the office.
That is not a measurement result; that is simple arithmetic. And it fails on two counts.
It fails on averages because attendance is not distributed evenly throughout the week, but clusters on specific days. Anyone planning based on an average will have too little space on the day everyone is present. Anyone who has been left without a desk once won't come back.
And it fails because it only recognizes desks. What is saved in desk space is needed elsewhere.
The Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics puts it clearly: "There is no blanket guideline for the desk-sharing rate," as every company has its own individual differences.
Why do we even need an office?
Before calculating any floor space, you must make a strategic decision based on three questions: Why do we need the office? What should happen there? What does our hybrid strategy look like—in other words, how often do people come in, and for what purpose?
Our own wpi projects show just how clear the answer has become. Across all our surveys to date, the vast majority cite working with colleagues as the main reason for coming to the office, with another significant portion mentioning simply meeting up with colleagues. In contrast, only a small minority come for focused individual work. People come for people, not for their desks.
In the same breath, a similarly large group names their top wish for improvement: being able to concentrate better in the office.
They come for collaboration and fail because they cannot concentrate.
These figures are derived from our previous wpi projects, not from a representative study.
This contradiction is the real lever. It means that withdrawal and interaction are not opposites; they are interdependent. A space that focuses solely on interaction turns negative because people have nowhere to go when it gets too loud. For planning purposes, this means that the proportion of focus areas is not a leftover quantity to be distributed at the end, but the prerequisite for the interaction space to be used at all.
How do you determine actual space requirements instead of just estimating them?
Five steps. Any company can take the first three on its own.
Step 1: Measure attendance for four weeks, with daily precision.
Count how many people are in the office every single day for at least four consecutive weeks. We use four weeks because shorter periods are distorted by holidays, vacations, or project peaks.
If you don't have a booking system, this can be done via access data, Wi-Fi logins, or simply by a daily headcount at reception. The method is secondary; the daily precision is not.
Ultimately, you need two values: the average across all days and the highest recorded day. The latter is the more important one. Together, they show whether a system adjustment makes sense.
Step 2: Use the peak day as the basis for planning.
For a quick estimate: Do not calculate based on the average. Here is an example with 100 employees:
The average is 55 people present. The highest recorded day, usually Tuesday or Wednesday, is 78. If you plan based on the average, you provide 55 desks, leaving 23 people without a place to work one out of every five days.
Plan like this instead: Take the peak value and add a safety margin of about 10 percent so that every last corner isn't occupied on peak days. In this example: 78 plus 10 percent, which is about 86 workstations for 100 employees. This corresponds to a factor of 0.86—significantly higher than what standard formulas suggest.
Conversely, if your peak day is 45, you don't need 60 desks just because a calculator says so.
If you want to dive deeper, look at how many employees come in on peak days only for team events, or have a work routine that allows for working at team benches or similar setups. This way, you can reduce the number of compliant workstations and supplement them with shared pool desks.
Finally, question your current routines: Do multiple teams have their "team days" on the same day? Is that what leads to these peak values? Are there good reasons for this to remain the case, or will there be systemic changes that influence attendance? Incorporate these changes and adjust your values accordingly.
Step 3: Identify activities, don't just ask for wishes
Don't ask "What do you want?", but rather "What did you do in the office last week, and what got in your way?". Wishes produce wish lists; activities produce requirements.
Five questions are enough for an initial overview:
- Why do you come to the office?
- What activities make up your typical workday in the office?
- How often can you not find a suitable place for conversations or calls?
- How often can you not find a suitable place for focused work?
- What would you change immediately?
Analyse the results by department. An overall average hides the very differences that matter: sales, accounting, and development rarely have the same profile.
Here, too, always keep an eye on the future: What is the goal? What do you need the office for? Why do you want to invest in the office? Are the activities, occasions, or processes expected to change in the future?
Step 4: Allocate space types
Only now do you start calculating, using four categories instead of one:
- Individual workstations, figure from step 2
- Focus areas for focused work and phone calls: booths, small enclosed rooms, quiet zones
- Collaboration areas: project rooms, meeting rooms of various sizes, open areas for spontaneous coordination
- Communal areas: kitchen, reception, informal zones
The distribution between these categories is derived from step 3, but not exclusively. The activities of your employees show what is needed today, while the strategic question reveals what the office will be needed for in the future.
This is why we need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture: What problem is the office supposed to solve? Is the main goal to better facilitate focused work? Should collaboration between teams be strengthened? Or is leadership saying: Our problem is that identification with the company has suffered and team spirit has weakened?
In that case, it is not enough to simply provide functional spaces for productive work. The office must also foster a sense of belonging, visibility, interaction, and shared experience. This might mean more informal areas, a stronger sense of identity, better spaces for team rituals, more room for collaborative learning, or a design that makes the company culture tangible again.
Space allocation is therefore not a mechanical result of a survey. It is a translation from two directions: what employees actually do in their daily work and what the organisation wants to achieve with the office. Sometimes, that is exactly the difference between a space that manages problems and a space that enables development.
If your survey shows that concentration is the main issue, space should be shifted from the collaboration category to the focus category, even if that contradicts the popular image of the open, communicative office.
As a rough check: If your plan allocates less than 10 percent of the usable area to focus work, but your survey indicates problems with concentration, something is wrong.
Step 5: Stress-test against future developments
Calculate two scenarios: 20 percent more employees and 20 percent fewer. If your plan falls apart in both cases, it is too narrowly tailored to the status quo. Spaces that can be repurposed are more valuable than spaces that fit perfectly today.
If this assessment shows that you could potentially reduce your office space in the medium term, it is worth taking a look at our article "Reducing office space: relocate, renovate, downsize, or share?".
Where this calculation reaches its limits
The mechanics are no secret. The limit lies in the quality of the data. Two things regularly go wrong in internal surveys:
First, people answer differently in internal surveys than in anonymous ones. If they know their manager is on the distribution list, they rarely state the actual problem.
Second, interpretation is more difficult than data collection. "Many want to be able to concentrate better" could mean: too loud, too many interruptions, poor seating arrangements, or a lack of rules. Four different causes, four different solutions, and only one of them is a spatial issue.
The office is not losing its importance. It is changing its purpose.
It would be a mistake to conclude that the office is becoming smaller and therefore less important. As long as work was tied to a specific location, the office didn't have to do anything other than be available. Now, it has competition and must justify its existence. That is exactly what makes it a tool.
An office that makes collaboration noticeably better is more valuable than any office that simply provided desks.
It is the place where new employees learn by watching others. Where a conflict is resolved in ten minutes that would have taken three weeks via email.
This impact is not created by square footage, but by spaces that are suited to what is meant to happen within them.
The better question
"How much office space per employee?" sounds like planning, but it's actually accounting. This question just counts heads and multiplies.
The better question is: What space do we need to ensure effective collaboration here? It’s a more uncomfortable question because answering it requires research rather than calculation. But it is the only one whose answer will still hold true in three years.
This is exactly where we come in. With the wpi we analyse how work is actually performed within a company before any space planning begins—confidentially and across all departments. This doesn't result in a standardised benchmark, but rather a space requirement tailored to this specific organisation. Sometimes it’s below the rule of thumb, sometimes above. But it is always evidence-based.
The essentials at a glance
How much office space does an employee need for hybrid work?
There is no reliable benchmark for this. The commonly cited figures of 8 to 12 m² per employee refer to a work environment with fixed desks and five days of office attendance. With hybrid work, the need for personal space decreases while the share of shared space increases.
What does the Workplace Ordinance require?
It specifies minimum values for workspaces, not a basis for planning. The wording itself states: at least 8 m² for the first workstation and at least 6 m² for each additional one. These figures define what is permissible, not what an organisation actually needs.
Is the rule of thumb that hybrid work saves 20 to 40 percent of space accurate?
This range is calculated, not measured: one home office day per week equals 20 percent, two days 40 percent. It fails because attendance tends to cluster on specific days and because the desk space that is no longer needed is often required elsewhere. The Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics notes that there is no general benchmark for desk-sharing ratios.
How many workstations do I need for 100 employees?
That depends on the peak attendance day measured, not the average. With a peak of 78 people present plus a safety margin of about 10 percent, you would need approximately 86 workstations. If your peak day is 45, you need correspondingly fewer.
How do I determine the actual space requirement?
In five steps: measure daily attendance over four weeks, use the peak day as the planning basis, survey activities instead of wishes, divide the space into four categories, and test the result against growth and shrinkage scenarios.
Why shouldn't I ask employees what they want?
Wishes produce wish lists; activities produce requirements. The question "What did you do in the office last week, and what hindered you?" provides actionable answers, whereas asking for wishes provides proposed solutions without a problem description.