Ira Fink is president of Ira Fink and Associates, Inc., University Planning Consultants, based in Berkeley, California. He can be reached at ira@irafink.com.

This article looks at offices on campus. Why? Offices are where university employees work, hang their pictures, make their calls, hold meetings, advise students, use their computers, conduct research, and, in many cases, store the operational histories of their institution. It is where many, if not most, university employees spend their entire working day as well as their entire university career.

Excluding housing, offices are also the single largest use of space on campus. Square footage devoted to offices exceeds space allocated to classrooms and class laboratories. Office space use at research universities even exceeds the area devoted to research laboratories. In fact, excluding housing, the number of rooms or spaces devoted to office use on a campus generally exceeds all of the rest of the assigned campus rooms and spaces combined.

Despite the significance and importance of offices as a campus space use, the literature of higher education is nearly devoid of studies about offices. This article seeks to fill this gap and looks at offices as a space use, reviews and provides guidelines and illustrations on office size, and describes and discusses policies on the allocation of offices.

This article is the fourth of a series I have authored on campus spaces. Previous articles have reviewed classrooms, class laboratories, and research space.1

The Need For Office Spaces
In contrast to many types of institutional enterprises, much of the work and the preparation for work in universities is done alone, not in groups or teams. This is true for university academic, administrative, and service activities. This solo pattern of university work—thinking, writing, working on a computer, and talking on the phone—requires assigned places for one to work alone and, on occasion, to come together to work in groups.

Offices are Important
Offices as a place of work are important for individuals to be productive and for institutions to be successful. As noted in the book Tomorrow’s Office, “Primary spaces in the office should make it easy for individuals to concentrate and groups to interact. A balance of different spaces helps to create the conditions in which skills and talents can develop.”2

As simple and obvious as it may seem, university faculty and staff in offices work while seated and their primary working area is a flat surface—a desk, a desktop or a table. The combination of seating and flat work surfaces creates the general workspace requirement for every university employee whose workplace is an office. To this baseline amount must be added the space to store the items and products of work and meetings. This combination of spaces requires, on average, more than 150 to 200-square feet per person.

Group Work Space
In addition to the office, the other primary work space is a conference room, a place for groups to interact and to meet formally. One’s status in the hierarchy of the university usually determines the number and frequency of meetings and thus the total size of the group work area needed. For those who meet frequently with others, their private office work space is sized to accommodate the additional meeting needs. For those whose work requires occasional meetings or presentations, their meeting space is a shared conference room.

Office Service and Support Space
Offices and conference rooms are also supported by a variety of service areas, including mail rooms, file areas, copier, scanner and fax rooms, vaults, coat rooms, waiting and reception, and the need for storage, both for supplies and the archival work products of the office. At many campuses, office support areas include informal meeting spaces, including faculty and staff break rooms, kitchenettes, and pantries.

Because higher education is labor intensive, the need for offices, conference rooms, and related service and support areas becomes the dominant space use on campus.

The Office as a Space Use
To understand more fully offices as a campus work space requires addressing two issues—first, what constitutes office space, and second, how much space offices consume.

What Constitutes Office Space
As described above, offices are defined as individual, multi-person, or workstation spaces specifically assigned to the various academic, administrative, and service functions of a college or university for carrying out desk-based activities supporting those activities. Office areas need not have clearly visible physical boundaries and might include open landscaped offices and open reception areas. In these instances, logical physical boundaries are assigned for the calculation of square footage.3

For purposes of this article and for measuring office space on campus, offices are all spaces that fit within the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Room Type Codes 300 to 399.4 In using this coding system, NCES suggests campuses classify office space into four broad types of office and office related uses by using the following Room Type Codes:

In simplest terms, service uses apply to those spaces that support the basic room use. For example, a copier/fax room (room type code 315) is a service room for an office (room type code 310). Other types of office service uses would be a reception area, a closet, or a mailroom. A pantry (room type code 355) is a service area for a conference room (room type code 350). Other conference room services uses could include audio-visual equipment or furniture storage.

Using this straightforward NCES coding system provides basic information about key functions of offices as a campus space use. It is the first step toward understanding the amount and distribution of office space use and how that distribution occurs. More about this topic is covered later in this article.

Space Devoted to Office Use
Finding data about office use, or any type of space use on campuses, is not easy. There is no uniform, national repository for this information, although the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) is beginning to collect campus space data. Records my firm has assembled on campuses where we have worked on space management projects and from universities who have shared their data provides the information base for this article.

Offices Are the Single Largest User of Space
I estimate, based on this data, that offices as a total space use are approximately one-quarter of the non-residential space on a campus, as shown in Table 1. The distribution of office space among the ten campuses in this table ranges from 21 percent to 30 percent of all non-residential space on their individual campuses. (As a confirmation of the amount of office space on campuses, Anthony Vaughn of the
University of Nevada, Las Vegas provided base information on 28 institutions they use for space comparison purposes. On average, at these large, land-grant universities, 28 percent of the non-residential space was office space.)

What is surprising given the attention paid to other campus space use, and as this table further illustrates, office space use at these ten campuses equals or exceeds the amount of space in classrooms, class laboratories, and research laboratories combined.

Offices Are the Largest Room Use
Offices also represent the largest number of rooms on these ten campuses. As shown in Table 1, more than 50 percent of the rooms or spaces on these campuses are in office space use. In other words, excluding housing, the number of rooms and spaces in office use on these ten campuses exceeds the total number of rooms in all other campus uses.

Office Size
While space for carrying out other university functions, such as sitting in a classroom, working in a class laboratory or conducting research in a laboratory, is generally related to space needs based on a uniform station size for each activity, this is not necessarily true of office space.

Office Size Based on Rank
The size or area of offices is based not only on the work to be done but also on the rank or position of the person within the university hierarchy. Although it is a given that individuals in higher echelon university positions generally spend more time meeting with others and therefore require larger offices with more seating, these individuals are also provided more office space as a result of their university status. Moreover, each university uniquely measures or calculates the amount of space needed per office for individuals in a variety of job classifications.

Space Needed in Offices
One would expect university work by faculty or staff classification to be somewhat similar from one institution to another, and thus the space needed to do this work would also be similar or uniform in size from one campus to another. This is not the case. Each institution computes and provides or assigns office space based on its own formulations. Some institutions are required to follow state or legislative office size space mandates, while others have developed their own office planning guidelines. Many campuses have no office space standards or guidelines; with each new or renovated building project, the size of the office is redefined.

Office Space Planning Standards
Scott Shader of the University of Missouri recently compared office space planning standards at 13 universities.5 For purposes of this article, I have summarized Shader’s work in Exhibit 1. As shown in Exhibit 1 on page 26, for most work classifications there is a 50 to 100 percent variation in the size of office space allotted by position when measured at the campus with the lowest space allocation to the campus with the highest.

For example, faculty offices in Shader’s campus comparisons ranged in size from 100 asf to 180 asf. A professional staff office space could vary from 100 asf to 140 asf, a director’s office from 140 asf to 180 asf, and an associate vice president office space from 150 asf to 280 asf.

I do not know why there is so much variation. I suspect, although I have not done the analysis, that campuses at the low end of the range with respect to office space allocation standards are also at the low end of the range in space allocation for all university activities, and those at the high end are likely to be the most generous for all other space on campus.  At campuses where faculty offices are small, faculty often keep their libraries at home and work from home, thereby precluding students from meeting with them except during scheduled office hours.

Space Planning Exceptions
There are exceptions to the general rule that status determines office size. For example, at the new campus of Soka University of America, in Aliso Viejo, California, the campus policy was one of equity in office space. All offices from the president’s office, to the faculty, to the staff and the custodians, were the same size. Each received 165 square feet.

At the Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford University, faculty offices are each 185-square feet. This generous office allows sufficient space for each faculty office to accommodate two large-screen computer monitors while meeting other operational needs.

Office Space in Older Buildings
A review of office space in older universities, where many buildings were built in the latter part of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century and are still in use today, shows individual offices used to be much larger than new office space on campus is today. At one campus with many older buildings, the average faculty office was 170-square feet, with nearly 20 percent of the 837 faculty offices exceeding 200- square feet.

Average Square Footage Per Office
To provide some measure of existing office space, Table 2 above illustrates the average square footage per office space at five public and two private universities, based on their room use space inventory. This table shows a range in existing average office size from 136 asf to 189 asf per office. The table also illustrates that office service space, conference room space, and conference room service space is, on average, larger at the five public universities than at the two private universities. This is a reflection of the differences in scale between the institutions, with the public universities in the table each having an enrollment approximately five times larger than the privates, and thus more need for file rooms, waiting and reception, larger meetings, etc.

Office Space Planning Guidelines
To establish a baseline for allocating office space in new or renovated buildings, we use the office space planning guidelines shown in Table 3. These office space guidelines are based on the amount of space needed to accommodate the furniture and furnishings of the various types of office spaces shown.

How Big Should Offices Be?
One effect of increasing office size is to be able to accommodate more useable furniture in an office. When the office increases beyond a certain size, the additional furniture is not desktop furniture, but rather stand alone furnishings such as a couch, side chairs, or free standing tables.

To illustrate this point, the following four offices (Exhibit 2) illustrate different furniture layouts as the size of an office is increased from a floor area of 105-square feet, to 131- square feet, 168-square feet and eventually 210-square feet. In each of these illustrations the width of the office is held constant at ten feet, six inches.

In the 105-square foot office, there is a limited area for the desktop, as well as visitor seating and files. While the space serves as an office, it is too small for many types of administrative work. At 131-square feet, the desktop area is increased to span the width of the room. At this size, the office is fully functional, but not overly generous. At 168-square feet, the desktop, seating area, and files remain the same, but additional credenza type furniture can be added to the room. This increased area allows more furniture to be placed in the office, but not more seating. At 210-square feet, the office accommodates all of the above uses and a small table for four persons as well. This office is actually too large for most administrative and facility needs. All of the furniture needs of this office can be accommodated in 180-square feet.

These illustrations also show that careful office space planning and the use of modular wall hung furniture and cabinets can have on maximizing office space. In all four illustrations, the door into the office is kept 12 inches away from the corner of the room, allowing a continuous set of file cabinets, bookcases, or closets to be placed along the entry wall. Each of these offices is shown as accommodating the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Office Related Service Space Uses
To understand the relationship among various office uses and develop a predictive space forecasting tool showing the relationship between office use and office support needs, I computed the following ratios based on data available from our work. As indicated in Table 4, and using the NCES Room Type Codes, there was 135-square feet of office service space for every 1,000-square feet of office space among the public universities and 166 asf of office service space among the privates.

In other words, if one could determine the amount of space needed to provide work space for faculty and staff, the amount of additional office service space, on average, would be the range of 14 to 17 percent of office space. In a recent facility program, which included 125 individual faculty offices, the ratio of office service space to office space was 16.8 percent. Measures of this sort are helpful to gauge requests for service space as a proportion of office space, and are useful in forecasting space needs.

Conference Rooms
Conference rooms are an integral part of office space use and are important for many reasons. Conference rooms serve as a shared place for meetings and presentations, and also function as backup seminar rooms, places for socialization, large workrooms and departmental libraries. They are also a space resource that is available for conversion to other office type uses when space needs are great and space availability is low.

Determining space needs and space requirements for individual conference rooms is not as straightforward as determining office needs. For example, the Council of Educational Facility Planners (CEFPI) suggests campuses provide 40 to 60 asf of conference room space per headcount staff who are classified as executive/administrative.6 The CEFPI guidelines do not provide similar guidance for other employee classifications.

The CEFPI does suggest when a departmental staff ranges from 6 to 15 FTEs, that 150 to 200 asf of conference room space should be provided. If the department or unit has 16 to 25 FTEs, CEFPI suggests a provision of 50 to 60 asf per FTE staff. As the following example illustrates, however, the latter guideline overstates the need, and the former guideline likely understates conference room need. For example, at 15 FTEs, a college or university department would plan for 150- to 200- square feet of conference area; this room size could seat about eight persons. At 16 FTEs, the CEFPI guidelines would suggest a campus department plan for 800- to 960-square feet, or enough conference space to accommodate 35 to 40 persons.

Predicting Conference Room Need
As a further test to develop a predictive tool for conference rooms, I calculated the number of conference rooms in our university room databases. I found one conference room for every 29 offices among the public universities and one conference room for every 33 offices among the private universities.

Planning for Conference Rooms
As a baseline planning guideline, include at least one dedicated conference room for each identifiable organizational unit or academic department when programming new or renovated facilities. Size the conference rooms to be proportional to the number of individuals in the department or unit. And identify each conference room as having significant audiovisual equipment and data capability.

Food, an integral part of many meetings and working lunches, needs to be accommodated in space planning. As a consequence, include counter space to accommodate a sink, microwave, and under-counter refrigerator in all conference rooms with a capacity of ten or more persons. When the conference room exceeds a capacity of 20 persons, include a small kitchenette or pantry adjacent to the conference room.

Redefining the NECS Codes for Offices
As noted at the beginning of this article, the NCES Room Type Codes provide a starting point for defining office space. In developing room databases, space management programs, and predictive measures for space for universities, we found a need to expand the NCES room type coding structure. A more defined room database allows easier and more specific identification of office space by type of user and by specific types of office service and support rooms. [Ed Note: The Facilities Inventory & Classification Manual, from which the NCES room codes are taken, is in the process of being revised and will be published later in 2005.]

Augmented Office Room Types
Table 5 shows a revised list of office room type codes for office uses within the NCES 300 to 399 room use code structure. This more detailed definition of room types allows you to sort a university room database and identify different types of office uses, including a variety of office occupants. For example, you can easily identify the number of faculty offices in a department, a college, or a university. A comparison of faculty headcount to the number of faculty offices provides a quick method for determining space deficiency or space excess.

This augmented office room type classification allows campuses to understand better the relationships between the various types of office uses and to pinpoint differences in office space allocation among academic department, administrative, and service units.

This expanded system of room type codes also serves as a checklist of needed rooms when programming new facilities, and when analyzing an existing facilities database to determine the distribution of offices, office service, and office support.

Office Suite Circulation
In order to function properly, an internal circulation space or connecting area is needed in a suite of offices or among a series of work stations. The modified room type code system accounts for these spaces by including Room Type Code 340, Department/Suite Circulation. This office suite circulation space is part of the assignable area of the suite.

In programming new or renovated facilities, provide an allowance for suite circulation equal to 18 to 20 percent of the total suite area devoted to office uses. For example, if you program an office suite that included six offices of 140 asf each, and also included a secretarial or reception area of 160 asf, for a total suite area of 1,000 asf, add to this a suite circulation factor of 20 percent or 200 additional asf to provide space for the internal corridor to connect the offices and reception area. Thus your program would show a total office suite area of 1,200 asf.

Office Space Management
In comparison to centralized management of some types of space on campus, for example, registrar-controlled classroom space, the management of office space is primarily a decentralized activity. While the university or the state is the owner of the space, deans, directors, and department chairs are the primary managers of office space assigned to their activity. They make specific office space assignments, move individuals into and out of office space, and, within university procedures, take the initiative in reconfiguring office space to match their needs.

The exception to this decentralized approach occurs when the unit or department is out of space. The lack of contiguous space leads first to the conversion of spaces not thought of as office space, into offices, followed by the subdivision of existing larger spaces into smaller spaces. When these approaches no longer work, the unit or department looks beyond its boundaries to provide office (or other) space. If the space issue becomes severe enough, entire units can be relocated, or additional space developed through new construction or renovation. Whether it is for a new hire, a visiting faculty member, or more graduate students, each of these space needs trigger a request to the next higher administrative level.

Policies on Office Use
Policies are a mechanism for recording and perpetuating the operating practices of an organization. Policies on office use can be classified in three broad categories: who is assigned offices, including offices for part-time use; how can the assigned office be used; and how large are these spaces.  In other words entitlement, decoration, and size.

Entitlement—Who Gets Offices
Surprisingly few universities have policies on allocating offices. And, for the most part, institutions with policies have guidelines only for faculty offices, not for staff.

Pfeiffer University in North Carolina has a typical policy on faculty offices. Their policy states that faculty require office space for study, class preparation, advising of students, and other activities related to their professional responsibilities. The policy further states it is the university’s goal to provide private offices, whenever possible, for all full-time teaching faculty, and these offices should be as attractive and comfortable as the institution can make them. Pfeiffer University faculty are assigned offices as convenient to their colleagues and teaching classrooms as is practical.7

It is the policy of Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) that full-time faculty receive an individual office.

A special effort is made to place newly hired full-time tenure track faculty close to the departmental office to provide opportunities for interaction during the tenure process. Close interaction with the department is essential in the university retaining these new faculty..8

Pfeiffer’s policies describe the use of the office and the need for comfort. MTSU’s policy explains the importance of the office in assisting new faculty in getting started and being part of their departmental structure.

Other campuses use policy statements in recognition of one’s office becoming personal space and how the physical characteristics of an office can have a bearing on one’s sense of well being and accomplishments.

Decoration
Offices can be a reflection of one’s self. They can be neat and tidy, or otherwise. It is the policy of Fort Hays State University in Kansas that faculty members may decorate, equip, and use offices as they see fit. This latitude is limited, however, to use that is consistent with physical plant policy and appropriate taste. At the same time, the university reserves the right to require individual faculty members to remove items from their offices for health and safety reasons and to enter the faculty office.9

The office can also be a special workplace if sufficient space is provided to house one’s library. For example, at the Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS) in New Jersey, many offices are large enough to provide space for a faculty to maintain a 1,500-volume library. The importance of these offices at PTS, some of which are 250-square feet or more in size, is also reflected in their name—faculty studies.

Policies for Part-Time Use
Universities have a different set of office policies governing space for part-time employees, including adjunct faculty, graduate students, and emeritus faculty. These policies often are based on sharing office space.

Adjunct Faculty
While universities are generally committed to providing private office space for full-time academic staff, this typically does not apply to those who teach part-time. Some institutions provide access to shared offices for adjunct faculty or part-time academic staff to prepare for teaching and to meet with students.

At other universities, neither part-time nor adjunct faculty are provided office spaces. This in turn creates a need for these individuals, without university assistance, to find a place, often a near-to-campus coffee shop, where they can arrange to meet with students, or in effect have “office hours.” With the increasing number of part-time faculty, providing a shared office space is now becoming an important component of academic space planning.

Graduate Students
University policies on providing office or desk space for graduate students vary widely. For students at the Ph.D. level, universities generally strive to provide individual study carrels or desk space, both as a place to store materials and as a location where students and faculty members can have easy access to one another. Facility programs today favor shared offices for Ph.D. students with three to an office, rather than large rooms with desks housing five to ten Ph.D. students.

For students who are teaching assistants (TAs), universities often provide a common work room to provide shared space for the TA to have office hours. For those students who are research assistants (RAs) and likely to spend considerable time in the lab, the RA is also now receiving a shared office work space, with a dedicated desk or carrel. As a result of lab safety issues, RA’s are being moved out of their laboratory desk space into office space in proximity to the laboratory.

Offices for Emeritus Faculty
Another important and thorny office space policy issue is office space for retired or emeritus faculty. Many university departments and emeritus faculty want to maintain their association with each other by continuing their pre-existing office assignment. However, institutions must also meet demands for scarce office space, which usually includes finding space for the person who is the successor to the professor who has just retired. To meet these demands, at campuses where there are policies on offices for emeritus faculty, they usually establish term limits, require office sharing, and define conditions that require vacating the office.

Term Limits
For example, at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, whenever possible, a retiring faculty member who requests to do so may have full use of his or her office for at least a further year beyond retirement.10 At Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., retired faculty who continue active involvement

in functions of their program or department may be provided a desk and research space. Upon retirement, Georgetown University faculty no longer have a claim to office space as is the right of full-time faculty.11

At the University of California, Berkeley, it is expected that an emeritus professor should be offered continued use of his or her office for one year after retirement. Thereafter, those desiring campus office space are expected to move to a shared office. This assignment of space to emeritus professors is discretionary, with such assignments of space evaluated annually. The assignment of a private office to an emeritus professor after one year is considered an exception.12

Sabbaticals and Leaves
Another office policy issue concerns temporarily vacated offices. At campuses where office space is difficult to come by, policies have been established to reuse faculty offices during periods of sabbaticals or leaves. At
Trent University in England, faculty on either half- or full-year sabbaticals are asked to remove their books and personal items and vacate their office. In some cases these materials are stored by the university.13

At the University of Ottawa in Ontario, when a faculty member is away for more than four months or more than 50 percent of the time, their office can be released and shared office space provided. When office space is released the university provides packing services upon request.14

Dual Offices
Traditionally, faculty offices are closely associated with their home department. Today, with an increasing interest in interdisciplinary research, campuses are faced with a need to provide office space for faculty both at their home department and also close to where their interdisciplinary research activities take place.

At Georgia Tech, where 10 percent of the research space is in interdisciplinary use, and at other research universities, faculty can have two offices. At some campuses, this dual office need is solved by providing a private office at one location and a shared or smaller office at the second location. The goal in each is to ensure student access to the faculty. At other campuses, such as Stanford University, the concept of dual offices is discouraged except under specific circumstances.15

Conclusions
From the data and policy statements presented above, there are four important conclusions about offices as a campus space use.

First, campuses need to develop and use their own set of guidelines regarding size of offices. Offices account for one-quarter of space on campus. Yet, most campuses do not have published office space guidelines. Without a set of office size policy guidelines, each new building or renovation will, during facility programming, raise again the question of office size.

Without guidelines, universities can make inefficient choices about space allocation. In some cases, the effect becomes like a ratchet. The office size for the past project creates a baseline for increasing office size in the next project. In developing guidelines, campuses can illustrate typical office layouts as a method to maximize the use of space in the office and provide guidance to the building design team.

Second, campuses guidelines on office size must accommodate the needs of today’s campus operations. This does not mean that offices should be oversized, but rather the size of the office has to accommodate technology needs and recognize the importance of the office both to the individual and the institution. Offices today require more surface area for desktop information technology, computing, and communication equipment. The desk space required to be set aside to accommodate a computer, fax, scanner, and printer has reduced the remaining desktop surface area available for other work purposes. At the same time, these pieces of equipment allow each faculty and staff employee to work more efficiently and become more productive.

Third, office policy guidelines must recognize the need for meeting and conference room spaces. Meetings and presentations are an integral part of campus life and collegial decision making. Some meeting space related needs are incorporated in the size of the office, depending on the rank of the office occupant in the university hierarchy. For others, without conference or meeting areas built into their office, shared conference  room space is needed and should be defined. Likewise, informal meeting areas, such as break rooms or kitchenettes, are now part of the office environment. Office policy guidelines will be most effective if they jointly address space requirements for offices, conference rooms, and informal meeting areas.

Lastly, campuses should develop policies on office space entitlement and decoration. Policies define intent. Because policies provide for continuity in organizational decision making and practice, they serve as a method for communicating expectations of institutional behavior regarding office assignment. In many areas of office space assignment, including offices for emeritus faculty or the allocation of two offices, the ability to rely on a policy for direction will enable the unit to plan ahead, reduce the opportunity for misunderstanding, and meet both individual  and organizational needs.