Desk Sharing, Booking & Ratios

Start with the arithmetic, because it is clarifying and often mystified. The sharing ratio expresses people-per-desk (or desks-per-person, the same relationship inverted). If a hundred people are assigned to a floor and their genuinely busy day sees seventy per cent of them in - the design peak from lesson 7.1 - then on that day you need about seventy seats. That is a sharing ratio of roughly 100:70, or 1:0.7, or '1.4 people per desk'. Provide a hundred desks and thirty sit empty even at peak; provide fifty and the busy day is a scramble. The desk count falls out of the peak, not out of the headcount.

But the raw peak is not the final number, because you must add a buffer. Peaks vary week to week; projects cluster; a big all-hands or a deadline can spike attendance; and an office that is bang-full at peak feels stressful and offers no slack. So you provide a little above the measured peak - aim perhaps for seventy-five seats where the peak implied seventy - which softens the ratio to around 1:0.75 and keeps the busy day comfortable rather than frantic. Overflow space (the cafe, project rooms, bookable touchdown seats) absorbs the rare spike beyond that, so you are not buying permanent desks for a once-a-quarter event.

The ratio you can support depends directly on the peak, which is why the two ideas are joined at the hip. A low, flat attendance pattern (say a fifty per cent peak) justifies a bold ratio near 1:0.5 - two people per desk. A high peak (ninety per cent, an office-first culture) barely shares at all, perhaps 1:0.9. This is why copying a ratio between organisations is so dangerous: the same 1:0.7 that is generous for a flexible firm leaves an office-first firm short by twenty desks every single day. As ever, every figure here is illustrative, as of 2026, and to be calibrated - the arithmetic is universal, but the inputs are specific to the client.

How you share matters as much as how hard you share, and there is a spectrum between two poles. At one end sits free address (free hot-desking): no assigned seats at all, sit wherever is free anywhere on the floor, pure flexibility. It squeezes the ratio hardest, because any free desk can be used by anyone, so utilisation is maximised. But it has real costs: teams scatter, so the colleagues you came in to work with may be on the other side of the building; people waste time hunting for a seat near their team; belonging and findability suffer; and the daily 'where will I sit?' friction wears on people. Pure free address works best for highly mobile, loosely-coupled workforces and tends to grate on tight teams.

At the other end sits assigned seating - the old world, a desk each, which barely shares at all. The sweet spot for most organisations lies in between, in neighbourhood sharing (also called team-based sharing or 'home zones'). Here each team gets its own zone of the floor - its neighbourhood - and shares desks *within* that zone. The team still sits together, so collaboration, belonging and findability survive; but because not everyone is in on any given day, the neighbourhood holds fewer desks than the team has members, so you still get the sharing benefit. A team of ten with a seventy per cent peak might have a neighbourhood of seven or eight desks. It is a gentler, more humane model that keeps most of the efficiency while shedding most of the friction, which is why it has become the mainstream choice - including across many large Indian IT and GCC floors.

There are hybrids of the hybrids: a team might have a neighbourhood with a soft sharing ratio for its 'home' days plus access to the whole building's settings for everything else, blending neighbourhood belonging with ABW variety. The design judgement is to read how tightly coupled the teams are and how mobile the people, and to place the organisation on the spectrum accordingly - bolder sharing and freer address where work is individual and mobile, gentler neighbourhoods where teams are tight and stable. One floor may well hold both.

Sharing only works if people can reliably get a suitable place to work without friction, and that is largely a matter of systems and etiquette rather than floor plan. There are two broad operating models. Free-address means no booking for desks - you simply arrive and take any free seat in your zone - which is light and low-friction but relies on the ratio being comfortable enough that a seat is essentially always available; if free-address meets an over-tight ratio, people arrive to find nothing free and the model collapses into daily anxiety. Booking (hoteling) means reserving a desk or room in advance through an app or a panel, which gives certainty and data but adds friction and can be gamed - people block-book 'their' desk every day and quietly recreate assigned seating, defeating the purpose.

Most good implementations blend the two: book what benefits from certainty (meeting rooms, and desks on known-busy days or for visiting staff), free-address the rest, and set etiquette that prevents gaming - release bookings you are not using, no permanent block-booking, clear your desk when you leave. The booking system, where used, should be genuinely easy; a clumsy one that takes five taps to find a seat is quickly abandoned and the sharing model goes with it. Booking systems also quietly generate the occupancy data that lets you re-calibrate the ratio over time - a virtuous loop, since the thing that makes sharing liveable also measures whether you sized it right.

Underneath the systems sits the same social contract ABW needs (lesson 7.2): clear-desk discipline so the next person finds a usable seat, lockers and frictionless storage so going deskless is not miserable, and enough seats that trust holds. And there are inclusion considerations that must not be lost in the efficiency drive: some people need a consistent, adjusted or accessible setup - for a disability, an ergonomic requirement or a medical need - and a well-run sharing model provides for assigned or reliably-bookable accommodation for them without making them fight for it each morning. Sharing is a convenience for the organisation; it must never become a barrier for the individual who genuinely needs a fixed place.

Everything in this lesson converges on one discipline: the sharing ratio must come from the organisation's own measured occupancy, not from a benchmark, a vendor's slide or a competitor's number. The arithmetic is universal - desks equal peak attendance plus a buffer - but the peak is specific, and it is the input that decides whether the office works. Get the peak from real evidence: badge-ins, desk sensors, booking-system logs, Wi-Fi association, or an honest manual count over a representative fortnight or month that avoids holidays and one-off spikes. Then set the ratio with a buffer and overflow, and - crucially - re-measure after people move in, because the pattern you designed to will shift as behaviour settles and the ratio may need tuning.

The failure modes are symmetrical and both expensive. Over-sharing - too aggressive a ratio - means people regularly cannot find a seat, which destroys trust, sends them back home for good, and makes the whole hybrid or ABW programme fail in a way that gets blamed on the concept rather than the arithmetic. Under-sharing - too timid a ratio - means you have built and are paying for, heating and cooling desks that sit empty, wasting money and carbon and missing the point of the whole exercise. The right ratio threads between them, and only data finds the thread. A good designer resists both the property team pushing for an over-tight ratio to cut cost and the anxious staff pushing for a desk each, and anchors the decision in evidence.

Keep the honest caveats in view. Every number here - 1:0.7, a seventy per cent peak, a seventy-five-seat buffer - is illustrative, as of 2026, and must be calibrated to the specific organisation, which varies enormously by sector, culture and role; a trading floor shares nothing, a mobile sales team shares hard. And the binding matters that sharing touches - egress and occupant load at the real peak, the accessibility of the sharing model and of accommodated fixed desks, ventilation for the peak density - belong to the current codes (NBC 2016, the relevant IS standards) and the specialist consultants. The sharing ratio is where hybrid strategy becomes a hard number on a drawing; make that number honest, humane and evidence-based, and revisit it as the organisation lives in the space.