The short version
- Public sector estates face scrutiny that private firms never see. Every desk ratio and occupancy claim needs evidence behind it.
- Desk sharing targets fail when they are set from headcount spreadsheets instead of measured attendance.
- Shared hubs only work when booking, access and reporting are consistent across every department using the building.
- Education estates need room timetabling that handles fixed teaching blocks and ad hoc bookings in the same system.
- Benchmarks from 1,500+ workplace teams show average utilisation of 54% against a 60 to 70% target, so most estates carry more space than they use.
Running a public sector workplace means answering a question private sector estates teams rarely face: can you prove it? Prove the desk ratio is justified. Prove the building you want to retain is actually used. Prove the space you released did not harm service delivery. The estates director in a government department or a university does the same job as their corporate counterpart, but with an audit committee, a funding body and sometimes a select committee looking over their shoulder.
The good news is that the discipline scrutiny forces on you is the same discipline that makes hybrid working succeed. This guide covers the four areas where government and education workplaces differ most from the private sector: setting desk sharing targets that survive challenge, preparing for estates scrutiny, running shared hubs across departments, and timetabling rooms on teaching estates. I have sat in the reviews where these decisions get pulled apart, so this is written from that side of the table.
Why public sector estates are different
Three things change the job. First, the money is public. A leased floor that sits empty in a private firm is a cost line. In a department or a trust it is a story waiting to be written, and the estates team will be asked to account for it in language a non-specialist can follow.
Second, decisions outlive the people who made them. Estates strategies in government run on multi-year cycles, and a desk ratio agreed today shapes lease decisions for the next decade. That makes the evidence base matter far more than the opinion of whoever is in the room.
Third, the estate is rarely one thing. A typical portfolio mixes headquarters buildings, regional offices, shared hubs, and in education a teaching estate with lecture theatres, labs and seminar rooms that behave nothing like offices. Managing that mix is the core of estates management, and it is why a single occupancy number for the whole portfolio tells you almost nothing.
Desk sharing targets that survive scrutiny
Most public sector desk sharing targets are set top down. A central body issues a ratio, say eight desks for every ten staff, and departments are told to comply. The ratio is defensible on paper and wrong in practice, because attendance is not flat. It peaks midweek and collapses on Fridays, so a ratio that looks generous on average is tight on Wednesday and wasteful on Friday.
HybridHero platform benchmarks, drawn from 1,500+ workplace teams, show the shape clearly: average desk utilisation sits at 54% against a typical target of 60 to 70%, midweek attendance peaks near 60%, and Fridays drop to the mid 30s. If your ratio is set against the average, your busiest day will fail first, and the complaints that follow will be used as evidence that desk sharing itself does not work.
Workplace benchmarks every estates team should know
Average desk utilisation54%
Utilisation target (upper bound)70%
Midweek attendance peak60%
Friday attendance35%
Meeting room no-shows (upper end)35%
Source: HybridHero Workplace Visibility Report benchmarks.
The fix is to set the target from measured peak demand, not average headcount. Run desk booking for a full term or quarter before you commit to a ratio. Then set the ratio against the peak day with a small buffer, and manage the peak itself with team scheduling so departments do not all converge on the same two days. A ratio you can show was derived from booking data is a ratio that survives an audit. A ratio copied from a policy document is not.
Preparing for estates scrutiny
When the review comes, and it will, the questions are predictable. What is the utilisation of each building? What does a desk cost against what it delivers? Why are you retaining this lease? The teams that struggle are not the ones with empty buildings. They are the ones who cannot answer with data.
Badge swipes alone will not carry you. They count entries, not how space was used, and they say nothing about rooms. Booking data plus check-in data gives you the pair scrutiny actually wants: intended use versus actual use. Meeting room no-shows of 25 to 35% are common in the benchmark data, and being able to show you have measured and reduced that gap is exactly the kind of evidence that turns a difficult hearing into a short one.
Build the evidence before you need it. Start capturing booking, check-in and utilisation data at least two quarters before any estates review, lease break or funding submission. Retrofitting evidence after the question is asked always looks like what it is.
Shared hubs: one building, many departments
The government hubs model, where several departments share a regional building, saves money on paper and creates friction in practice. Each department arrives with its own booking habits, its own security expectations and its own view of which floors belong to whom. Without a shared operating layer, the hub becomes several small offices that happen to share a lift.
Three things make hubs work. One shared booking system across every tenant department, so a desk is a desk regardless of whose budget line it sits on. Visitor management that handles staff from other departments as smoothly as external guests, because in a hub your most frequent visitors are colleagues from another organisation. And reporting that can be cut both ways: per department for internal accountability, and whole-building for the landlord function. If your platform cannot produce both views from the same data, you will end up running two systems and reconciling them by hand.
Education estates have a problem offices do not: the timetable. Lecture theatres and seminar rooms are block-booked months ahead for teaching, then everything else, staff meetings, open days, exam boards, society events, has to fit around the fixed skeleton. Most institutions run the academic timetable in one system and ad hoc bookings in another, which means nobody can see true utilisation of any room.
Room timetabling done properly puts both layers in one place. Teaching blocks are protected and cannot be double-booked, released slots return to the bookable pool automatically when a class is cancelled, and check-in data reveals the timetable’s dirty secret: rooms that are booked all term and empty half the time. That last point matters for capital planning. Universities regularly conclude they need new teaching space when the real problem is that a quarter of booked sessions never happen.
Government and education: same pressures, different shapes
| Requirement | Government estates | Education estates |
|---|
| Space planning driver | Desk ratios and hub consolidation across a dispersed portfolio | Academic timetable first, office and study space second |
| Peak demand pattern | Midweek office peaks, quiet Fridays | Term-time peaks, near-empty vacations |
| Scrutiny comes from | Audit bodies, central estates functions, public reporting | Funding bodies, governors, capital planning committees |
| Hardest booking problem | Shared hubs across multiple departments | Fixed teaching blocks alongside ad hoc bookings |
| Visitor pressure | Inter-departmental staff and official visitors | Open days, contractors, external event hires |
| Security and compliance | Clearance levels, protective security, data handling | Safeguarding, exam integrity, campus access control |
Measuring what the estate actually does
Everything above depends on one capability: knowing what happened, not what was planned. That means utilisation by building, floor and room type, booking versus check-in gaps, no-show rates, and attendance patterns by day and by team, all exportable in a form a committee can read. This is where reporting and analytics earns its place in a public sector deployment. The dashboards you look at weekly are useful. The evidence pack you can produce in an afternoon when the review letter arrives is what justifies the whole system.
Start small and specific. Pick one building or one faculty, run booking and check-in for a term, and compare measured utilisation against your assumed ratios. In my experience the gap between the two is the single most persuasive slide an estates director can put in front of a board, because it replaces opinion with a number nobody in the room can argue with.
Public sector workplaces do not need different tools from the private sector. They need the same tools run with more rigour, because someone will always ask for the working. Set ratios from measured peaks, build the evidence base before scrutiny arrives, run hubs on one shared layer, and put the whole timetable in one system. Do that and the next estates review becomes a progress report rather than an interrogation.
Sources and further reading