RIBA’s latest barometer of business sentiment in the architecture sector has found an increase in optimism compared with the previous month – but workloads and staffing levels are still expected to fall in the coming quarter.

The institute’s Future Trends survey responses for November found 21% of practices expect workloads to increase over the coming three months, while 51% expect them to stay the same and 28% expect them to decrease.

Responses are used to produce the Workload Index, which now stands at -6 in an indication of negative expectations. However the figure is an improvement on October’s -8.

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