Why Your New Office Design Should Consider the Ratio of Desks-to-Doors
March 4, 2024
As workplace strategists, we've traditionally relied on specific metrics to evaluate and define what makes an office excel. However, in the face of the evolving post-COVID dynamic, those traditional metrics fall short of providing a comprehensive understanding of office performance today.
One glaring shortcoming in many offices has to do with virtual calls. We repeatedly hear from clients that virtual calls conducted in open office spaces are a primary source of distraction. This is a significant problem as employees rank “opportunities to focus” as the top reason to come into the office, according to Ark’s 2023 Workplace Satisfaction Survey.
In response to this shortcoming, our strategies for office design now involve considering the ratio of desks to doors.
“A repeat concern like this is a call to action for our team. We needed a way to measure the response to new work patterns in order to offer targeted and accurate solutions for our clients. The desk-to-door ratio has become a simple metric to evaluate the market response to an increase in the volume of virtual calls.”
– Alex Dunham, Associate Principal, Managing Director Ark
What is the Desk-to-Door Ratio?
A desk-to-door ratio is the measure of private, soundproof spaces employees can use to take virtual calls, compared to the number of individual workstations, or desks, the office is designed to support. Ultimately these “doors” may lead to phone booths, huddle rooms, or larger conference rooms, but not offices. We’ve removed offices from the equation because they serve as both a desk and a door. The occupants of those rooms already have a space for virtual calls.
A higher desk-to-door ratio indicates an increased capacity for simultaneous virtual calls, a feature that is decidedly beneficial for a hybrid workforce.
Possible “Doors” may include meeting rooms, focus rooms, phone booths, and other enclosed rooms.
How Do We Use the Desk-to-Door Ratio?
Leveraging our repository of workplace data, we compared recent office designs of the past two years to those from three to five years ago. The results showed a discernable uptick in the number of enclosed meeting rooms in more recent projects—a modest but not surprising trend.
Our primary interest lies in understanding how different industries compare in terms of the desk-to-door ratio within their workplaces. This analysis will serve as a benchmark, providing a foundational starting point for our design strategies. While we have a few projects in the tech sector with the desk-to-door concept as a core design principle, it is still too early to establish an ideal ratio based on these initiatives.
What is a Good Starting Point?
We've observed desk-to-door ratios ranging widely from as high as 27:1—indicating 27 desks for every door—to as low as 1.7:1. Both examples of these ratios come from workplaces designed within the last five years, and both met the functionality required.
The desk-to-door ratio of all HLW projects within the past five years - a nearly linear line of best fit based on office size.
The higher ratio of 27 desks per door was noted in a London-based financial services firm with a large trading floor. Most of the collaboration here happens in short conversations at the desk or in small open areas designed for in-person team interactions, resulting in a reduced necessity for virtual calls.
Conversely, the example with a ratio of 1.7:1 came from a consumer electronics company that had switched to a remote-first policy. As a result, a significant increase in the volume of virtual calls was expected, as colleagues in the office would need to connect to their remote coworkers.
Two contrasting examples of desk to door ratio. Needs can vary greatly based on industry and job requirements.
The above examples represent the extremes; it may be more helpful to consider the average ratio across our entire database of projects. The average desk-to-door ratio based on the past four years of data is 7.4:1, indicating roughly seven desks for every door. This ratio improves among offices identified as top performers and designed within the last two years, narrowing to an average of 6:1.
The desk-to-door ratios of all HLW projects within the last five years.
What Does This Mean For You?
The average desk-to-door ratio significantly varies across industries and organizations. For example, a global company might expect more cross-time-zone virtual calls at peak hours. In contrast, smaller organizations could see a more spread-out pattern of virtual communication throughout the day. Ultimately, workstyle is the biggest factor. Tech companies and creative industries, which tend to adopt remote work policies more readily, typically need more doors. Industries like finance or insurance, where employees engage in focused work for the majority of their day, may not need as many doors.
Although desk-to-door ratios do vary by industry—even in the same industry there is enough variation in how organizations work that the data gets muddy—we prefer to categorize organizations based on how they work. Below, we present a few examples of desk-to-door ratios based on the “persona” of the organization, to give you a sense of how yours might measure up.
The average desk-door-ratio by office “persona”
Legend:
Remote First – Use the office as a “drop-in” workplace as needed only.
Office Heavy – Typically legal or financial firms who have a small population assigned to open workstations.
Agile – An activity-based environment, assigned or unassigned, with a variety of work settings within the office.
Focus First – Organizations with a mix of offices and workstations that perform mostly heads down work.
Trading Floor – A unique setup required for traders where nearly all work happens at the individual workstation.
It might come as a surprise that organizations with many offices have a favorable desk-to-door ratio, despite offices not being counted in this study. This is because such organizations typically have few workstations and sufficient meeting rooms to accommodate individuals needing to make or take calls. However, these meeting rooms are often larger, making them less than ideal for individual calls.
It’s important to keep in mind that these figures represent current averages, not necessarily best practice. The “focus first” category shows an average of 9.4 desks per every door. Yet, if focus is a priority, aiming for a ratio closer to the top-performing average of 6.2 might be more beneficial.
When using this number, we recommend thinking at the team level first. Teams within the same organization can have vastly different working requirements and remote employee numbers, which means varying needs for access to private call spaces. A "door" situated too far from the people who need it most is likely to be underutilized. Managers should closely assess their teams' working habits, including office attendance patterns, meeting schedules, and the frequency of client calls to understand where call volumes are highest.
What Does This Mean for Your Future Office?
To determine the number of “doors” your organization may need, it’s a good idea to consider existing conference room booking data and meeting calendars. Performing a simple observational study at various times of the day can be insightful, too.
But, as valuable as these methods are, they still don’t tell us just how distracting calls are for your workforce. The most effective strategy to understand the need for enclosed space is to conduct an employee survey, which allows individuals to anonymously share their experience. Ark's comprehensive survey for hybrid and distributed workforces delves into a wide array of factors that can enhance workplace efficiency without setting unrealistic expectations for sweeping, immediate changes.
“We ask a lot of value-based questions so that respondents provide ranking scores about how they work, and what methods of working would be most effective for them. It’s about providing proxies for the strategies we might recommend which enables us to translate insight into action.”
– Alex Dunham, Associate Principal, Managing Director Ark
All of that information is a great start, but even with the right physical architecture in place, people need to develop the habit of taking a call away from the desk. This takes time but it happens faster when there is a dedicated effort to communicating the change. It sounds funny, but a small, internal PR campaign for these “doors” goes a long way.
A quick email blast could do the trick to spread the word, but we see this an opportunity to look to the future. Imagine getting a nudge from Outlook, linked to real-time room availability, alerting you to an open room right before your call. Or what about setting up noise meters around desks or office neighborhoods that gently remind everyone to keep it down? It may sound far-fetched, but with the value of everyone’s time in an office, having systems in place to drive behavior is often worth the investment.