AI can make workplace planning faster, but it can’t predict whether people will actually use a space as intended. In The behavioural science of workplace choice, Astrid Tran and I explore how behavioural science can bridge the gap between workplace design and real-world behaviour. Discover a practical framework for understanding workspace choices, two real-world case studies, and four principles for designing workplaces that make the right choice the easiest choice.

Our starting premise is simple: most workplace planning is supply-focused. Square footage, space ratios, amenities, and technology. Those are important questions, but they leave out the harder one — how do people actually decide where to work when they're standing in a room full of options? That decision isn't random, and it isn't fully explained by what people say in a survey either. It follows patterns that behavioral science has understood for decades; we just haven't been applying them to office design.

The framework we built has three connected layers. The first looks at what actually attracts people to a space in the first place — the fit between the task and the space, whether it satisfies core psychological needs like autonomy and connection, individual sensory and social differences, the pull of social norms, and basic environmental comfort. The second looks at how people actually choose in the moment, once options are in front of them — habits like defaulting to familiar spots, following the crowd, guarding space against future scarcity, and settling for "good enough" when the ideal option requires too much effort to find. The third layer is where it becomes actionable: four choice-architecture principles for designing spaces so the easy choice and the right choice are the same choice.

Where the paper gets really interesting, I think, is in the two real implementations we walk through. The first follows a professional services firm whose new activity-based floors got hit with a perfect storm — a revised hybrid policy and a temporary renovation displacement — pushing occupancy well past comfortable thresholds almost overnight. We show, using sensor data and structured interviews, exactly how scarcity triggered territorial "desk claiming" behavior, how physical cues like flooring material shifted noise norms without anyone intending it to, and how nearly a fifth of observed behavior turned out to be people rationally improvising around a space that didn't quite fit their needs.

The second follows a financial services firm with more than 60,000 employees that treated its new floor as a living system rather than a finished product — using heat maps to smooth out lopsided weekly attendance, and using real usage data to catch and fix mismatches, like phone rooms that were quietly being used for video calls and needed dual monitors, or a "quiet zone" that turned out to need more comfortable furniture because people were staying in it far longer than expected.

Both cases show the same underlying idea: once you understand the behavioral "why" behind space choices, the fixes stop being guesswork and start being targeted. The full paper includes the research underpinning each factor and heuristic, the complete four-step implementation roadmap we recommend for diagnosing and piloting changes, and the common pitfalls we see organizations fall into again and again.