The Situation
Diagnostic Imaging had two years remaining on their headquarters lease across five floors of an office tower in Minneapolis, representing approximately 70,000 rentable square feet. As Spring 2021 arrived with the pandemic in full swing, the organization needed a clear answer to a question most companies were still too uncertain to ask directly: how much space do we actually need going forward? A leadership transition — including the arrival of a new CEO mid-engagement — added organizational complexity to an already uncertain environment.
The existing footprint had been accumulated over eight lease amendments, layering space decisions on top of space decisions without a coherent strategy. No one had a clean view of what was being used, what was redundant, and what the organization would actually need once hybrid work patterns stabilized.
The Approach
We surveyed every employee and conducted in-depth interviews with each department head — capturing genuine space utilization data and work pattern expectations, not assumptions. Multiple visioning sessions were facilitated with the executive team to align leadership on guiding principles before any numbers were run. We then modeled a full range of return-to-work scenarios paired with headcount growth forecasts, producing a complete space program that quantified the tradeoffs clearly enough for a new CEO to make confident decisions quickly.
The modeling explicitly tested the interplay between desk density, collaboration space ratios, meeting room demand, and the percentage of employees expected to be in office on any given day — producing a range of space scenarios with corresponding cost and culture implications.
The right answer wasn't obvious until the data made it undeniable. A 30% reduction — and the confidence to act on it — came from understanding how people actually work, not how management assumed they did.