How Upplands Väsby Municipality used Workplace Adequacy™ Survey to create a stronger decision-making foundation for a new municipal building

When Upplands Väsby Municipality decided to bring together operations from several addresses into one shared municipal building, it quickly became clear that the project required more than traditional space planning. The new building needed to work for many different functions, ways of working and security requirements, while also supporting both employees and residents over time. Through Workplace Adequacy™ Survey, the municipality gained a clearer and more structured decision-making foundation to understand needs, set priorities and create the basis for a municipal building that works in practice.

A municipal building with many needs to balance

When organisations plan a new office or municipal building, the same challenge often arises: how do you create a workplace that can support many different needs at once, without decisions being driven by assumptions or individual voices?

For Upplands Väsby Municipality, this was especially important. The new municipal building will bring together six departments and 43 units in one shared location. The workplace therefore needed to support focused work, collaboration, meetings, security, confidentiality and accessibility within one coherent whole. At the same time, the building needed to function as a place where residents could more easily connect with the municipality.

In a project with so many functions and needs, there is a clear risk that workplace decisions become difficult to prioritise. Different groups work in different ways, have different requirements and need different forms of support from the physical environment. To make the right decisions, the municipality needed a decision-making foundation that showed how the organisation actually worked, which needs were shared, and where there were clear differences between different parts of the organisation.

A clearer decision-making foundation with Workplace Adequacy™ Survey

This is where Workplace Adequacy™ Survey became an important tool. By collecting employee perspectives in a structured and relevant way, the municipality gained a clearer baseline view of organisational needs. The survey tool made it possible to identify both overall patterns and specific requirements from different parts of the organisation. This created better conditions for separating need-to-haves from nice-to-haves and prioritising the measures that would have the greatest impact on the future municipal building.

That is what makes Workplace Adequacy™ Survey valuable in complex workplace projects. It is not just a survey, but a decision-support tool for workplace strategy. In Upplands Väsby’s case, it helped create a more accurate basis for sizing, diversification, neighbourhoods, clustering and zoning in the new municipal building.

Built on the principles of Workplace Adequacy™

Workplace Adequacy™ Survey can also be understood in relation to the principles of the Workplace Adequacy™ framework. In brief, the framework is about sizing the workplace correctly, diversifying the workplace, enabling collaboration and increasing usability, with insight through participation as the foundation. In practice, this means the workplace needs to be designed around real needs, offer the right variety of settings, support collaboration patterns and be easy to use in everyday work. To do that well, reliable input is needed from the people who actually use the workplace.

For Upplands Väsby, this became especially relevant because the municipal building needs to work for many different functions within the same building. With the help of Workplace Adequacy™ Survey, it became easier to translate complex needs into a more structured decision-making foundation. This gave the municipality better conditions to prioritise effectively early in the process and to create a workplace concept grounded in the reality of the organisation.

The value in practice

The value of the tool lies not only in the analysis itself, but also in the stronger foundation it creates for future decisions. In a project with many stakeholders, high requirements and broad organisational complexity, it becomes especially important to have a foundation that contributes clarity, structure and alignment. This reduces the risk of poor prioritisation later in the process and makes it easier to stay focused on organisational needs as the project moves forward into planning, implementation and move-in.

Upplands Väsby therefore shows how Workplace Adequacy™ Survey can create value in projects where workplace questions are complex and many different needs need to be balanced at the same time. For municipalities and other organisations with multiple functions in the same work environment, the tool can contribute to a stronger decision-making foundation, clearer priorities and a more business-aligned workplace strategy.

Book a demo

Would you like to see how Workplace Adequacy™ Survey can help you create a clearer decision-making foundation for a new municipal building, office or other complex workplace project? Book a demo.