If you’re looking to modernize your workplace, you’ve probably heard the neighborhood approach in passing. But what is it, really?
Done right, office neighborhoods can offer everything from improved employee satisfaction to enhanced productivity and an adaptable, future-proof workplace.
In this guide, we’ll explore the concept in more detail, show why companies are turning to it, and demonstrate the key benefits that it can bring. By the end, you’ll have a solid understanding of both the neighborhood concept and how to implement it in your own premises.
What is an Office Neighborhood?
Office neighborhoods are designed workspaces designed to support groups of employees in collaborative spaces.
They are used in modern workplaces where hot desking and hybrid work models have replaced traditional office layouts. Since teams don’t have their own private offices, neighborhoods allow people to work together on a more flexible basis.
At it’s simplest, an office neighborhood can consist of a large table with multiple desks, or smaller desks clustered together in a shared space. However, some companies prefer to lean into the neighborhood office layout, often giving each area its own meeting rooms and quiet zones, although most companies prefer to find a balanced approach. Meeting rooms and other shared areas can be used to separate neighborhoods from each other, helping to maintain some peace and quiet.
Why Are Office Neighborhoods Becoming More Popular?
Neighborhood seating is becoming more popular as companies adapt to the new reality of working. They offer numerous benefits that traditional, rigid office layouts often couldn’t support.
Hybrid Work has Changed Office Attendance
The biggest reason companies create neighborhoods is to better support hybrid work. Consider what happens in a typical office set-up:
- When teams have dedicated areas, such as private offices, these rooms sit empty when the team is working from home.
- When the office has one large open-plan area, as is common in hot desking, teams can’t collaborate or concentrate.
Office neighborhoods solve this by providing temporary collaborative zones that teams can reserve when they know they’re going to be in the office. When group employees are working elsewhere, the spaces are still available for wider business use.
All of this supports business models where different employees and teams are rotating in and out.
Companies Need Flexibility
Office neighborhoods are a much more flexible option for most companies. Alongside growing and shrinking teams and the fluctuations of daily office attendance, neighborhood utilization also supports a more diverse range of intercompany work styles.
For example, let’s say a new project is starting in the company, and it involves people from different departments. These team members would benefit from their own space to work and collaborate, but none of the designated areas for their original teams are usable.
With neighborhoods, the team can choose from the different neighborhoods available, finding the right spaces for their needs. Under this approach, the company can rapidly provide employees with the different spaces needed without major effort or cost.
Employees Still Want to Work Together
For most employees, collaboration is the biggest priority for attending the office.
A recent CBRE survey found that 68% of respondents stated team collaboration was a key reason for office attendance, with 58% similarly coming in for in-person meetings.
Therefore, to encourage employee engagement and productivity, workplace leaders need to design flexible office spaces that enable different groups to interact as they need. Neighborhoods give staff the freedom to choose, thus empowering employees to focus on these priorities when on-site.
Office Space is More Valuable than Ever
In recent years, companies have prioritized space efficiency over expansion. This has been supported by hybrid work, with fewer desks supporting the same number of employees.
The same CBRE workplace insights study mentioned above found that office density is increasing:
- The average workplace had 158 square feet of space per employee in 2025, down from 174 in 2024.
- Companies are targeting a seat sharing ratio of between 1.01 and 1.49 people per seat.
- Global occupancy averages at 111%. In other words, there’s an average of 11 people for every 10 actual desks.
Whilst office neighborhoods aren’t the most effective in terms of sheer density, they offer the ideal compromise between space efficiency and business productivity. They support cross functional collaboration and knowledge sharing across project teams, but don’t require dedicated and permanent spaces.
What’s more, as part of a wider hot desking arrangement, they still enable focused work and other day to day requirements. Smart companies balance neighborhoods with meeting rooms and quiet zones, dependant on their specific needs.
The Biggest Benefits of Office Neighborhoods
Office neighborhoods aren’t just a trend. They’re designed to help companies manage real estate costs through flexible seating arrangements, whilst also offering increased employee satisfaction by letting teams stay connected.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the advantages that neighborhood seating can offer.
Better Collaboration Helps Productivity
As we already mentioned, people naturally want to sit with the people and team’s they work with the most.
By incorporating office neighborhoods into your workplace design, staff have the ability to choose spaces to work together. This enables clear communication, improving not only employee well being but also effective collaboration.
It Encourages Communication Better than Hot Desking Alone
The key difference between office neighborhoods and hot desking is that the former groups desks together. This enables greater collaboration and decision making amongst teams. It also reduces disturbances across the company: other teams aren’t distracted by conversations taking place in broader, shared areas.
Improved Employee Experience
Employees feel more relaxed when they feel they’re in control of their surroundings. Office nieghborhoods allow staff to choose the particular area they and their colleagues work, rather than randomly assigned hot desks.
The nieghborhood model also supports the desk hoteling approach. With hoteling, staff can reserve the same space for a short period of time, so they don’t need to move around the office constantly. For teams working on critical projects, this is one less hurdle to worry about.
Stronger Team Identities
By allowing employees to work together, businesses can also better maintain team identities. Sitting together supports greater social interactions and knowledge sharing. Teams feel more connected and become more comfortable around each other.
Having “their area”, even if only for a day, helps keep these team identities strong. And this sense of belonging greatly influences how staff feel about their job.
Better Office Navigation
For many, office neighborhoods are an easier to navigate. In hot desking, companies are often focused on maximizing density, and spaces tend to become indistinct from one another. By creating office neighborhoods, companies make a workspace that is easier to get around.
What’s more, each area becomes much more identifiable, as staff only need to think about given work clusters, rather than specific rows of desks.
Neighborhood Offices Lead to More Efficient Space Utilization
All of these previous points lead to a more effective office. Here’s why workspace leaders should take note:
- Office neighborhoods support collaboration, both amongst long-term departments and impromptu project teams.
- They enable productivity, whilst retaining flexibility and the ability to adapt to changing needs.
- They support staff needs and help them feel better about their work environment.
All of this makes neighborhoods a more efficient option over traditional office layouts. Paired with desk booking, spaces don’t sit empty because a given employee or team isn’t in the office. The workplace stays adaptable, with staff swapping in and out throughout the week.
How to Design Effective Office Neighborhoods
Office neighborhoods require a little more preparation than simple hot desking. If you want to get started, the first steps focus on building a solid understanding of both team and organizational needs. From there, it’s a simple process of designing and refining.
1. Understand Team Sizes
Not all teams are created equally: you likewise shouldn’t create uniform neighborhoods, either.
Here are a few things to consider:
- What’s the average team size? And what is the largest?
- What does office attendance look like, both on average and on peak days?
- How many different teams are there?
These questions will help identify the right balance of neighborhoods. You should aim to support typical team sizes, whilst also ensuring one or two zones are available for the largest of your teams. Naturally, these latter spaces should, if possible, be a little bigger than necessary if you’re planning for future growth.
2. Place Related Teams Together
There are some teams that might need permanent spaces. These are often departments that regularly access sensitive data, such as HR or accounting. From these, you might even find teams that work closely on a regular basis, such as sales and marketing.
In these instances, you can consider placing these teams in close proximity.
3.Include Shared Spaces
Even though teams work together during the day, individuals may still need to step out for their own purposes. For example:
- Meeting rooms and phone booths enable team members to take calls without disturbing the wider department.
- Focus areas or quite zones can help people who really need to stay productive.
- Kitchens and other lounges can help people take breaks away from the working space.
- If neighborhoods don’t have their own printers, scanners etc, you can also put these in public areas.
- Lockers or cloakrooms also help staff keep shared spaces clean and uncluttered.
These additional spaces can be used to seperate neighborhoods, creating a greater sense of space and keeping noise down. Centrally located, they can also be used by multiple teams. You don’t need a strict “X meeting rooms per neighborhood”. It’s much more effective to analyze workplace data and determine how many meeting rooms and other resources are needed on a regular basis.
4. Plan for Growth
The biggest mistake in planning any office layout is forgetting to account for future development. This is why we encouraged seating arrangements that cater to the largest team, and then some.
Where possible, you should try to adapt your workplace to have a little more than is needed. This includes the size of each area, the number of neighborhoods, or even additional meeting rooms. You can modify your workplace as needs change, but optimizing your office takes time. By enabling some growing room from the start, you give yourself more time to adapt, prepare and plan.
5. Make Neighborhoods Easy to Recognize
Visual cues can help keep each neighborhood distinct:
- If a neighborhood is in its own closed room, then doors and labels are an obvious answer.
- If a neighborhood is in an open space, than signs can still work, but color or some other theme will be much easier to remember.
Similarly, you can also use a unique naming convention to make each space feel distinct. Many companies already do this for meeting rooms. Whether it’s capital cities, company products or even pop-culture references, you should consider the same approach here. “Office neighborhood 5” is not very memorable or easy to find in a hurry.
Need More Data? Consider Involving Employees When Designing Neighborhoods
Not sure exactly what you need? There’s one easy way to get valuable data: ask. Whilst you have internal data from desk reservations, meeting room bookings and more, this doesn’t always tell the whole story.
What are staff missing? What would help them work better? What kind of spaces do they prefer to work in? You can get all of these answers directly.
It seems obvious, but don’t just start impromptu conversations with random employees. Send out surveys, ask critical questions, and even consider giving staff the chance to respond to the first proposals.
Office Neighborhoods and Desk Booking in Practice
If you’ve made it this far, you’re likely looking to incorporate neighborhood seating into your office design. So let’s focus on some of the various aspects of practical implemenation.
Implement Desk Reservations
For office neighborhoods to be successful, your workforce needs a way to reserve given spaces. Some staff will need a space for a day, whilst others might need longer periods of team collaboration. This is often too much for administration to be dealing with on a manual basis.
The good news is that desk reservation software can readily support these organizational needs. Parkalot, for example, not only lets staff book desks, it includes office mapping tools so you can even visualize where every desk is. This way, teams know exactly which desk to reserve, and can therefore coordinate themselves.
What’s more, Parkalot also supports custom policies. If you want to limit how many times employees can reserve spaces, or how far in advance they can make bookings, you can!
Many companies limit this to ensure fairness. As a quick and easy rule, you can use the following formula lifted from our business parking space policy guide:
R = (S x D) / E
- R = the total reservations an employee can make in the time period
- S = the amount of shared desks available
- D = how many working days are in the given period
- E = how many employees can reserve desks from the pool
Imagine you have 100 desks, but 120 employees. Mathematically, not everyone can reserve a desk on the same day. But if we let each employee reserve desks 4 days a week, everyone get’s a shot.
Of course, you should also cater to each team’s needs. Departments that come to work everyday should have better access, for example. With Parkalot, you can create custom rules for the groups you define.
Encourage Teams to Plan Together
In order to better manage office neighborhoods and their usage, teams should be encouraged to coordinate their own bookings.
- Those that don’t have a permanent space of their own should have some private channel where they can plan their office visits, notifying members on which neighborhood is in use.
- For project teams, they can likewise find a dedicated space, notifying the project group via a dedicated channel.
- Teams with their own spaces don’t need to worry, but staff who mostly work remote would likely appreciate a quick reminder!
In all of these situations, it’s best to have a team leader to take the initiative. This not only keeps momentum going, but it also avoids duplicate bookings or split decisions. The team lead should know how big their team is and, from there, can find out who wants to attend and draw their attention to the appropriate spaces.
Prevent Overbooking
The easiest way to prevent overbooking is to use automated tools. As we mentioned earlier, Parkalot helps staff reserve automatically. This is often done in advance, so staff without an available desk know not to come to the office.
As a result, nobody gets to work only to be surprised by a lack of avaliable workspace.
As an added benefit, Parkalot lets staff give up their reservations if something happens and they can’t make it to the office. This goes back to the wider pool, keeping availability as high as possible.
Support Flexible Attendance
Finally, for a neighborhood office layout to be truly effective, your organization needs to be adaptable. If staff have to come to work everyday, at the same hours, then flexible arrangements serve a very minor purpose.
Effective office neighborhoods serve to cater to flexible workstyles. If your company isn’t supporting a hybrid or flexible approach, then neighborhood seating won’t make anywhere near as big an impact as it normally does.
Why Office Mapping Makes Neighborhoods Even Better
New ideas take hold when they’re easy to visualize, and it’s no different with office neighborhoods.
Office mapping is already a good idea for helping employees navigate and find desks, but here are two extra reasons why it’s useful:
- With office neighborhood seating, staff can use maps to readily find their neighborhood, not just the individual desk allocations.
- For office managers planning new layouts, maps are a free and painless way to plan new ideas.
You also don’t need to invest in an expensive tech stack either. You can use our free office map creator to get started. You don’t need to log in: just launch it in-browser and start adding walls and desks as needed. You can label and define the layout with ease… and if you don’t like something, change it!
Play around with our map creator to get a feel for how neighborhoods support different functions and how they can interact with breakout rooms and other relaxation areas. And if you’re ready for something more interactive, consider using Parkalot for your desk booking needs. The in-app map can let employees reserve the desks they want, when they want.
A Note on Hybrid Neighborhoods
We’ve spoken a lot about neighborhoods for teamwork, but it’s also possible that only parts of a given team might be in the office. In this case, office neighborhoods still work great, but you can make a few adjustments.
For instance, consider giving neighborhoods their own privacy, and then add TV screens and other conference equipment. This will allow the team working to easily hop on and off calls as they’re working.
The alternative, of course, is to simply invest in a few more meeting rooms. Which option is best depends entirely on how your teams operate – another good reason to ask your employees for input at this early stage.
Beyond Assigned Seating: Other Criteria to Consider When Designing Office Neighborhoods
Offices are more than just desks. There are many other facilities that are needed and, depending on the nature of your company, they can be rather important. Be sure to keep these in mind when designing neighborhoods.
Meeting Rooms
Every neighborhood should have easy access to meeting rooms. How many you actually need is dependent on your business. If you’re using meeting room reservation software, you can easily get a feel for this. Just pay attention to:
- Which size meeting rooms are the most popular
- If capacity is already at a limit.
- When meeting rooms are the most in demand, and just the average occupancy.
This will give you rough targets to hit.
Parking
What good is a desk if you still can’t get to the office? Employees start their office journey before they walk through the door. Allowing them to reserve parking spaces alongside desks makes arriving at the office simpler and helps reduce congestion during peak office days.
And if you want to visualize this, we also offer a parking map creator too – try it out!
Office Equipment and Facilities
Depending on the exact work, teams might need access to printers, scanners and other advanced equipment. It’s likely not worth investing in extra equipment if it rarely gets used. Instead, you should make sure that existing assets are easily reachable and accessible for everyone. This can be as simple as putting them in the most public or shared areas, as well as marking them out on office maps.
Other Resources
Outside of standard office equipment, there are a few other considerations to help employees work in the neighborhood system:
- Similar to parking, bike storage can also help answer staff needs.
- If you want to keep shared spaces tidy, lockers and personal storage solutions should be readily available.
- Kitchen facilities should be accessible for all, and not in dedicated neighborhoods or workspaces.
Support for Visitors
You should also take an extra moment to consider how visitors feel when coming to your office. What’s the process for ensuring they have a place to work, or even a place to park?
If you’re using an app like Parkalot, the answer is simple. You can assign individuals to be responsible for visitor reservations. This, combined with an easy to understand map, can help visitors navigate.
Prioritize Natural Light
Finally, when planning an office layout, it’s always better to prioritize natural light for the most used areas. Various studies have shown that natural light has a positive and calming effect on people, including in places of work, making windows a vital element of your office.
People can spend 8 hours at a desk, whilst a meeting room only gets used for a few hours, so the former should get the most natural light.
Common Mistakes When Creating Office Neighborhoods
Like any process, it’s easy to make mistakes if you’re not careful. The most common errors that occur when designing office neighborhoods are:
- Making neighborhoods too large
- Making them all the same size, either
- Not involving employees in the process
- Copying old seating plans into new areas
- Ignoring hybrid attendance patterns
- Forgetting about meeting rooms
- Not updating internal maps and layouts
- Creating rigid boundaries that make staff feel closed off
Keep this in mind when updating your office layout, and you won’t go wrong!
How to Create Office Neighborhoods in Your Workplace: A Step-by-Step
If you’re not sure how to start, here’s a quick, streamlined-process to help you:
- Define Your Goals. What do you want the new layout to achieve? Are you supporting hybrid work, encouraging greater collaboration, or reducing unused desks? Be sure to have some clear objectives in mind.
- Understand How the Office is Used. Before you can fix something, you first need to understand the baseline. Which teams come in the most often? Which departments collaborate regularly? What’s the average and peak attendance for both desks and meeting rooms? There are many office metrics you can use to help here.
- Involve Employees. This is a good step to ask for staff input. Send out questionnaires or surveys, but be sure to leave some open ended questions. Someone might have an idea you haven’t considered yet, or have a problem that your initial data didn’t show.
- Group Teams that Work Together. If there are teams that need dedicated space, this is a good time to make a note of which teams should be near which. Similarly, if there are teams that don’t have their own spaces, but still collaborate, keep an eye on their requirements, and be sure the spaces you design later are in close proximity.
- Draft, Propose and Refine the Plan. We won’t lie – this is the hard part. Depending on your situation, you might go through a few revisions. But it’s better to plan than jump straight ahead.
- Rearrange the Physical Office. Once you’ve chosen a layout, it’s time to actually rearrange the workplace. If this can’t be done after hours, such as in the evening or over the weekend, then you’ll need to move things incrementally, so as to not disturb workplace operations.
- Create a Digital Office Map. Before staff experience the new office space, send them the updated map. This will make it much easier on the day!
- Set Up Desk Booking. Employees will also need a way to secure spaces, so make sure the desk booking system is up and running.
- Launch, Communicate and Train. Be sure to give employees guides on the new system, and be available to answer any questions at the start.
- Review and Refine Over Time. After a while, you can use extra employee input and internal data, such as reservations, to determine if the change was a success. You can always comeback and tweak things, especially as the company grows.
Plan Your Office Neighborhoods for Free
At this point, we hope you’re itching to get started! The best way to jump in is to start with a digital map. You can define the hard boundaries of the office, such as the walls and other unmovable infrastructure, and then play around with new layout proposals.
Our office mapping tool is free to use and you don’t need to download anything. Just head on over and start designing!
FAQ
What is an Office Neighborhood?
An office neighborhood is a designated area within the workplace where a team, department, or project group can work together. Rather than assigning employees to permanent desks, staff reserve available workspaces within their neighborhood using desk booking software or another reservation system.
The neighborhood approach combines the flexibility of hybrid work with the collaboration benefits of sitting near colleagues. Depending on the company, neighborhoods may include desks, meeting rooms, phone booths, breakout spaces, and other shared resources that support the team’s day-to-day work.
How are Office Neighborhoods Different from Assigned Seating?
Assigned seating gives each employee a permanent desk that remains theirs regardless of whether they’re in the office. Office neighborhoods are much more flexible. Employees belong to a particular neighborhood rather than a specific desk, allowing them to reserve any available workspace within that area.
This approach helps companies make better use of office space while still ensuring teammates can sit together. It’s particularly effective for hybrid workplaces where employees don’t attend the office every day.
Do Office Neighborhoods Work with Hot Desking?
Yes. In fact, office neighborhoods and hot desking complement each other extremely well.
Hot desking gives employees the flexibility to choose where they work each day, while neighborhoods add structure by keeping related teams together. Instead of choosing from every desk in the office, employees simply reserve an available desk within their team’s designated area.
The result is a workplace that’s both flexible and collaborative, without the inefficiencies of permanently assigned desks.
How Large Should an Office Neighborhood Be?
There isn’t a universal size that works for every organization. The ideal neighborhood depends on factors such as team size, attendance patterns, available office space, and expected future growth.
A good rule of thumb is to design neighborhoods around typical daily attendance rather than total headcount. You should also leave some room for expansion and review the layout regularly as teams change. Occupancy data and desk booking analytics can help determine whether neighborhoods are too large, too small, or need adjusting over time.
Can Office Neighborhoods Improve Collaboration?
Yes. One of the main reasons companies adopt office neighborhoods is to make collaboration easier.
When colleagues work near one another, it’s easier to ask quick questions, hold informal discussions, and solve problems without scheduling formal meetings. Teams also develop stronger working relationships by spending more time together in the office.
Combined with meeting rooms and collaborative spaces, neighborhoods create an environment that supports both focused work and teamwork, making them particularly valuable in hybrid workplaces.
Do Office Neighborhoods Require Desk Booking Software?
Not necessarily, but desk booking software makes managing office neighborhoods significantly easier.
Without a booking system, employees may struggle to find available desks, neighborhoods can become overcrowded, and facilities teams often have to manage reservations manually.
Desk booking software allows employees to reserve workspaces in advance, helps managers monitor occupancy, and prevents double bookings. Many workplace management platforms, including Parkalot, also integrate office maps, meeting room reservations, parking management, and workplace policies, making it easier to coordinate the entire office experience from a single platform.
What’s the Difference Between an Office Neighborhood and a Team Neighborhood?
Nothing. Office neighborhood, workplace neighborhood, and team neighborhood all describe the same general concept. They refer to a dedicated area where employees from the same team, department, or project group can work together while still benefiting from flexible seating.
Different organizations use different terminology, but the underlying goal is the same: balancing collaboration with efficient use of office space.
