The new workplace: why your MSP office gathers dust 90% of the time
AuthorMSP Late NightPublished on:The new workplace is too small on Tuesday and Thursday, too big on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and at the weekend it gathers dust. We see the same pattern in nearly every MSP office we walk into: 60 desks, 30 people on peak days, empty floors the rest of the time. And still a rent increase lands in the inbox every quarter.
For most MSP owners the office is a cost line that brings no joy. You signed a five or ten year lease when you were growing faster than your IT stack could handle. You fitted it out in 2019 for a team that came in full time. And since 2021 you have been sitting with the same metres, the same rent, and half the average usage.
What makes it sour: there is little you can do. Your landlord does not want shorter terms, because their bank wants certainty of income. Your engineers do not want to come in more often, because on the busy days they fight over a desk and on the quiet days there is nobody to have lunch with. And you are in between with margins already under pressure, and with the knowledge that attracting junior talent without a decent office experience has become nearly impossible. The reflex is then often: everyone back two days, compulsory. That rarely works, and it does not solve the real problem.
What the new workplace really asks: measure before you cut
Most MSPs start at the wrong end. They look at the rent, work out how many square metres they “actually” need, and go and negotiate or move. What works in practice is exactly the reverse: first measure how often people are really there, and only then decide what to do with the space.
A concrete example from the fractional office world: companies that say at onboarding they are in the office three to four days a week turn out, after six months of measurement, to average 2 to 2.1 days. That is not a halving through laziness. That is the gap between what people think they do and what they do. Without that measurement, every decision about your office is a gamble, and with a five-year lease that is an expensive gamble.
From square metres to hours: hotel logic applied to your MSP office
In hotels the basic question every morning is the same: how many rooms were occupied, for how many nights, at what price, and what else did guests do in the building. No hotelier would call an investor with a business case of 30% occupancy. They would be laughed out of the building. In office land 30% occupancy has become the norm, and nobody blinks.
“An office standing empty costs money too.”
Translated to an MSP with 100 staff and 60 workplaces: you have 300 place-days available per week. If everyone comes three days on average, that fits exactly, provided you spread it across the week. If everyone comes on Tuesday and Thursday, you are 40 places short on those two days and 60 places over on the other three. Same building, same team, two completely different worlds. The problem is almost never the number of metres; it is the distribution of hours.
What you can measure concretely, even without expensive tooling
You do not have to stick sensors under every desk straight away. Start with four figures per quarter: average attendance per day of the week, peak occupancy on the busiest day, percentage of workplaces structurally unused, and the difference between what people say and what the access system records. Those four figures will tell you more about your office within three months than five years of gut feeling. And they give you something to take back to your landlord, or to your team if you want to shift something in the working week.
What you then do with those figures
Once you know your peak on Tuesday is 78 people and your trough on Friday is 14, you have three dials to turn. The first: spreading. Not by sending round an email saying “we have to distribute the working week better”, but by giving teams explicitly different anchor days. Service desk on Monday and Wednesday, projects on Tuesday and Thursday, sales on Wednesday and Friday. That sounds like micromanagement, but it is exactly what you do when you roster a 24/7 NOC. The second dial: shrinking on the metres you structurally do not use. Subletting a whole floor to a friendly service company often produces more than a year of negotiating with your landlord. The third dial: investing in the places where people do come. A second screen on every desk, decent acoustics in the call booths, and a kitchen where you need not fear the coffee will drive away the guest you just brought in.
What is in none of those three dials is “everyone back, compulsory”. Not because it is ideologically wrong, but because it does not improve your core figures. Your peak day gets busier, your quiet day stays empty, and your best engineers start looking at the competitor who does understand how grown-ups work. The data from the fractional office sector consistently shows that compulsory return days raise average attendance by half a day a week at most, while turnover rises over the same period. That is a bad trade, certainly in a market where replacing one senior engineer easily costs you half a year of margin.
“It starts with knowing how often we are really there.”
Why this is doubly relevant for MSPs
At MSPs two things come together that elsewhere sit apart. On one side margins under pressure, where every unused square metre bites straight into your EBITDA. On the other a labour market where you do not attract junior engineers with an empty floor and a coffee machine from 2018. The claim from the fractional office corner is that some 32 million square metres of office space in the Netherlands is structurally underused. For your company that translates into a few hundred square metres you pay rent on, burn energy on, and schedule cleaning for, without anyone working there. At the same time your new employee puts their bag down at a desk with no second screen, because the good places have already been “claimed” by colleagues who are not in this week.
There is something else on top that matters less in other sectors: at an MSP the office is also your showroom. A prospect who comes by for a security assessment or a migration conversation reads within three minutes how well you have your own affairs in order. A half-empty building with sticky notes from 2022 on the whiteboards tells a different story from a floor that is clearly rostered, where the meeting rooms are booked by name, and where the technology works the way you promise your clients it will. So the new workplace is not only an internal cost question; it is also a commercial signal given out afresh every week to everyone who walks in.
The choice about the new workplace is not a property question and not an HR question. It is a question about how you run your company. Anyone who keeps fitting out their office for a working week from 2019 pays every quarter for empty chairs and at the same time loses the people they want to keep. Anyone who starts by measuring before cutting or building gets a grip for the first time on a cost line that has been a blind spot for most MSP owners for years.