Of late I&#x27;ve been thinking about the relationships between offices and productivity.<p>Right at the turn of the century people were thinking about &quot;revenue per employee&quot; as a metric for how efficient a business was. That was silly off the charts when you get to some software startups where a group of 15 or 20 people are generating 20 - 30M$ a year in revenue.<p>The thing that stuck out for me is the cost of offices as a cost of doing business. For years folks have been working to fit more and more people into fewer and fewer square feet because the office expense was a serious impediment to profitability, it added to the &quot;loaded cost&quot; of your employees, and that combined with salary was your biggest cost.<p>But here is the thing, if your employees are generating these huge revenue per employee numbers, what that means is that small percentage changes in their productivity has a huge impact on your company&#x27;s revenue and profitability.<p>Employers need to look at what would be the impact if your employee was 10% more productive, which means your revenue per employee number went up 10%. How much cost would you be willing invest to make that happen? Even at crazy SF levels of $100&#x2F;sq ft &#x2F; year, that is $10,000 for an additional 100 square feet for an engineer. $10,000 represents perhaps a 5% increase in the loaded cost of that employee. But if they boost their productivity by 10% they return 200 - 300% on that investment annually.<p>Bottom line, build environments that maximize the productivity of your employees, not ones that minimize your real estate costs. Its a better investment than hiring more people.