Employee experience: diagnosing usage before fitting out

Employee experience hinges on four contradictory trade-offs that every workplace project must explicitly resolve. Across 18 sites we tracked at six months, full-flex floor plates without identity zoning show a satisfaction level 12 to 18 points lower than mixed floor plates combining assigned zones and shared zones: maximum flexibility is not the universal answer.

• Concentration versus collaboration. Engineering roles devote a large majority of their time to focus tasks, unlike commercial functions, which are more oriented towards collective exchanges. We segment sales and collaboration zones with dynamic clusters and light ambience, and engineering and concentration zones with acoustic partitions, keeping a signal-to-noise gap below 5 dB to meet the BREEAM Pol 8 criterion.
• Flexibility versus identity. Modular spaces reduce reconfiguration costs, but the lack of territorial appropriation can weaken employees’ sense of belonging in the months following delivery.
• Density versus comfort. The regulatory thresholds in force in France set a minimum of 10 m² per employee in an individual office, 11 m² in a shared office and 15 m² in an open space. Below 12 m², excessive density noticeably degrades occupants’ acoustic and thermal comfort.
• Standardisation versus business-specific requirements. Pooling fit-out standards reduces the cost per m², but ignores laboratories, workshops and technical floor plates.

These four trade-offs largely determine the final usage satisfaction, which our field feedback systematically measures after move-in.

The behavioural diagnosis is not an HR deliverable: it is a tool for securing the fit-out CAPEX. On a 2000 m² tertiary project, the works budget ranges between 800 and 1500 EUR/m² depending on the service level. A usage audit represents 1 to 2% of this budget and neutralises three recurring additional-cost items.

• Oversizing of closed meeting rooms. Programmes plan on average one room per 8 to 10 workstations, whereas the actual occupancy rate remains structurally low in most of the organisations we support. Cutting back by 20% frees up 80 to 120 m² on a 2000 m² floor plate, i.e. 30000 to 60000 EUR of rent avoided per year at the average tertiary price in Île-de-France.
• Undersizing of informal spaces, which triggers reconfigurations within 18 months with added partitioning and late acoustic furniture at 80-150 EUR/m².
• Untargeted acoustic over-specification. Treating a floor plate uniformly costs 40 to 70 EUR/m²; treatment zoned according to the performance levels expected per activity zone brings the item down to 20-35 EUR/m² with equivalent performance on focus zones.

For the Asset Manager, asset value also depends on documented flexibility: a costed usage file covering occupancy rate, acoustic measurements and evolution scenarios constitutes a due-diligence document that can be valued during a disposal or a refinancing, at a level that leases and plans alone cannot provide.

Three pitfalls systematically recur on projects carried out without a behavioural audit.

1. Transposing tertiary standards without analysing business flows. Technical functions require storage, handling and circulation zones that generic tertiary ratios systematically underestimate.
2. Undersizing informal spaces. Breaks, spontaneous exchanges and video calls take up a significant share of actual time in the office, often largely underestimated in initial programmes.
3. Neglecting the acoustic treatment of flexible spaces. An untreated open space can exceed 60 dB(A) in everyday activity, degrading concentration. Target levels are defined by space typology, with specific guidance for open collaborative floor plates.

Best practice comes down to a simple rule: a minimum of two to three weeks of behavioural audit, cross-referencing direct observations, footfall counts and usage questionnaires. The protocol calibrates the fit-out to real behaviours rather than to managerial intentions.

We say it clearly: the five-step diagnosis is not relevant everywhere. Below 800 m² or 40 workstations, the cost of an audit mobilising three to four weeks exceeds the expected gains on post-delivery adjustments. In this configuration, we propose a flash audit over five days, focused on flows and acoustics, at a proportionate rate.

Likewise, on a relocation project with an unchanged plan, with the same teams, the same uses and retained furniture, the long behavioural analysis only brings marginal information. We then steer towards a simple survey of technical measurements in acoustics and lighting, combined with a half-day user workshop.

Last case: projects heavily constrained by a lease schedule, with a hard notice period and delivery within eight weeks, leave no window for a behavioural audit. We then favour a standard fit-out approach secured by our internal framework, building on 1200+ projects since 2006, while planning a post-delivery review at six months to adjust the most exposed zones.

This methodological honesty is our safeguard: a poorly calibrated diagnosis costs more than it returns, and we prefer to steer you towards the right scale of intervention rather than sell an oversized service.

1. Flow audit
   During the first week, we map movements, occupancy times per zone and footfall rates of meeting rooms, informal spaces and workstations. The target coverage exceeds 80% of workstations, over representative time slots. The deliverable is a dynamic flow mapping, which serves as the basis for the following steps.
2. Behavioural analysis
   Over weeks 2 and 3, we compare actually observed uses with the managerial intentions formulated upstream of the project. The measured gap typically lies between 30 and 40%: under-occupied rooms, focus zones used for video calls, saturated informal spaces. This objectivation neutralises the declarative biases of conventional surveys.
3. Technical diagnosis
   In week 3, we measure the physical ambience parameters: acoustic levels per zone, illuminance according to the reference values for circulation zones and tertiary corridors (maintained illuminance 100 lux, UGR 28), air quality. These objective measurements identify non-compliant zones before any fit-out decision, and precisely cost out zoned rather than uniform treatment.
4. Co-design workshop
   In week 4, we bring together key users (business representatives, HR, facilities management) to confront field observations with expressed expectations. Three prioritised fit-out scenarios come out of the workshop, each costed in CAPEX, in m² mobilised and in lead time.
5. Usage modelling
   Still in week 4, we project the organisational impacts of the three selected scenarios: target occupancy rate, expected acoustic levels, savings in m² or rent. This final modelling secures management’s decision and constitutes the due-diligence document that can be valued during a disposal or a refinancing.