In an office planning world where seats no longer automatically equate to people, ratios matter. Concurrent shifts toward greater workplace density and desk-sharing are challenging a decades-old notion that “people” and “seats” are interchangeable for planning purposes.
Anyone who has ever been involved in an office planning, design or construction has—undoubtedly—encountered the real estate industry’s most common metric: workplace density. A deceptively simple measure, density is typically expressed in square feet of space allocated per person (“square feet/person”) and commonly used to indicate the number of seats present (or soon-to-be present) in a workplace, relative to the total area.
Notice how we said that the allotted square feet per person usually means square feet per seat? Did you find that strange or confusing?