An office layout is a physical record of decisions about status, access and adjacency. Most of those decisions were never articulated, which is what makes the floor plan informative — it encodes what the organisation actually believes rather than what it says.
If you are new somewhere, or trying to understand why coordination is difficult, the floor is worth reading.
For a practical reference on common fireable offences, Monitask provides the website.
What to look at
Who has enclosed space. In an organisation that describes itself as flat, note how many people have doors. The distribution of enclosure is the most direct statement of hierarchy available, and it is rarely mentioned.
Where leadership sits. Together on one floor, or distributed among their teams. Together means the executive team is a team and their functions are secondary. Distributed means the reverse. Both are legitimate; they produce different organisations.
Who is adjacent to whom. Physical adjacency drives informal coordination more reliably than reporting lines. Two teams that need to work together and sit on different floors will coordinate worse than the org chart predicts, indefinitely.
Who is far from everyone. A team on a different floor, in an annexe, or at the far end is structurally peripheral whatever anyone intends.
Where the meeting rooms are, and who books them. If the good rooms are near leadership and permanently booked, that tells you where decisions happen.
Where the kitchen is, and who passes it. The highest-traffic collision point in most offices. Teams whose route passes it are better connected than teams whose route does not.
Whether there is anywhere to have a private conversation. An organisation with nowhere for a difficult conversation to happen has those conversations elsewhere, or not at all.
What the mismatches tell you
The useful reading is not the floor plan itself but the gap between it and the org chart.
Two teams that report separately and sit together will coordinate well and will occasionally surprise their managers by agreeing on things above their level.
Two teams that report together and sit apart will not coordinate, and the manager will spend a disproportionate amount of time relaying between them.
A senior person seated among a team they do not manage has more informal influence over that team than the structure suggests.
A function seated at the periphery is peripheral to decisions, whatever its stated importance. This is one of the most reliable signals available and it usually predicts which functions get consulted late.
Layout as an instrument
Space is one of the few levers that changes behaviour without changing structure, and it is faster and cheaper than a reorganisation. See reorganisations.
If two teams need to coordinate, seat them together. This does more, more quickly, than a shared objective or a standing meeting.
If a function is being ignored, move it to the centre.
If a person is being over-consulted, distance helps — proximity produces interruption, and some of the load on senior people is purely geometric.
Rotate seating occasionally. It produces new weak ties, which are where cross-team information actually travels.
The hybrid complication
Most of this weakens when the floor is half empty and nobody has a fixed seat.
Adjacency stops being reliable under desk booking, which removes the main mechanism described above. Zoned booking by team restores some of it. See hot-desking and desk booking.
The signals become harder to read and do not disappear. Who has retained a permanent desk in an otherwise hot-desked office is now the clearest status marker on the floor, and it is usually not framed as one.
Digital adjacency substitutes partially. Which channels people are in, who is in which recurring meeting, who is copied on what. Worth reading the same way, and it is more visible than most people realise.
For someone new
In your first fortnight, walk the floor and note: who has a door, where leadership sits, which teams are adjacent, and which function is furthest from everyone else.
It takes twenty minutes and it will tell you things about how decisions get made that nobody will say out loud for six months. See your first 90 days.
For broader public guidance and background, consult the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.