Walk any campus during a mid-week afternoon and you’ll see the mismatch: the informal learning areas are buzzing while whole corridors of staff offices sit dark. Hybrid timetables and remote research have contributed to the emptying of as much as a third of the academic workplace, yet the real estate bill continues to climb.
For facilities leaders, this is less a construction problem than a people problem. When we treat square footage as a strategic asset — rather than an academic birthright — we unlock budget, carbon, and community gains in the same stroke.
The playbook is clear: audit what you have, release what you don’t need, and redesign the rest as shared territory where students, faculty, and industry partners collide.
From isolation to interaction: Why the old formula fails
Traditional campus planning grew up around the one-professor, one-office ideal. That model no longer lines up with work patterns or financial reality.
A pre-pandemic Tradeline study found that most assigned faculty offices are occupied just 30-40 percent of their workday, yet remain off-limits to everyone else. Add hybrid scheduling, and those numbers sink further. EAB’s 2024 survey of facilities executives indicates that the actual use of college- or department-owned rooms is 44 percent, leaving millions of square feet underutilized.
Vacancy has a human cost, too. Dispersed offices create siloed staff cultures and make faculty (quite literally) hard to find, which can depress the informal contact that drives mentoring and retention. When presence no longer predicts productivity, every square foot has to earn its keep as a connector, not a container.
Start with evidence: auditing and mapping real utilization
Before anyone sketches a new lounge or coworking hub, you need facts — seat by seat, hour by hour. Our teams begin with a 60-day utilization audit that stitches together badge data, Wi-Fi pings, room-booking logs, and on-site counts. The Association of College & University Auditors (ACUA) outlines a similar protocol: establish baselines, flag rooms that never hit 30 percent occupancy, and compare “assigned” space against actual headcount.
The data does two things. First, they neutralize politics; no dean wants to defend an office that is shown to be vacant four days a week. Second, they surface quick wins: clustering part-time faculty into flexible workspaces, converting dead stockrooms into grad student huddle rooms, or sub-leasing peripheral buildings to external partners. My rule of thumb: if a room can’t prove 45 percent utilization by week nine, it goes on the repurpose list.
Places with purpose
Space only fulfils its promise when people choose to be there. Purpose-built communal hubs cultivate that choice by weaving belonging, collaboration, and problem-solving into the very bones of the building. Three recent case studies show how:
Belonging as a design brief: The University of Iowa tracked staff well-being before and after reconfiguring departmental floors into mixed-use collaboration zones. Post-move surveys recorded sharper “sense of belonging” scores and lower turnover intentions, signalling that layout can strengthen social glue as effectively as HR programmes.
Community through coworking: Research from Cornell’s Coworking Library highlights how shared desks, transparent sight-lines, and varied seating catalyse informal encounters that boost members’ social capital. The lesson for campuses is simple: democratic access to daylight and resources beats a maze of private offices every time.
Staff engagement in reimagined offices: A Melbourne university’s shift from individual rooms to activity-based settings increased reported collaboration and cross-disciplinary contact while reducing its footprint. Faculty who once worked behind closed doors now meet in “third-space” lounges that double as tutoring nooks and industry touch-down points.
Across all three examples, the winning thread is intent and change management. Designers mapped the social tasks that matter — such as mentoring, brainstorming, and quiet focus — and then supplied a palette of settings tuned to each task. When change is facilitated and people see their daily rituals supported, they are more likely to show up, stay longer, and initiate conversations that wouldn’t happen on Zoom.
Lessons from global campuses
The most convincing proof comes from universities that have already made the leap. The aforementioned Tradeline survey also states that, at TU Delft, a post-fire rebuild traded single offices for an “unassigned faculty city,” boosting research collaborations without adding floor area. Additionally, the University of Maryland partnered with WeWork in 2018 to pilot an academic coworking hub that brings in industry mentors and alumni start-ups, generating rental income while giving flex staff a professional home base.
Internationally, we see three constants. First, leadership sets utilization targets — typically 40 square feet per person with an average occupancy rate of 45 percent — and adheres to them. Second, change management begins early, with faculty co-creating etiquette rules and test-driving furniture mock-ups. Third, success breeds replication: when one facility moves into a new workplace and it is implemented successfully, others will follow suit, seeing the new way of working as a desirable objective.
Real estate is the second-largest line item on most university ledgers, yet the true currency of space is experience. By shifting the conversation from “whose office is it?” to “who benefits from being here together?” facilities leaders can recapture underused square footage and reinvest it in community, wellness, and academic excellence.
The blueprint is straightforward — measure ruthlessly, release fearlessly, and design for interaction at every turn. Titles don’t need walls; ideas need places to collide.
– Albert Fraval is a Strategy Director focused on user strategy for the global place brand ERA-co. Albert is an education strategist with a wealth of experience working in the education sector. Albert has worked closely with University clients on a range of different projects, including return briefs, stakeholder engagement, and asset planning activities. Trained and registered as an architect, Albert has a firm understanding of the spatial implications that affect learning environments and is passionate about helping to create spaces that enrich the user experience whilst on campus. A successful project often relies on meaningful engagement with a broad range of stakeholders. Albert thrives when collaborating with stakeholder groups and seeks to understand their vision and work with them to create a clear strategic plan to realise these aspirations.
Copyright © 2026 California Business Journal. All Rights Reserved.
For California Business Journal Disclaimers, go to https://calbizjournal.com/terms-conditions/.
