It started as a real estate question. It ended as a culture question.

When a major Northeast life insurance company approached our team at Savills for workplace strategy services, the assignment seemed straightforward: evaluate underutilized space across their 300,000-square-foot headquarters and recommend what to do with the surplus. The facility spanned five floors, each renovated at a different time over the years as issues arose, and leadership wanted a clear-eyed strategic assessment of what to do with some idle square footage.

But standard space metrics can only tell you where and when desks sit empty. They can't tell you why. Before we made a single design decision, we needed to understand what was happening in the stack. What we found went well beyond underutilized real estate.

Uncovering the Invisible Hierarchy

Physical environments send clear signals about culture. Across this insurer’s working floors, employees had gradually adapted to a strict vertical hierarchy. The lower levels felt casual and approachable. Moving up to the middle floors, the tone shifted to business casual. By the time you reached the top floor, formal business attire dominated, accompanied by a quiet, guarded atmosphere. Workstations and meeting room ratios varied considerably across the building, creating an unintended culture of haves and have-nots.

The cultural fragmentation apparent in this work environment aligns with some of the ongoing challenges the broader insurance sector faces. Increasing demographic shifts, including an aging workforce and weak interest in insurance careers amongst younger generations, threaten to erode institutional knowledge and make recruitment more challenging. Cohesive workspaces can address these threats directly, encouraging mentorship across generations while serving as a powerful magnet for new talent.

Designing for “Extremes” Rather Than Averages

To uncover and address silent divisions, Savills curated an engaging visioning process that brought executives, managers and frontline staff together in the same conversation. Rather than relying solely on a leadership session, employee interviews or a survey on employee experiences, we used the same activities in each collaborative focus session with small groups of eight to ten people across the organization.

One of the main activities was focused on creating the optimal future experience. Together with the core project team, we developed four distinct employee personas grounded in real daily behaviors and character traits: a traveling sales broker, a recent graduate starting on the actuarial team, an underwriting manager and a visiting employee from another location. Participants broke into groups of three, received a persona, and were given a deck of 40 images covering focus space, enclosed collaboration space, open collaboration spaces, amenities, and social spaces. Each group built the ideal workday for their assigned persona and presented their concepts back to the room.

This approach borrowed a principle from military aviation design, now known as “designing to the edges,” where fighter jet cockpits are built to accommodate a range of physical attributes rather than an average pilot who does not actually exist. By prompting leaders and employees to design for different walks of life, preferences and ages, including mobile brokers visiting HQ or quiet analytical roles, the exercise forced people to think through experiences that were not their own. Participants felt comfortable proposing novel ideas, and clear spatial priorities quickly emerged across both executive and employee sessions.

Restacking for Equity and Connection

With these insights in hand, Savills developed three restacking options ranging from minimal adjustments to comprehensive overhauls. Leadership selected the middle-ground option, which focused on building spatial consistency across floors while introducing a strong cultural anchor.

The strategy standardizes lighting, furniture quality and room ratios across the working floors, removing the visual hierarchy that had divided teams. To create a central destination that encourages mixing across departments, a portion of the middle floor is transformed into a shared event and conference center for internal gatherings and client events.

The strategy also addresses the building's ground level. Floor one, which houses accounts receivable, mailroom operations and maintenance staff, had originally been excluded from the initial scope. However, during this process, the core team realized the importance of addressing this area as well. Reprogramming this space ensured that support teams received the same upgraded amenities as the rest of the company, bringing every employee into the cultural fold.

Turning Square Footage into Cultural Alignment

What began as a focused exercise in real estate reduction evolved into a complete overhaul of how this life insurance carrier operates under one roof. Organizations that jump straight into interior design without examining underlying behavior tend to end up rebuilding the same problems in a new finish.

Savills workplace strategy approach helped this client look beyond desk counts to address the underlying cultural friction.. The resulting plan transformed underused square footage into a unified, energetic workplace, one where early-career staff and seasoned executives work alongside one another with a shared sense of purpose.