Post-Occupancy Evaluation

Most workplace projects are evaluated by anecdote and photography. A Post-Occupancy Evaluation evaluates by the record: the measurement framework, the ranked criteria, the accepted sacrifices, the environmental criteria the Guide Notes specified. Because the methodology documented what the workplace claimed it would do, the evaluation can ask the only question that matters: did it? The answer generates the first recalibration evidence and closes the loop that makes the discipline cumulative.

• First pass at three to six months post-occupancy, once behaviour has stabilised past novelty and grievance
• Full evaluation at twelve months, capturing a complete seasonal and business cycle
• Never earlier than three months: early evaluation measures the change process, not the workplace

• Strategist or internal workplace capability leading
• Community group reconvened as interpretation panel
• FM and HR contributing operational and workforce signals
• Leadership team receiving results against their own recorded decisions

• Measurement framework and baselines from the Workplace Strategy
• Ranked criteria, accepted-sacrifice record and Conceptual Pillars
• Commissioning verification results from handover
• Continuous occupancy, booking, experience and environmental streams
• A repeated Dynamics-style assessment for reported experience

1. Reconstruct the claim set: what the workplace committed to, in measurable terms — per criterion, pillar, setting type and accepted sacrifice.
2. Gather evidence against each claim: observed use, reported experience, environmental measurement, operational records.
3. Evaluate the sacrifices explicitly: accepted costs are monitored commitments — did mitigations work, and did impact stay within accepted bounds?
4. Triangulate reported and observed exactly as Diagnose did.
5. Diagnose failures by cause — spatial, behavioural, environmental or assumption — because the remedy differs entirely by cause.
6. Interpret with the community group before reporting; numbers without ground truth misdiagnose reliably.
7. Report performance versus claim with causes and recalibrations routed accordingly.

• Novelty inflation in early scores, grievance inflation in early complaints — both decay; the twelve-month signal is the signal
• Failures that are undelivered dependencies: the setting works, the norm never landed
• Success theatre: flattering metrics reported, unflattering ones archived
• Sacrifice drift: accepted costs quietly exceeding their bounds
• The unbuilt claim: value-engineered commitments evaluated as if built

• Performance-versus-claim evaluation across criteria, pillars, settings and sacrifices
• Cause-diagnosed failure register
• Recalibration recommendations routed by cause
• Updated baselines for continuous monitoring

Findings route by cause: assumption failures to Assumption Recalibration, spatial failures to the Spatial Performance Review, behavioural failures to the Workplace Behaviour Review, policy failures to the Hybrid Work Review. Updated baselines become the reference for all continuous monitoring.

Attribution is the judgement: whether a failing setting failed by design, norm, environment or assumption determines the response, and the evidence rarely announces which. So does distinguishing a stabilised signal from a decaying one.

• Evaluating at six weeks and reporting the change process as performance
• Measuring satisfaction without the claim set
• Skipping the sacrifice review — the evaluation's integrity test
• Reporting failures without cause diagnosis, triggering wrong remedies
• Running it once and calling the loop closed

A consultancy's twelve-month evaluation found focus settings outperforming their claim, but the monitored sacrifice — reduced cross-team encounter, accepted in Workshop III — had exceeded its bound: inter-team ties were thinning faster than projected. Because the sacrifice carried a threshold, the finding triggered a designed response (relocating two shared amenities) rather than a debate about whether the problem existed.