For a growing company that wants to retain a private workspace without managing fit-out work and day-to-day operations, a managed office is often a relevant option. A floor managed more extensively in-house makes more sense when headcount is stable and the company has the resources to run it. A more flexible setup is better suited to hybrid organisations or needs that change quickly.
Between 30 and 70 team members, not everything grows at the same pace. Ten additional people do not simply require ten more workstations: they may be enough to saturate meeting rooms on certain days, create a need for confidentiality that was previously less pressing, or expose the limits of a workplace setup that had until then been managed through a few informal adjustments.
At this scale, the office gradually stops being a “simple container” and becomes a small piece of business infrastructure. It needs to absorb peak-attendance days, several simultaneous uses and changes in headcount, while the company decides what it wants to manage itself and what it prefers to delegate.
Key takeaways
- Between 30 and 70 team members, headcount indicates the scale of the project but is no longer enough to size the office. Peak days and the uses that reach saturation first become decisive.
- Private, managed and flexible are not three mutually exclusive categories: the same space can combine all three characteristics to different degrees.
- The choice depends as much on the space itself as on what the company wants to manage, delegate and be able to adapt without launching a new real estate project every time something changes.
When the office starts generating its own workload
One meeting room may be enough as long as discussions are easy to reschedule. It becomes a source of friction when three teams all want to meet at 10 a.m. A few confidential calls can be handled informally; when they become a daily occurrence, the lack of suitable spaces starts to show. The same applies to access, equipment, storage, visitors or changes in furniture.
The office then develops its own back office. Someone has to manage service providers, solve a connectivity issue, replace a piece of equipment, arrange an intervention or find a solution when meeting rooms are full. Taken individually, each of these tasks may seem fairly minor. Their repetition is what eventually creates a workload.
This workload may be absorbed by an Office Manager, facilities teams, HR, IT or several people who “take care of it when needed”. In a company structured for this, the model can work perfectly well. In another, the same office may consume a disproportionate amount of time compared with the value it provides.
A floor managed largely in-house offers more freedom over fit-out and service providers. A managed office can maintain a high level of privacy while transferring part of this operational workload to a single point of contact. The question then becomes less “which format should we choose?” and more how much work will these offices create once we have moved in?
Compare a setup, not just a label
The terms used in the office market do not answer exactly the same question: private mainly indicates who uses the space, managed who takes care of its operation, while flexible describes how much freedom the company has to commit, evolve or change its occupancy.
A floor can therefore be private, managed and offered under flexible terms at the same time. To compare offers, it is more useful to look at their concrete characteristics than to force them into three separate boxes.
| Criterion | Floor managed more extensively in-house | Managed office or private floor | More shared flexible setup |
|---|---|---|---|
| Initial setup | Largely organised by the company | Largely handled by the operator | Generally limited |
| Furniture, internet, maintenance | To be arranged and coordinated as required | Often bundled into a single service package | Usually already included |
| Level of privacy | High | High in many configurations | Varies depending on the offer |
| Workspace personalisation | High | Possible within certain limits | Generally more restricted |
| Day-to-day management | Higher internal workload | Reduced and centralised | Low |
| Ability to adapt the workspace | Depends on the lease, available space and any work required | Often easier if the offer allows for it | Flexible depending on the offer and availability |
| Real estate commitment | Often more binding | Generally more flexible than a traditional lease | Flexible depending on the package |
| Particularly relevant if… | the company wants to retain control over its environment and has the resources to manage it | it wants its own team space while delegating part of its operation | it prioritises simplicity and adaptability |
No column is inherently better than the others. The main purpose of the table is to identify where the complexity sits and who takes responsibility for it.
Peak days reveal the first bottleneck
Hybrid working has made capacity planning more subtle. A company may have relatively moderate average attendance while still experiencing one or two days each week when the office is much more heavily used.
European data from CBRE provide a useful illustration. In its European Office Occupier Sentiment Survey 2025, average weekly office utilisation stood at 46%, compared with 71% on peak days. 47% of respondents also expected office utilisation to increase. These figures mainly concern large corporate occupiers and are not intended to provide a ready-made ratio for an SME. They do, however, show how much a weekly average can conceal the reality of the busiest days.
In its European outlook for 2026, CBRE also notes that some offices are already reaching capacity on peak days and that 21% of surveyed companies were planning to increase their footprint in response to rising utilisation.
For a 50-person team, planning around an average attendance of 30 or 35 people can therefore be misleading if 45 people are regularly on site on the same day. And workstations are not necessarily the first thing to become a problem.
Two managers are conducting interviews, several salespeople are on calls, eight people are in a meeting, a visitor is waiting in reception while another team is looking for somewhere to talk: office capacity then looks less like a total number of seats and more like a chain whose first saturated link limits everything else.
Depending on the activity, the first pressure point may be the number of workstations, small meeting rooms, confidential spaces, larger meeting rooms, dining areas or circulation space. This approach builds on office sizing for teams of 5 to 30 people, but the change in scale adds another question: which use reaches saturation first on a busy day?
Office sizing should therefore distinguish between usual attendance, a recurring peak-attendance day that the space needs to absorb normally, and an exceptional event for which a temporary solution may be more rational than keeping extra square metres available all year round.
The right balance is to absorb recurring peaks without paying all year for genuinely exceptional scenarios.
Cost and flexibility: what happens after signing
The advertised price does not always show what the office will actually cost the company once it is occupied. A floor may offer an attractive rent while still requiring fit-out costs, furniture, connectivity, cleaning, maintenance, insurance or several separate service contracts.
To compare two solutions, it is therefore useful to look at three layers:
- visible real estate cost: rent or service fee, charges, commitment;
- setup cost: fit-out, furniture, equipment, installation;
- operating cost: suppliers, maintenance, monitoring, management and internal time.
The price of a managed office generally bundles more cost items into a single package. Part of the gap compared with another offer may therefore correspond to costs that simply appear elsewhere in a different form. Conversely, a highly integrated service may be less relevant if the company already has its own teams or contracts. The comparison should in particular help avoid paying twice for the same capability.
Flexibility deserves the same practical reading. It is not limited to the length of the commitment. It can be:
- contractual: duration, notice period, exit conditions;
- spatial and capacity-related: ability to change the layout or add or remove workstations;
- operational: how easily those changes can be implemented;
- geographical: potential access to other spaces or locations as needs change.
A stable team may favour a less adaptable space if its priorities are control and a long-term base. A company that is continuously hiring will pay more attention to its ability to absorb additional team members. A hybrid organisation may be more sensitive to peak-attendance days.
A genuinely flexible office is therefore not necessarily the one that is easiest to leave. It is also the one that prevents you from having to leave too soon.
Before signing, test both the space and the offer
A viewing shows whether a space works today. It tells you less about how it will perform when the organisation moves outside its usual scenario.
For a team of between 30 and 70 people, five scenarios already provide useful information:
| Scenario tested | What it helps you assess |
|---|---|
| +10 team members over the next twelve months | The ability to accommodate reasonable growth without moving or launching another major fit-out phase |
| -10 team members | The risk of being left with permanently underused space and the ability to reduce or repurpose it |
| 80 to 90% of the team on site on the same day | The capacity of workstations, meeting rooms, confidential spaces and shared areas on busy days |
| Two or three important meetings at the same time | The availability of rooms and spaces where people can work privately without disrupting the rest of the office |
| A project team needing its own space for several months | The ability to temporarily reconfigure the floor without disrupting other teams |
The question is not simply whether “everyone fits”. A space designed for 50 people may still work well with 58 if its layout allows it, while another officially sized for 60 may start to perform poorly much earlier if ancillary spaces are too limited.
The purpose of the test is to identify the point at which the space stops working well and assess whether the scenario that causes it is likely enough to influence the decision.
Before signing, also check:
- the firm commitment period and notice period set out in the contract;
- the options for expanding or reducing the space or number of workstations;
- the services that are precisely included and those that remain the company’s responsibility;
- connectivity and IT security, particularly where the business has specific requirements;
- the meeting rooms included, their capacity and any booking restrictions;
- additional fees that may be charged on top of the main service;
- workspace personalisation options and permitted alterations;
- handover and reinstatement conditions at the end of the occupancy period;
- how peak-attendance days are handled when almost the entire team is on site.
The stress test and this checklist are not designed to make every offer pass every criterion. Their purpose is to show where the limits are before you discover them after moving in.
Lille: an office that evolved at every stage of growth
Fintech specialising in instalment payments and credit, based in Hiptown spaces in Lille since 2021, and having grown from a handful of team members to around 90 today.
The company arrived in Lille in 2021 with just a few workstations, then grew to around forty team members before moving to a larger-capacity office in 2023. Rather than opting for a traditional commercial lease, considered too rigid for growth that was difficult to forecast even three years ahead, it chose a solution capable of supporting each stage of expansion without restarting a full real estate project every time.
At this scale, the distribution of space mattered as much as overall capacity: several meeting rooms, a shared area separate from the open-plan workspace, and smaller rooms for confidential discussions or small meetings. The case provides a concrete illustration of the first-bottleneck principle: beyond a certain team size, the requirement is as much about the different uses that need to coexist as it is about the number of available workstations.
The company also highlights another benefit that is less visible on a floor plan: day-to-day site operations — access, energy, connectivity and services — are delegated to the operator. For a fast-growing team, this avoids having to build a dedicated internal function around these issues while the business itself is expanding.
Choosing a setup that can grow with the company
Between 30 and 70 team members, the aim is not to force the company into a particular real estate category. It is to find a setup that matches actual attendance, the uses that need to coexist, the resources the company wants to commit internally and the changes it is likely to have to absorb.
A floor managed more extensively in-house, a managed office or a more flexible setup can each be relevant. The difference lies less in the label than in how the space works today and what it will allow the company to do tomorrow.
Looking for office space for 30 to 70 team members? Talk to Hiptown to assess your team’s actual attendance, the spaces you need and the right level of services.
