More and more companies want to reduce the number of workstations: fewer assigned desks, more shared space, square metres freed up. The number that governs this choice is the desk sharing ratio. Using it well, however, requires first understanding how people actually work – because the wrong ratio doesn't save money: it does damage.
What the desk sharing ratio is
The desk sharing ratio expresses how many people share one workstation. The first number is the workstation, the second the people: 1:1 means one desk each (the traditional model); 1:1.5 means two workstations for every three people; 1:3 one workstation for every three people. The higher the second number, the more the space is shared and the more square metres are freed up.
Put like that, it sounds like a mere cost-cutting lever. It is actually a design choice: it indicates how present an organisation is on site, how much it works elsewhere and how much its activities require a fixed workstation rather than different spaces throughout the day.
There is no single ratio: it depends on the work profile
The most common mistake is looking for «the» right ratio for the whole company. But a company is not made of identical people: it is made of different work profiles, each with its own presence in the office and its own mix of activities. And each profile has its own ratio.
These are the four main standard profiles we use in our analyses. For each one, the ring shows how activities are distributed across the day, and on the right the resulting desk sharing ratio together with the share of time spent on site or elsewhere.
The four standard profiles and their desk sharing ratio – ARCHIlabs elaboration.
A Dedicated profile, which spends most of its time at its own desk, needs a ratio close to 1:1. A Dynamic profile, which works off site more than 65% of the time, can go as far as 1:5 without anyone ever being left without a seat. Applying the average to everyone is precisely what generates the chaos companies fear.
How we calculate it
The ratio is not estimated by eye: it is measured. The path is always the same:
- Surveys and interviews to capture the «typical day» of each team – presence on site, activities, tools.
- Profiling: each team is mapped onto one or more standard profiles.
- Ratio per profile, weighted on the actual headcount, to arrive at the company's overall number.
ARCHIlabs' proprietary software derives the ratio for each profile from the survey data and weights it on the actual headcount: a method refined over more than twenty years and 2.7 million square metres of designed space.
It is a figure that comes from people. That is why we always start with a survey: it is the quickest way to bring out how people actually work, including the latent needs nobody states spontaneously.
The mistake to avoid
Desk sharing frees up square metres, but those square metres should not simply be cut: they should be reinvested. Fewer assigned desks mean a greater need for support areas – meeting rooms, phone booths for calls, informal areas for concentration and for meeting. An aggressive ratio without this balance doesn't save money: it produces crowded offices and unhappy people.
The ratio, in other words, is not a number to minimise. It is the outcome of a project that starts from how people work and arrives at a space capable of enabling them.