But the price alone says nothing about how an office affects a company’s operations. Two offices of equal cost can lead to completely different realities—one fosters collaboration and speed, while the other creates friction, isolation, and unnecessary fragmentation of work. It’s a difference that doesn’t show up in the books but is crucial to day-to-day operations.
Office Space as an Expense: How Much Does a Square Meter Cost?
When a company relocates, it typically compares rent, floor space, operating costs, and investment in equipment. This approach is based on the logic that an office is a static space—something that is set up once and then simply operated efficiently.
In the reality of hybrid work, however, the office is no longer just “rented space.” It becomes an environment that influences the way people work—from how quickly they communicate with one another, to the quality of collaboration, to the onboarding of new colleagues, and to how corporate culture plays out in practice. And this is precisely where the “how much does a square meter cost” perspective begins to fall short, because it describes only the initial cost, not the resulting impact.
The real costs tend to lie elsewhere
The actual cost of an office often doesn’t appear in facility or office management budgets, but rather in the day-to-day operations of the company.
If a space isn’t well-designed, people waste time looking for a place to work, waiting for meeting rooms, or dealing with noise in an open-plan office. All told, this can amount to tens of minutes per person per day—time that is spent improvising instead of working productively. In the worst-case scenario, some work shifts to the home office not because it’s efficient, but because the office doesn’t support concentration or collaboration.
The second impact is even less visible: retention. The quality of the work environment significantly affects how people feel at the company. If an office isn’t practical or doesn’t support the team’s way of working, this translates into lower satisfaction, weaker engagement, and, as a result, higher turnover and a more challenging recruitment process.
The Office as a Tool for Performance
In fact, an office is just as much a part of the infrastructure as IT systems—it affects the speed of work, the quality of collaboration, and decision-making. Just as slow software slows down entire teams, a poorly designed space creates friction in day-to-day work: people spend more time looking for a place to work, coordinating, or dealing with distractions than they do actually working.
At the same time, it determines how easily people communicate with one another and how quickly decisions are made. If the environment is well-designed, information flows naturally, teams meet at the right moments, and collaboration happens without the need for complex organization. If not, even simple things start to get “processed”—through meetings, calendars, and coordination—which slows down the entire system.
An office, then, is not just a physical space. It is a company’s operating system, which either speeds up its operations or subtly slows them down.
From a workplace consultancy perspective, it therefore makes more sense to think of space as a tool for performance rather than as a cost. Of course, that doesn’t mean we don’t care about how much a given space costs. Cost estimates for construction and operations are always an important part of our work. However, we recommend that clients focus primarily on what people need to do their jobs and how to design offices so that they enable people to be more productive. Then it’s important to crunch the numbers.
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