Most office layouts fail not because the furniture is wrong but because the circulation was an afterthought. The floor plan looks generous on paper, then the chairs back into the main aisle and the room stops working.

Start from area per person, not desks per square metre

A practical range for open-plan office space is 8–12 m² per person including circulation, meeting rooms and support space. Below 8 m² the floor feels dense regardless of how neatly the workstations are arranged; above 14 m² you are paying for space nobody uses. Desk-only density figures look better and mislead, because they exclude everything that makes the floor functional.

Aisle widths that hold up in practice

• Main circulation: 1200–1500 mm. Two people passing, or one person and a chair pushed back.
• Secondary aisles between workstation rows: 900–1000 mm clear. Below 900 mm, a pushed-back chair blocks the aisle.
• Escape routes: follow local code, and remember that clear width is measured with furniture in place, not on the empty plan.
• Accessible routes: 1200 mm passing space and 1500 mm turning circles at decision points.

The most common mistake is drawing aisles at the minimum and then specifying chairs with a wide recline. Measure the aisle with the chair pushed back, not tucked in.

Zone by noise, not by department

Departments in open plan generate different acoustic profiles. Sales floors and customer support are continuously loud; engineering and finance need sustained concentration. Arranging by noise level — quiet zone at the perimeter, active zone near entrances and meeting rooms — reduces friction more than arranging by team, and costs nothing.

Adjacency: who needs to be near whom

Build a simple adjacency matrix before placing a single desk. Score each pair of teams from 1 (rarely interacts) to 5 (constant). Teams scoring 4–5 should sit within a short walk; teams scoring 1–2 can be on different floors. This single exercise usually recovers 10–15% of floor area compared with laying out by headcount order.

Meeting and focus space ratio

A reasonable starting point is one small meeting room per 12–15 people, plus phone booths at roughly one per 20 people, plus a larger room per floor. Underprovide focus space and people take calls at their desks, which damages the quiet zone you just built.

Leave room for change

Headcount forecasts are wrong more often than right. Specify benching that can be reconfigured without new parts, keep at least one open bay unassigned, and prefer freestanding storage over built-in so the plan can move. A layout that cannot absorb a 20% headcount change without a rebuild is a layout with a short life.

Test the plan on the floor

Before ordering, tape the workstation footprints and aisle widths on the actual floor and walk it for a day. Two things surface immediately: whether the main aisle is where people actually walk, and whether the desk orientation puts screens in the path of window glare. Both are cheap to fix on tape and expensive to fix after installation.