13 May Workplace Strategist, Tenant Advocate or Interior Designer? Who You Need to Lead Your Next Workplace Transformation
Your lease is ending, a refurbishment is well overdue, or the leadership team have finally acknowledged what their people have been feeling for years… that the workplace no longer “works”. So the task is handed to the Property & Facilities team (because of course it feels like a property problem) and they engage an architect or interior designer. The brief gets written and a fitout gets built.
Job done! The space looks better…
But six months later, nothing in the business has fundamentally changed.
The teams still work in silos, productivity has remained unchanged and the speed of delivery hasn’t accelerated.
So what went wrong?
Your team didn’t get anything wrong nor did the designer miss the brief.
They just didn’t know any differently.
This is an outcome we see all the time. A classic case of engaging (the right) people at the wrong time, and it happens because the wrong question was asked at the start, and often, the wrong people were asked to answer it.
The role most organisations reach for first
When a workplace project begins, most organisations think they need an architect. The more informed client may start with an interior designer. Whilst both disciplines are valuable and have their please, neither is a Workplace Strategist.
There’s also a growing confusion in the market I want to call out up front: almost every designer now calls themselves a workplace strategist. And while the title has proliferated, the service that is delivered underneath it varies enormously. Sometimes you’ll get a detailed functional brief, maybe a culture survey. Rarely, will you get the depth of strategic thinking that actually transforms how an organisation operates.
It pays to understand what you’re signing up for — rather than taking the marketing at face value.
A Workplace Strategist isn’t an interior designer, a facilities manager, a tenant advocate, or an HR consultant. They sit at the intersection of all of these disciplines — and beyond them. Their job is to help you imagine and build an environment that considers your business objectives, your culture, and your ways of working, so that your people and your organisation can genuinely thrive.
What a tenant advocate does — and doesn’t do
A tenant advocate is an expert at taking your organisation to market — finding the right premises and negotiating the best possible lease terms. That expertise is genuinely valuable, and a good advocate will save you significant money.
But here’s what they won’t do: help you understand what you’re actually going to market for.
They won’t analyse how your people work, what types of spaces you need, and in what ratios. They won’t challenge your assumptions about how much space you actually need — or use data and occupancy science to calculate it. They won’t examine your strategic vision, your values, or your culture to shape how your next workplace should enable you to execute on all of it over the full term of your lease.
That’s the strategist’s job, and it happens before the advocate goes to market — not after.
Why Property & Facilities and People & Culture need to be in the same room
In most organisations, when a new workplace or refurbishment is needed, it gets handed to the Property & Facilities team to manage. And they’ll manage it well — on budget, on program, operationally sound.
But here’s where the disconnect lies: Property & Facilities tend to see the workplace as an asset. Something to be maintained, optimised for cost per square metre, kept running. Their instinct is to get it built.
What gets missed in that frame of mind is that a workplace isn’t primarily an asset. It’s a tool — one of the most powerful and most underused performance levers in any organisation. It exists to enable culture, shape behaviour, and support the strategic execution of the business. Which means the people who are responsible for culture and performance — your People & Culture leaders — should be driving the workplace transformation, not inheriting its outcome.
When these two functions work together, with a strategist holding the thread between them, something different becomes possible.
What happens before we put pen to paper
Before COMUNiTI begins any design work, we spend a lot of time inside your organisation. Not observing from the outside — inside.
We want to understand your organisational structure and how it actually functions day to day. Where communication flows and where it breaks down. Which teams work together and which ones should be working together but aren’t. What your strategic plan demands of your people that your current environment is quietly making impossible. What behaviours the space is reinforcing that leadership has been trying to shift for years — without realising the space was the obstacle.
We look at your growth aspirations. Your operational challenges and opportunities. The ways of working that are serving you and the ones that are holding you back. What policies, procedures and rhythms may need to be reimagined before a new space can do what you need it to do.
This depth of understanding is what shifts a workplace project from a real estate transaction to a transformative business decision. It’s the difference between a space that responds to how you work today — which is often the product of a poorly designed environment you’ve been constrained by for years — and a space that’s built for who you are aspiring to become.
What a connected system actually produces
The organisations that get this right aren’t just building better offices. They’re aligning three things that most organisations treat as separate problems: their physical environment, their culture, and their ways of working.
When those three things pull in the same direction, the results aren’t incidental. Faster decisions. Stronger collaboration. Better retention. A workforce that moves with agility because the environment makes agility structurally possible — not because leadership asked for it on a slide.
We’ve seen it firsthand. Organisations that came to us for a real estate saving and left with a transformed business. Leadership teams that describe the workplace shift not as a project, but as the moment their organisation learned how to move.
That’s what a Workplace Strategist does. Not all strategists are made equal — and it pays to know the difference before you begin.
Ready to understand what your workplace is really capable of? Start a conversation with the COMUNiTI team at comuniti.com.au