Writing an office fit out brief: ask whose working day is missing

Ask the people who notice different things

I would start by listing who uses the premises and who looks after them. Include regular staff, occasional visitors, the person handling deliveries and whoever cleans or maintains the space. A director may know the growth plans; the receptionist may know exactly where visitors get lost.

Ask people for a recent example of something the workplace made awkward. Offer a private way to contribute as well as a group discussion. Someone who struggles to concentrate beside a lively team may not want to raise that in front of everyone.

WorkSafe's office guidance recommends involving workers when identifying health and safety risks and choosing solutions. That is a useful foundation for the conversation. A design questionnaire can help collect observations, but it should feed into the business's wider health and safety arrangements.

• What task is harder here than it needs to be?
• When does the problem happen, and who else is affected?
• What already works well enough to keep?

Turn requests into evidence the designer can use

Try a simple exercise: ask each team to contribute an observation, its consequence and a question. Keep the original wording alongside your summary so a genuine problem does not disappear during editing.

In a hypothetical office, the sales team requests more meeting rooms. Their examples reveal that short video calls occupy the only room large enough for a client presentation. The question becomes how to accommodate those calls while preserving space for visiting groups. That gives the designer something specific to investigate without deciding the answer in advance.

Record how often this happens and whether it reflects a normal week or an occasional event. Avoid treating a single unusually busy day as the whole brief. Equally, do not dismiss an infrequent activity if it is important to the business.

• Observation: what actually happens.
• Consequence: what becomes difficult.
• Design question: what needs to work differently.

Keep disagreement visible

One team may want more spontaneous conversation while another needs long periods of uninterrupted work. I would record both needs rather than averaging them into a vague request for a flexible office.

Agree who can decide when requests compete, and what information that person needs. Ask the designer to show the consequences of each option. A staff preference, an operational requirement and an unresolved technical question should be labelled separately.

Bring the proposed response back to the people who raised the issue. Explain what has been included, what needs further investigation and what cannot be accommodated in the current scope.

Include the qualities people would miss

Ask what would make the office feel less like itself if it disappeared. It could be a shared table, a generous arrival space or a particular material. Photographs with short explanations are more useful than a folder of unrelated inspiration images.

In his published feedback about the Aro Digital redesign, Jonty describes valuing improvements that retained the existing space's character. That is a helpful reminder to write down what should survive a change, alongside the problems to solve.

Bring the observations, unresolved differences and a few valued features to an initial conversation. I would be happy to help turn them into a focused workplace brief and identify the next questions for your design team.