Before We Design the Workplace, We Need to Understand the Work

Howard Murray
6 minutes ago
7 min read

Why workplace discovery needs to follow how work actually happens

Only 21% of global office workers whose workplace had been updated in the previous three years said they felt included a great deal in the decision-making process, according to Gensler’s 2025 Global Workplace Survey

That figure is a useful reminder that workplace change is still often done to people rather than developed with them.

But there is a further issue.

Even a well-run consultation can stop short of understanding the work itself. Surveys, interviews and workshops may tell us what people like, what frustrates them and what they hope a new workplace will provide. They do not automatically show how work moves through the organization, where it catches, or which informal arrangements keep it moving.

Before we design the workplace, we need to understand the work.

The Workplace Brief Often Starts Too Late

By the time a workplace project reaches design, many of its boundaries are already fixed. The portfolio decision has been made. A budget and program may be in place. The project team needs answers about capacity, desk ratios, meeting rooms, technology and finishes.

Those choices matter. They describe what will be built. They do not yet explain what the investment must make possible.

Briefs often use broad aspirations such as better collaboration, more effective hybrid working or an improved employee experience. All are reasonable. None of these tells the designer what needs to become easier during an ordinary working day, which points of friction matter most, or what else around the workplace must change.

If that work has not been done, the gaps are usually filled with benchmarks, preferences and familiar design responses. The project can become increasingly well-defined while the job it is meant to do remains loose.

“A workplace brief should begin with the work, not the rooms.”

Work As Described Is Not Always Work As Done

Most organizations can explain how work is supposed to happen. There are organization charts, job descriptions, policies, process maps and systems. Speak to each function, and people can usually give a coherent account of their responsibilities.

Reality becomes clearer when a piece of work is followed from beginning to end.

A request enters the formal workflow, but some of the information is missing. An analyst messages someone in another team because they know who can interpret it. An exception is agreed during a short call. A more experienced colleague checks the judgement informally, and the system is updated later so the record catches up with what has already been decided.

The process map may show a straight line. The work relied on judgement, relationships, interruptions, access to expertise and a workaround that everybody involved now treats as normal.

This is not necessarily evidence of a broken process. It is often how an organization adapts to complexity. But it matters when we are deciding what the workplace should support.

A request for ‘more collaboration space’ tells us very little. Following the work may reveal a need for quick confidential conversations, a way to bring remote specialists into an unplanned discussion, or easier access to someone whose knowledge is frequently needed but whose role sits elsewhere in the organization.

Counting activity tells us how often people meet. Understanding the work tells us why the interaction exists and what makes it useful.

Consultation Is Not The Same As Discovery

Employee consultation is important. The people using a workplace should have a meaningful voice in shaping it. But consultation and discovery are doing different jobs.

People tend to describe the work they remember, the problems that are most visible, or the environment they would prefer. They may not mention a workaround because it has become routine.

Senior leaders can explain the intended operating model without seeing the small acts of coordination that make it viable. Interviews held separately by function can produce several accurate accounts without revealing how the work joins up between them.

The harder work is more direct. Sit with people and watch what they do. Trace a recent case through the organization. Look at the tools, messages and documents used along the way. Bring together people from either side of a handover and compare their accounts. Examine the quiet periods, the peak periods and the moments when something unusual happens.

The aim is not to document every task. It is to identify the recurring patterns, dependencies and constraints that have a consequence for place, technology, policy or behavior.

“Workarounds are not noise around the process. They are evidence about how the organization really operates.”

Follow The Work Across Organizational Boundaries

Workplace discovery is often organized around functions because functions are easy to identify. Work is less respectful of those boundaries.

A customer issue may cross operations, finance and technology before it is resolved. A product decision may depend on people in several countries who rarely share the same working hours. An employee joining the organization may experience a single process that is owned in fragments by HR, IT, security, facilities and their line manager.

Looking at each group separately risks designing for a collection of local preferences. Following the work exposes the handovers, competing demands and shared conditions that the organization needs the workplace to support.

It also reveals variation. The same role may work differently by location, market, seniority or point in the business cycle. Some of that variation is unnecessary. Some is essential. Treating it all as one average pattern may create a standard workplace that fits nobody particularly well.

Good discovery therefore asks where work starts, how it reaches a decision, what information people need, where it waits, and what happens when the formal route does not work. It pays attention to who is brought into the conversation late, which relationships carry knowledge across boundaries, and which parts of the work need privacy, concentration, immediacy or physical presence.

Turning Observation Into An Investment Brief

The opportunity is not to create more research for its own sake. It is to give an expensive workplace decision a clearer line of sight to the work it is intended to improve.

Suppose an organization wants project decisions to move faster. Observation shows that issues stall when local teams cannot quickly reach the specialists or decision-makers they need. That finding can be translated into a workplace requirement: easy access to small hybrid settings where a short, focused conversation can happen without booking a large meeting room days in advance.

The workplace is only one part of the response. Availability norms, decision rights, technology, and leadership behavior may also need attention. An operational owner needs to remain responsible after the project team leaves. Early evidence might include fewer handovers, less time waiting for clarification and shorter decision cycles.

The design has not been asked to solve the whole organizational problem. It has been given a clear job within a wider response.

That creates a more useful investment brief. It connects the expected change to an observed pattern of work, then to a workplace condition, the supporting organisational changes, an accountable owner and evidence that the change is beginning to happen.

“The building creates the conditions. The return comes from what people can then do differently.”

A Mini Diagnostic Before Moving Into Design

We have surveyed employees and run focus groups. Have we understood the work?
Perhaps. The test is whether the findings explain how work moves across roles and boundaries, not only what people say they need from the workplace. If the output is mainly a list of preferences, the discovery is not yet complete.
We already have process maps. What else would observation add?
Process maps usually show the agreed route. Observation reveals the judgement, delays, interruptions, and informal coordination around it. Both views matter, particularly where the real work depends on relationships or exceptions.
How much of the organisation needs to be studied?
Enough to see the recurring patterns and the meaningful variation. Sample different roles, locations, levels of seniority, handovers and operating conditions. The purpose is not exhaustive documentation; it is confidence that the workplace brief is not built around a partial view.
Can the workplace team do this alone?
The workplace team can lead the enquiry, but the work belongs to the business. Operational leaders, employees, technology, HR and service teams may all hold part of the picture. Someone must join those perspectives without reducing the discovery to separate functional wish lists.
How do we know we are ready to brief the design?
The organization should be able to name the observable changes it expects in an ordinary working day, show which workplace choices support them, identify what must change beyond the physical environment, and say who remains responsible for realizing the value.

If the answers still center on desks, rooms, attendance and amenities, the project may be ready to discuss space. It is probably not yet ready to describe the return.

Before asking what the workplace should become, how much do we really know about the work it is expected to support?

Source: Gensler, ‘Designing Workplaces That Work — With Your People’, August 2025: https://www.gensler.com/blog/designing-workplaces-that-work-with-your-people

Howard Murray

Senior Consultant, Global Workplace Operations

Drives strategy, operations, and transformation excellence, aligning people, processes, and governance to deliver sustainable business performance.

Email Howard

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