Aligning Stakeholders on a Stacking Plan
An effective stacking plan requires more than surface calculations: all stakeholders must be aligned. Discover how Stackfit simplifies this challenge.
In any real estate reorganization project, the stacking plan is a fundamental tool: it materializes the strategy for occupying floors and workspaces by matching teams with available areas. It is a key step in the project, one that takes place before macro zoning and serves as the foundation for future layout decisions.
But in practice, this step which is supposed to be purely rational often turns into a laborious process, a source of tension, endless back and forth exchanges, and sometimes even inconsistent decisions. Why? Because stacking is not just a matter of square meters it is an exercise in balancing interests among a wide range of stakeholders (HR, business units, general management, real estate director...).
A slow, complex process… and deeply political
Behind the apparent neutrality of a stacking plan lie human, strategic and political stakes. Every decision assigning a floor to a team, bringing two functions closer together, isolating a department has concrete implications for employees daily lives, team dynamics and operational efficiency. Two teams that previously sat next to each other might have influenced each other: shared ideas at the coffee machine, a colleague giving quick input while walking by, spontaneous collaboration. On paper, these teams may seem different and could be placed on separate floors during a relocation. But doing so could hurt productivity. This is why it is essential to understand teams needs and work habits before proposing a stacking plan.
Who are the stakeholders?
General management: they aim to optimize costs, enhance the value of spaces and embody a strategic vision (collaboration, flexibility, company culture). When I used to work as a workplace consultant, it was common for general management to ask us to “sweeten the pill” for employees regarding reduced workspace per workstation by emphasizing the benefits of open spaces.
HR: they focus on quality of work life, social interactions and fairness between teams. For HR, metrics such as area per workstation are critically important.
Business unit leaders: they defend their teams needs, growth, confidentiality requirements or proximity to specific functions. A key challenge with operational managers is their varying willingness to embrace change some are change advocates, others are strongly resistant. It is important to distinguish real needs from perceived ones. Some managers claim they need private offices for their teams when, in fact, they fear open spaces.
IT / facility management: they think in terms of networks, logistics, accessibility and technical constraints. They look toward the future: the new stacking plan will shape the next several years. They tend to favor flexibility to reduce future costs for instance, preferring movable partitions over fixed ones. However, fixed partitions offer much better acoustic performance. A balance must be found, and it is essential to explain how fixed partitions can benefit employee well being, even if they reduce flexibility.
Space planners and architects: they translate all of this into square meters and workable plans. Architects often try to complete the stacking quickly to move on to macro zoning and detailed plans. It is important to slow them down and encourage them to spend more time understanding team needs and interteam synergies so they can propose a stacking plan that makes sense from an operational standpoint, not just a spatial one.
Each of these actors has their own reading of the project, their own priorities, and sometimes even their own agendas. The stacking plan then becomes a negotiation ground, even a source of tensions.
Divergent expectations
Let’s consider a few examples: a sales team wants to be close to marketing, but the two do not have the same team size nor the same need for confidentiality. For instance, the sales team is constantly on the phone, which could disrupt the marketing team’s focused work. Or maybe leadership wants to group all managers on one floor to create a “leadership floor,” but this means splitting operational teams. That would leave some employees on a different floor from their manager, altering team functioning. Often, HR wants to promote service mix to break silos, while managers prefer homogeneous clusters that are easier to lead.
Caught between these conflicting expectations, the space planner does their best to translate constraints into a plan… but without the right tooling or collaborative method, it quickly becomes a game of back and forth.
What if we stopped the endless iterations?
raditionally, stacking is built through a sequential process: the space planner gathers needs, prepares a plan, then shares it with stakeholders. Comments follow, along with objections, contradictory requests and demands for adjustments… and the cycle starts again. Two weeks later, a new version is produced often already outdated or still unsatisfactory.
This approach has clear limitations:
First, a lack of reactivity each iteration takes time and slows the project.
Second, stakeholder disengagement some teams feel unheard or excluded from decisions.
Finally, a gap between the plan and reality without a shared understanding, the plan validated on paper does not always work on site.
The result: lost time, reduced engagement and sometimes even a loss of trust in the process.
Stackfit: a tool to align quickly, collectively, and transparently
It's in this context that Stackfit takes on its full value. Designed to facilitate interactive macro-zoning, Stackfit allows building stacking plans in real-time, integrating needs, constraints, and trade-offs directly in the interface.
But Stackfit isn't just a technical tool: it's a collaborative governance lever. It transforms a generally top-down task into a participative and iterative process, animated in the form of workshops with stakeholders.
How does it work?
During a stacking workshop with Stackfit, each stakeholder can express their needs (capacity, proximity, confidentiality, adjacencies…), the plan adjusts in real time according to collective decisions and constraints are visualized instantly: over capacity, isolation of a team, distance from key functions… Multiple scenarios can also be tested quickly to compare options.
You no longer work “on a file” that gets emailed back and forth instead, you co build the solution with a shared, real time view of the result.
Concrete benefits
Conclusion: from mapping to co-construction
Stacking isn't a simple placement exercise: it's a moment of strategic convergence for a company. Too often perceived as a technical puzzle, it deserves to be approached as a collective, structured, and transparent approach.
With Stackfit, we move from a slow and siloed process to a fluid and participative approach. It's not just a time gain: it's a posture change, which places users at the heart of the decision. And if, finally, aligning stakeholders on a stacking plan wasn't an impossible mission… but simply a mission poorly equipped until now?