The way we work has fundamentally changed. With hybrid working now the norm across London, most companies find themselves paying for office space that sits half empty, while their teams struggle with environments designed for a world that no longer exists. Before investing in a refit, redesign, or relocation, you need a clear strategy. That is exactly what workplace consultancy delivers: the evidence and direction to make confident decisions about your workspace, your lease, and your people.
At Office Refit, we provide workplace consultancy services across London that help businesses align their physical workspace with the way their teams actually work. Whether you are right-sizing after a shift to hybrid, planning a relocation, or simply trying to get more from your current office, our consultancy team gives you the data and strategy to move forward with clarity.
What Is Workplace Consultancy?
Workplace consultancy is a strategic advisory service that sits before design and build. While interior designers focus on how a space looks, and fit-out contractors focus on construction, a workplace consultant focuses on something more fundamental: understanding how your organisation works and what your office needs to support that.
It covers the essential questions that drive every workspace decision. How do your people work day to day? When do they come into the office, and what do they do when they are there? Where does collaboration happen, and where do people need quiet focus? What technology do remote participants need to feel included? And critically, how much space do you actually need?
The answers to these questions form a workplace strategy: a clear, evidence-based brief that guides every decision from lease negotiations through to furniture selection. Without this foundation, businesses risk spending significant sums on offices that look impressive but fail to support the work being done inside them.
Our Consultancy Services
Our workplace consultancy offering covers the full spectrum of strategic workspace planning. Each engagement is tailored to your organisation’s size, sector, and objectives.
Workplace Strategy Development
We build comprehensive workplace strategies that connect your business goals with your physical environment. This includes defining the purpose of your office, setting design principles, and creating a space brief that your design team can work from with confidence.
Occupancy and Utilisation Studies
Using sensor data, badge records, and observational studies, we measure how your current space is actually used. Most businesses are surprised by the results. Utilisation data provides the hard evidence you need to right-size your office and justify the investment to stakeholders.
Employee Surveys and Workshops
Numbers only tell part of the story. We run structured surveys and facilitated workshops to understand what your people need from their workspace, what frustrates them, and what would make the office a place they actively choose to visit.
Hybrid Working Policy Development
Many organisations have informal hybrid arrangements that create confusion and inconsistency. We help you develop clear, practical hybrid working policies that balance flexibility with collaboration, supported by the physical environment to make them work.
Change Management
A new office or new way of working only succeeds if your people embrace it. Our change management support covers communication plans, champion networks, pilot programmes, and post-move reviews to ensure a smooth transition.
Lease Advisory Support
Workplace strategy directly influences lease decisions. We work alongside your property advisors to ensure you take the right amount of space, in the right location, on terms that reflect modern working patterns rather than outdated assumptions.
Cost Benchmarking
We provide benchmarking data on fit-out costs, space ratios, and occupancy rates across London, so you can compare your plans against the market and set realistic budgets from the outset.
Why You Need Workplace Consultancy
The case for workplace consultancy has never been stronger. The shift to hybrid working has transformed how London businesses use their offices, and the implications are significant.
Most offices in London are now operating at between 40% and 60% utilisation. That means companies are paying full rent on space that is empty for much of the week. For a business occupying 10,000 sq ft in central London, right-sizing to match actual usage could save hundreds of thousands of pounds over a lease term. Workplace consultancy provides the evidence to make that decision confidently.
Employee expectations have shifted dramatically. People no longer accept a sea of identical desks under fluorescent lighting. They want variety: quiet focus areas, collaborative zones, social spaces, and technology that connects them seamlessly with remote colleagues. Understanding these expectations through proper research, rather than assumptions, is essential to creating a workspace that attracts and retains talent.
Above all, data-driven decisions beat guesswork. We have seen businesses invest heavily in large collaborative spaces only to find their teams primarily need quiet focus areas. We have seen others strip out meeting rooms that turn out to be the most in-demand spaces in the building. Workplace consultancy replaces opinions with evidence, reducing the risk of costly mistakes.
Our Approach
We follow a structured four-stage process that takes you from initial questions through to a clear, actionable workplace strategy.
Discover
The first stage is all about gathering data. We conduct occupancy studies to measure how your space is used throughout the week. We run employee surveys and stakeholder interviews to understand needs, frustrations, and aspirations. We observe working patterns, review HR data on headcount projections, and assess your existing space against current standards. This stage typically takes two to four weeks, depending on the size of your organisation.
Analyse
With data in hand, we analyse utilisation patterns to identify underused areas and pinch points. We map out pain points that are holding your teams back and spotlight opportunities to improve productivity, collaboration, and wellbeing. This analysis forms the evidence base for every recommendation that follows.
Recommend
We develop a workplace strategy document and space brief that sets out exactly what your office needs to deliver. This covers space allocation, zoning principles, technology requirements, and design guidelines. It also includes scenario modelling: for example, what happens if your headcount grows by 20%, or if you move to a four-day office week? The strategy gives you a roadmap, not just for today, but for the next five to ten years.
Support
Our involvement does not end with a report. We support you through the design and implementation process, ensuring the workplace strategy is faithfully translated into a finished office. We review designs against the brief, advise on furniture and technology selections, and conduct post-occupancy evaluations to measure whether the new space is performing as intended.
Hybrid Workplace Planning
Designing for hybrid working is one of the most common challenges we help London businesses solve. A hybrid workplace is not simply an office with fewer desks. It requires a fundamentally different approach to space planning, technology, and culture.
Activity-Based Working
Rather than assigning everyone a fixed desk, activity-based working provides a range of settings tailored to different tasks. Quiet pods for focused work, open tables for collaborative projects, informal lounges for creative thinking, and bookable meeting rooms for structured discussions. Our consultancy work defines the right mix of settings based on how your teams actually spend their time.
Hot Desking Ratios
Getting the desk-to-person ratio right is critical. Too few desks and people cannot find a place to work; too many and you are wasting money on empty furniture. We use utilisation data to calculate the optimal ratio for your organisation, typically between 6:10 and 8:10 for hybrid teams, and stress-test it against peak days and seasonal patterns.
Collaboration Zones
If people are coming to the office primarily to collaborate, your space needs to support that. We help you design collaboration zones that range from quick stand-up areas to fully equipped project rooms, sized and positioned based on the types of teamwork your organisation does most.
Focus Areas
Hybrid workers often struggle to find quiet space in offices optimised for collaboration. We ensure your workplace strategy includes adequate focus areas, from acoustic phone booths to dedicated quiet floors, so that people who need concentration can find it.
Technology for Remote Participants
Hybrid meetings fail when remote participants feel like second-class citizens. We advise on the technology infrastructure needed to create equity between in-office and remote attendees, including room acoustics, camera positioning, display sizing, and booking systems that make hybrid collaboration seamless.
Consultancy and Design Integration
One of the key advantages of working with Office Refit is that our consultancy service integrates directly with our office design and space planning capabilities. This means the insights gathered during consultancy flow seamlessly into the design process, without the loss of detail or context that often occurs when different firms handle each stage.
Your workplace strategy becomes the design brief. The utilisation data shapes the floor plan. The employee feedback informs the look and feel. And our team carries the full context from first survey through to final snagging, ensuring nothing is lost in translation.
For businesses that already have a design team in place, we are equally happy to provide consultancy as a standalone service. The workplace strategy and space brief we produce are designed to be picked up by any competent design practice and translated into a finished scheme.
Areas We Serve
We provide workplace consultancy services across London, with particular expertise in the areas where commercial office space is concentrated. Our consultants regularly work with businesses in the City, the West End, Midtown, Southbank, and the growing commercial districts of east and south London.
Recent consultancy projects include offices in Bank, Farringdon, Vauxhall, Bethnal Green, and Balham. Whether your office is in a heritage building in Clerkenwell or a modern tower in Canary Wharf, our consultancy process adapts to the specifics of your space and location.
Book a Free Discovery Call
If you are rethinking your workspace, considering a move, or simply unsure whether your current office is working hard enough for your business, we would welcome the chance to talk it through. Our initial discovery call is free, with no obligation, and gives you the opportunity to outline your challenges and hear how a structured consultancy process could help.
Book your free discovery call today and take the first step towards a workspace strategy built on evidence, not assumptions.