Why your breakout space sits empty
Press Feature
SPOR Group's acquisition of Squaredot was featured in Installation on 14 September 2026. The article covers the deal itself, Squaredot's design expertise, and the combined client base the two businesses now bring together.
Here's a pattern we've seen play out again and again over 25 years of workplace design: a business invests in a bright, well-furnished breakout area. Soft seating, good light, maybe a coffee point. It photographs beautifully for the case study. Six months later, it's the quietest part of the office, and everyone's still having their informal chats hunched around someone's desk.
It's not usually anyone's fault. It's just what happens when a space gets designed around what a breakout area should look like, rather than around what actually pulls people out of their seats.
Why this keeps happening
Most breakout spaces get designed to answer the wrong question. The brief asks "what does a good breakout space look like?" instead of "what would actually make someone leave their desk and use this one?" Those two questions produce very different rooms.
A few reasons the gap opens up:
It's positioned wrong. Tucked away for the render to look clean, not on the route people actually walk during the day
It solves a problem nobody has. Comfortable seating for a conversation, when what teams actually needed was a quiet spot for a two-minute call
It competes with habit. If the desk already works fine for an informal chat, a nicer room two floors away won't beat it without a real reason to move
Each of these is a small mismatch on its own. Together, they're enough to make an expensive, well-designed space quietly optional.
What changes when space planning starts from behaviour, not floor plan
We recently joined SPOR Group, a workplace technology specialist that spends as much time understanding how people actually use a building as we spend designing it. The point of bringing the two together isn't just resourcing, it's sequencing.
When you can see how people currently move through a space, where they naturally gather, what technology they reach for and when, the breakout areas stop being a guess. You place them where the traffic already is, give them a genuine reason to exist that the desk can't replicate, and build the technology in from the start rather than adding a screen later because the room feels underused.
It sounds obvious written down. It's rarer in practice than it should be.
What this means if you've got a move or refit coming up
If your current breakout spaces are quieter than they should be, it's worth asking whether they were designed around real usage patterns or around what a "good" breakout space is supposed to look like. That question tends to explain a lot.
We've pulled together what we're seeing across the market right now, how organisations are actually using their space, where hybrid working is heading, and what's shaping smarter workplace decisions, in The Dynamic Workplace 2026 Report.
It's a useful benchmark whether you're at the start of planning a project or just want to see how your current workplace stacks up.
