Successful Office Fitout: The Key Role of Business Units from the Design Phase

A real estate project — whether it's a relocation, refurbishment, or creation of a new headquarters — is too often perceived as a matter of square meters, budget, and planning. It's approached first from a technical or logistical angle, focusing on regulatory compliance, delivery deadlines, or cost control.

However, this type of project deeply transforms teams' daily lives: their way of working, meeting, cooperating, managing their time, or living their company culture. It's not simply about moving offices, but about redefining the conditions of collective work.

And this is precisely where a strategic challenge lies: if business units are not involved from the early phase, the risk is great that the final space will be disconnected from operational realities. Result: misunderstanding, frustrations, rejections, or in the worst cases… an expensive, underutilized, and inefficient space.

Conversely, involving business units from the first reflections makes real estate a lever for strategic alignment, managerial transformation, and collective performance.

Here's why — and how — this involvement must become the norm.

1. Better understanding real usage

Business units have a fine knowledge of field reality. They know how teams work on a daily basis, what tools are used, what irritants or informal rituals shape a department's efficiency.

By involving them early on, we can better answer fundamental questions:

What are the key moments of the day? (meetings, reporting, intense production…)

What spaces are essential to the activity? (open space? concentration bubbles? project rooms?)

What are the internal and cross-functional interaction flows?

What degree of autonomy exists? What is the management culture?

What is the share of remote work or mobility in the team?

This knowledge is precious because it allows avoiding "out-of-touch" fitouts, designed from generic standards or assumptions.

Example:

An HR department might think that a 100-workstation flex office floor will suffice, while a highly confidential business (like legal or accounting) requires closed spaces, quiet, and restricted access.

Involving business units therefore allows designing a project based on real usage and not on an abstraction of work.

2. Designing spaces that support performance

Each business has its own performance imperatives. Designing a generic, uniform space for all teams amounts to ignoring each one's specificities — which can directly harm their efficiency.

Concrete examples:

A product team will need open spaces to prototype, exchange, test — with accessible materials and free expression walls.

A customer service working with incoming calls will favor quiet, partitioned zones, with acoustic booths and good auditory comfort.

Support teams (HR, finance, legal) will alternate between solitary tasks and inter-service coordination, requiring flexible but well-structured spaces.

Involving business units allows imagining configurations adapted to their rhythms and objectives, rather than imposing standardized formats.

In short, a good workspace is a tool serving operational performance — not the opposite.

3. Identifying organizational innovation levers

A real estate project isn't just a change of location. It's also a unique opportunity to rethink operating modes, inter-team relationships, autonomy, information flow, management style…

Business units can be forces of proposal for:

Setting up new coordination rituals (scrums, stand-up meetings, project reviews…)

Introducing cross-functionality logics, by physically grouping certain functions that were previously distant

Imagining hybrid spaces to facilitate welcoming consultants, freelancers, or external partners

Testing agile formats: innovation labs, immersive rooms, digital walls…

A real estate project can thus become a collective experimentation ground, well beyond simple square meter distribution.

4. Fostering adoption and limiting resistance

One of the main causes of failure in fitout projects is resistance to change. Moving, changing workstations, rituals, or physical environment can generate stress, loss of bearings, or distrust.

Involving business units from the design phase allows anticipating these reactions and building more adapted support.

Key advantages:

Identifying barriers specific to each team

Adapting communication messages to field needs

Relying on managers as transformation relays

Creating a snowball effect with business ambassadors involved from the start

Giving meaning to spatial transformations, by linking them to business challenges

It's not the space that creates adoption, but the way it's built and explained.

5. Aligning real estate with business strategic challenges

A real estate project isn't a side project. It directly affects the company's ability to transform, attract talent, innovate, or grow in new markets.

Involving business units also means ensuring that spatial choices serve business strategy:

Anticipating headcount growth

Planning zones for new activities (digitalization, CSR, international…)

Integrating flexibility needs (remote work, mixed teams, temporary projects…)

Thinking about tomorrow's skills and the environments necessary to develop them

It's also an opportunity to translate major strategic orientations into space: more autonomy? more collaboration? more informal interactions? The environment can be an accelerator of these transformations… or their main brake, if poorly thought out.

Bonus: structuring collaboration with dedicated tools

For co-design with business units not to remain theoretical, it's useful to rely on visual collaborative tools, like Stackfit.

Stackfit allows you to:

Simulate different implantation scenarios

Visualize team distribution across floors

Test the impact of certain decisions (team grouping, density, flows)

Foster collective decision-making during workshops

Thanks to this type of tool, business units become co-authors of the project, not simple spectators. This strengthens their engagement and accelerates trade-offs.

Conclusion: a real estate project = a company project

Involving business units from the early phase isn't "adding a layer of complexity." It's on the contrary creating the conditions for an aligned, relevant, and sustainable project.

This requires expanded governance, listening time, and sometimes a bit more time in the framing phase. But this time invested upfront is largely compensated by better appropriation, reduced resistance, and truly useful spaces.

Ultimately, what distinguishes a suffered space from a meaningful space isn't its design.

It's the way it was designed, with users and for their collective performance.