Glossary · Space planning & real estate

What is office space planning?

Short answer

Space planning is the process of deciding how an office's floor area is divided and allocated, from which teams go on which floors to where desks, meeting rooms and shared areas sit. Workplace, facilities and real estate teams use it so the layout supports how people work and fits real demand without wasting space.

Also called office space planning, workplace space planning, office layout planning.

How it works

Space planning works from the building down. A stack plan assigns teams to floors, a block plan assigns them to zones on each floor, and a seat-level plan places desks, meeting rooms, focus rooms and amenities. Each level is the brief for the next.

The inputs are demand and constraints. Demand is how many people each team needs to seat on its busiest day, what kinds of space it uses and which teams it works with. Constraints are the building's cores, windows and services, health and safety rules, and the budget.

In hybrid offices the plan is revisited often. Attendance, team structure and headcount change, so plans built on live occupancy data and kept on digital floor plans can be adjusted without starting again, then turned into moves.

How to measure it

  1. Seats per team against each team's peak-day attendance.
  2. The mix of space types (desks, small and large meeting rooms, focus space) against how each is booked and used.
  3. Space per person and desk ratio by floor.
  4. Meeting room demand at peak hours, which catches shortages that daily averages hide.

Steps in office space planning

  1. Gather demand: attendance by team and weekday, headcount forecasts and how each team works.
  2. Set the working pattern and space standards: desk ratio, the mix of settings and space per person.
  3. Map the constraints: building cores, windows, services, accessibility and safety rules, and the budget.
  4. Create the stack plan: which teams go on which floors, with close collaborators near each other.
  5. Create block plans: zones and neighborhoods on each floor.
  6. Lay out desks, rooms and shared settings, and test the fit against peak-day demand.
  7. Plan the moves, and update floor plans and booking records on move day.
  8. Measure use once people have settled in, and adjust.

Examples

  • A company moving to a hybrid policy replans a floor from 200 assigned desks to 130 bookable desks plus eight small meeting rooms.
  • A growing team is planned into a neighborhood next to the teams it works with most, with an adjoining flexible zone for growth.

Common mistakes

  • Planning from the org chart instead of attendance data.
  • Designing for the average day rather than the busiest one.
  • Providing too few small meeting rooms and too many large ones.
  • Treating the plan as finished at move-in; without updates it drifts from reality within months.

How Kadence helps

Kadence SpaceOps goes from a stack plan down to seat-level layouts on real floor plans, using attendance and occupancy data from WorkOps. The AI planning agent builds or changes plans from plain-language requests, floor plans can be imported and edited in the browser, and approved plans are published to neighborhoods and desk assignments in WorkOps.

Space planning software · SpaceOps · Space management · Office space planning guide

Frequently asked questions

What does office space planning software do?

It holds digital floor plans and the teams, desks and rooms on them, and helps planners allocate space from building to seat. Stronger tools use live attendance and occupancy data, test scenarios before changes are made, and push approved plans into booking and seating so they take effect.

What metrics are used in office space planning?

Common ones are space per person, desk ratio, occupancy and utilization by floor and space type, peak-day attendance, meeting room demand at peak hours and cost per seat. Together they show whether the layout fits real demand.

What is the difference between space planning and space management?

Space planning designs how space should be allocated. Space management runs the space day to day and measures how it is used. Data from space management feeds the next round of planning.

What are the steps in office space planning?

Gather demand data, set the working pattern and space standards, create a stack plan by floor, a block plan within each floor and a seat-level layout, then plan the moves. Review the result against measured use after people move in.

  • Stack planning A floor-by-floor plan of which teams occupy which floors and buildings, used to test moves and consolidations first.
  • Block plan A floor-level layout that assigns each team to a zone of one floor, between the stack plan and the seat-level plan.
  • Occupancy planning Deciding where people and teams will work across floors and buildings, and how much space each needs, as the organization changes.
  • AI space planning Using AI to draft and test stack plans, seating plans and scenarios from headcount, occupancy data and floor plans.
  • Space management The ongoing tracking, allocation and improvement of how an organization's buildings, floors, desks and rooms are used.
  • Test fit A quick draft layout that checks whether a space program fits a specific building before a lease is signed.

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