Why your office refit never quite works
Press Feature
SPOR Group's acquisition of Squaredot was featured in AV Interactive on 15 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 commissions a beautiful new office. The space planning is thoughtful, the furniture is right, the finishes look great in the render. Then the AV team turns up separately, works to their own brief, and six months later someone's standing in a meeting room wondering why the screen sharing never quite works the way it did in the demo.
It's not usually anyone's fault. It's just what happens when a workplace gets designed by two teams who never sat in the same room.
Why this keeps happening
Most workplace projects split naturally into two conversations that rarely talk to each other:
The design conversation: how the space should feel, how teams move through it, how it supports the way people actually work
The technology conversation: what goes into the meeting rooms, how the network's laid out, whether the AV actually performs under real use
Each side optimises for its own brief. The design team hands over a beautiful floor plan, then the technology team retrofits cabling, screens and controls into a space that wasn't built with any of it in mind. Nobody's wrong, but nobody's fully right either, and the client is left living with the join.
What changes when it's one conversation, not two
We recently joined SPOR Group, a workplace technology specialist that's spent as long solving the systems side of this problem as we've spent solving the design side. (You can read the full story on that here, if you haven't already.) The point of bringing the two together isn't just resourcing, it's timing.
When space planning and technology strategy happen in the same conversation, from the first site visit onwards, the questions get asked in the right order: where the power and data actually need to sit before the walls go up, how a meeting room's technology shapes its layout rather than being squeezed into it afterwards, what a hybrid team actually needs from a room versus what looks good on a spec sheet.
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 you're weighing up a relocation, refurbishment or expansion, it's worth asking early on whether your design and technology planning are genuinely happening together, or just happening to line up by the end. That single question tends to predict a lot about how smoothly the project goes.
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.
