5 Things to Get Right Before You Redesign Your Office
Most office redesigns that go wrong do not fail during construction. They fail in the weeks and months before a single wall is moved, when the wrong assumptions are made, the wrong questions are skipped, and the brief is built on what people think they want rather than what the business actually needs.
Here are five things worth getting right before any design work begins.
1. Understand how your people actually work (not how you think they do)
There is almost always a gap between how leadership believes the office is used and how it is actually used. Some meeting rooms are booked constantly while others sit empty. Some teams are in the office every day while others rarely come in. Some people need deep focus time while others need constant collaboration.
Before redesigning anything, map how the space is actually being used. Walk the floor at different times of day. Talk to people across different teams and levels. Look at meeting room booking data if you have it. The answers will surprise you, and they will shape every decision that follows.
A redesign built on accurate insight into how people work will serve your team far better than one built on instinct and aspiration.
2. Decide what problem you are actually trying to solve
“We need a new office” is not a brief. It is a starting point for a conversation.
The organisations that end up with the best spaces are the ones who can articulate clearly what is not working about the current space and what success looks like for the new one. Is the problem that the current layout makes collaboration difficult? That the space no longer reflects the company’s growth and ambition? That it is impossible to recruit talent into an office that looks like it has not been updated since 2018? That the lease is ending and this is simply a necessary transition?
Each of these problems leads to a different solution. Getting clear on the problem before engaging a design firm will save you significant time, money, and frustration.
3. Get your stakeholders aligned before the project starts
Office redesigns have a way of surfacing disagreements that have nothing to do with design. The CEO wants an open plan. The HR Manager wants private offices. The IT team wants a bigger server room. The developers want to come to the office in crocs.
These conversations need to happen before a designer is briefed, not during the design process. When stakeholders are not aligned at the start, design reviews become battlegrounds and projects stall. The brief changes, work gets redone, and costs increase.
Hold a proper stakeholder alignment session at the beginning of the project. Get agreement on the non-negotiables, the priorities, and the trade-offs before anyone opens a sketchbook.
4. Be honest about your budget and build a contingency
There is a tendency in early project conversations to understate the budget; either because people are not sure what things cost, or because they worry that sharing a higher number will result in a higher price. This almost always backfires.
A design firm that does not know your real budget cannot design to it. The result is a concept that you love but cannot afford, followed by a painful value engineering exercise that strips out everything that made the design exciting in the first place.
Be honest about what you have to spend. A good design and build firm will design to your budget, not beyond it. And always build a contingency; ten to fifteen percent of the total project cost for the unexpected. In a Lagos fit-out, something unexpected almost always happens.
5. Plan for the transition not just the destination
The finished office gets all the attention. The period between now and moving in rarely does.
Where will your team work during the fit-out? If the office needs to remain operational, how will construction be phased around the business? What is the communication plan for keeping staff informed during a period of disruption? Who is responsible for making decisions quickly when questions arise on site?
These are not design questions but they are as important as any design decision. The organisations that navigate fit-outs most smoothly are the ones that plan the transition as carefully as they plan the space.
A well-run fit-out should not feel like a crisis. With the right preparation, it should feel like exactly what it is; a business investing in its future.
If you are in the early stages of thinking about an office redesign and would like a conversation about where to start, we would be glad to help.
