Workspace Consultancy
Workspace Consultancy
Is your lease expiring, and you're not sure whether you should extend your lease or look for a new space? Perhaps you want staff to get back to the office, but they are resisting your efforts. Whatever your situation, you're considering engaging a workspace consultant. If so, one of your first questions will be "How much does workspace consultancy cost?"
The answer, as always, is “it depends”. It depends on the skill and experience of the consultant, the complexity of your brief, how much time is required for your project, and if any specialist technology is required. However, most workspace consultancy packages cost £,5000 to £50,000.
In this article, we'll break down exactly what is included in workspace consultancy and what it costs. At the end of this article, you'll be able to set a rough budget for your workspace consultancy. You'll be ready to prepare for your workspace consultancy process.
Of course, budgeting is just one part of preparing for your workspace consultancy process. To learn more about getting started, download The Ultimate Guide to Workspace Consultancy. There, you'll learn exactly what it is, how much it costs, how it will benefit your business, and if you need consultancy or not. Download it here.
Leadership Workshops
The first step of workspace consultancy is a leadership workshop. This will help your consultant understand the overall vision and what senior leaders want their workspace to achieve. This will help inform the rest of the consultancy process and establish your workspace strategy.
The cost will depend on the size of your leadership team, the complexity of your needs, and how many workshops you run. It will normally cost will cost between £800 and £3000. Even if you don’t proceed with a full workspace consultancy package, many design and build companies will include an informal version of this as part of their research process.
Manager Interviews
It may also be helpful to get input from key staff on an individual basis. This could include staff from relevant departments such as HR or IT, as well as company leaders. This could help your consultant understand their key requirements, as well as team-specific needs and challenges.
The cost for this stage will depend on how many interviews have to be carried out. Most interviews will cost between £500 and £800 per person. This may increase if workshops are required between departments, or if there are conflicting requirements that need to be managed.
Staff Engagement Surveys
The next step is to send out online workspace surveys to all your staff. These will enable your workspace consultant to understand how your people currently use your office, what would make them more effective, and most importantly, the gap in between. These surveys will also look to gauge typical working patterns and thoughts about change. This means you get a diverse range of perspectives, and your process isn't biased by a few people.
To run a 3-round online workspace survey will cost in the region of £50-£80 per staff member, depending on the length of the survey, and the amount of analysis required. A single-round survey will cost about £30 per person.
Occupancy Studies
Workshops, interviews, and surveys can collect a lot of valuable insight, but a lot of it is based on opinions and self-reporting, which is not always accurate. To gain a truly objective understanding of the way your people use your office, a space utilisation study is necessary. Sensors and cameras take snapshots of occupancy levels throughout the day and week. This builds up a detailed picture of exactly how your people use the office.
Depending on the size of your office and the length of time the sensors are collecting data, it will cost £3,000 - £10,000 to carry out an occupancy study. This is comprised of two parts: the equipment and the analysis. The hardware cost includes the use of the trackers as well as installing and decommissioning. The analysis involves your consultant analysing the data to not only understand how your people use the space currently but also how your space utilisation can be improved in future.
Consultancy Report
The report provided by your consultant is the culmination of months of research, analysis, and ideation. Exactly what is in your report will be very dependent on the brief you gave the consultant. However, your report will cover workspace strategy, issues & opportunities, space requirements, and design recommendations.
The cost to produce this report will be very dependent on how many of the previous stages have been carried out. It will cost between £3,000 and £12,000. This cost will also include time with your workspace consultant to go through the key findings of your report with you.
Workspace Consultancy Costs 2024
So how much will you need to spend on workspace consultancy? The answer, as always is “it depends”. The cost is variable, depending on the skill & experience of the consultant, how much time they spend on your project, and if any specialist systems are needed. However, most workspace consultancy packages cost £5,000 to £50,000. Depending on the complexity of your brief, you should probably budget around £1 per square foot of workspace.
This may seem like a big cost, but it's important to consider it in the context of your overall real estate costs. It may be well worth spending 1-3% of your project budget on a consultancy package that helps you get the big decisions right and sets your project up for success.
Do I Need Workspace Consultancy?
Many prospective clients we work with struggle to see the value of workplace design consultancy and if it is right for them. Workspace consultancy isn’t right for everyone. It depends on the motivations behind your project and the certainty you have about the improvements to be made. When deciding if you need workspace consultancy or not, you also need to consider the benefits a fully optimised office would bring.
If you are relocating because you have chosen not to renew your lease, and you are happy with the performance of your office, then workspace consultancy is not going to be a good investment. If you are conscious of falling productivity levels and your staff are complaining that the space does not suit the way they work, then workspace consultancy is worth considering.
Getting Started
Workspace consultancy helps your company understand exactly what you need your workspace to achieve, how it is performing at the moment, and how you can close that gap. Now that you know all that goes into workspace consultancy and what affects the cost, you can calculate how much consultancy would cost for your company. You can then decide if workspace consultancy is right for you or not. For more help doing that, read Do I Need Workspace Consultancy?
To learn more about getting started with workspace consultancy, download The Ultimate Guide to Workspace Consultancy. There, you'll learn exactly what it is, how much it costs, how it will benefit your business, and if you need consultancy or not. Download your consultancy guide here.
