Don't Sign a Ten-Year Lease Around Today's Jobs

Work/Shift Insights - Issue #22

By Frederic Libet Descorne

A ten-year lease signed in 2026 will still be running in 2036.

Anyone who signed one in 2016 has already lived this problem.

Nobody can say exactly what jobs, teams or management structures will look like ten years from now.

That is not a reason to shrug and sign. It is a reason to understand which parts of today's workplace decision depend on very little changing.

I have worked across workplace strategy, furniture and delivery. The most expensive mistakes rarely begin with the design.

They begin with the assumptions handed to the design team.

Most workplace projects start with evidence from the organisation as it exists now. Current headcount, attendance, utilisation, room bookings, team structures and meeting habits.

All of it is useful.

But it is still a snapshot.

An occupancy sensor can count an empty desk. It cannot tell you whether the job attached to that desk is about to change.

That snapshot still decides how much space is leased, how many rooms are built, where teams sit and what the office is expected to do.

The footprint assumes a certain number of people will continue to need space. The room schedule assumes people will keep meeting in much the same way. The layout assumes the same teams will need to work near each other. The hybrid policy assumes the office will continue creating value in the same way.

None of those assumptions is necessarily wrong.

The problem is asking them to carry a ten-year financial commitment without properly challenging them first.

AI is making that problem harder to ignore, but this is not an argument about predicting how many jobs it will remove or create.

Nobody knows that with enough certainty to design a workplace around it.

The question is whether the current workplace decision has been built as though jobs, teams, management structures and work patterns will remain broadly the same.

You do not need a perfect workforce forecast.

You need to know which assumptions would change the decision if they stopped being true.

That can change how much space you take now. It can change the balance between meeting rooms and space for individual work. It can change how fixed the layout should be, how much is built immediately and how much is held until the picture is clearer.

Clients do not pay for "optionality". They pay to avoid doing the fitout twice.

Sometimes the answer is a smaller initial commitment. A different room mix. A layout that does not need to be ripped apart when teams change. Doing part of the work now and holding the rest until more is known.

Or simply agreeing that before more money is committed, the assumptions will be checked again.

Design teams do not need to predict the workforce of 2036. They need a better starting point.

A brief that separates what the evidence supports from what the client is simply assuming.

A brief that is clearer about what must work now, what could change later and which decisions will be expensive to reverse.

That makes the design easier to defend when the client asks, "How do you know?"

It also reduces the chance of a team spending months solving the wrong problem beautifully.

Testing those assumptions needs to happen before the lease, design and fitout decisions have already answered the question.

Once the lease is signed and the direction is set, the conversation changes.

It is no longer about whether the assumption was right.

It is about making the commitment work.

The lease keeps running either way.

Which parts of your workplace decision only work if the workforce stays the same?