We've time to imagine a healthier relationship between working and the workplace

Working in a space where software innovation meets corporate real estate means that I’ve invested a lot of time over the last few years thinking of ways we can use our buildings better. More efficiently, more imaginatively and more sustainably. Our focus, like most of the rest of the world, has been on encouraging people into the office. Offices were the arena where work happened and I didn’t think we’d ever be in the business of holding them at arm's length. But it’s March 27th 2025 today, and the world we have created since COVID is pretty different. 

We’re still going to need our workplaces and spaces, but we’re not going back to the status quo. My business isn’t and neither is yours. We need to find a new relationship with working and the workplace.

‘Why’ and the workplace

If it’s possible to set aside the tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic for a while, we can start to look at some of the positives to emerge, because I think we’ve seen glimpses of some better ways to be. After 200 years, we’ve finally put presenteeism behind us. In the professional and knowledge sectors (at least), we’re now trusted to get our jobs done wherever we are. We’ve found new ways to engage - more authentically ourselves, more patient, more smiles - on those endless video calls, now meeting in person as well virtually, adding back the human need to physically interact.

I’ll take my crises one at a time, but I’m also mindful that we’ve got a climate challenge ahead of us. It can only help that we’ve learned how personal transport and travel has a real and immediate cost to society and proven that much of it is habit, not necessity. 

We’ve collectively proved that working from home is doable, for most of us. We don’t need to commute to do our jobs. Silicon Valley icons such as Google and Twitter and financial giants like JP Morgan Stanley and Chase Manhattan engaged remote working during and immediately in the aftermath as the new normal, however aggressive RTO strategies are now being enacted or seriously considered by many.  

Some of the trends during COVID felt good. We found ways to work, partly by letting in, not holding out on, our lives and families. I liked the way I was given virtual tours of penthouses and sheds, and got to recognise countless partners, kids and cats, now that trend is definitely diminishing as pre-COVID norms are gaining momentum.

Remote or Hybrid working is not without its problems. Most of our homes were not designed to be full-time workspaces, although many have now adapted. Our broadband wasn’t built to differentiate between Zoom and Netflix. And there’s plenty still to innovate and learn about the culture and practise of homeworking. For instance:

| Where are our boundaries now?

| When we blur those boundaries between working and living, it’s easy to become disoriented. When to work and when to stop? When to break, and when to press on? 

| How do we devolve authority alongside accountability?

Questions I asked myself back in 2020, are still relevant today.

Some paradoxes are emerging. We’ve little choice in becoming more flexible. There’s greater trust placed in us, but potentially also greater expectation placed on us. These burden our mental health, personal resilience and sense of wellbeing. We need to evolve management behaviours and build stronger engagement to offset these. We need to amplify a re-emerging sense of community and extend it from the office into the home. 

Organisations feel obliged to tell us what to do. We may still be able to insist on certain rights and privileges. But a better way may be not to obey, or demand, but participate. Be the agent of change. Know that no one has all of the answers, and everyone even 5 years later are still feeling their way.  

If home working is part of building back better, where does the workplace fit?

Home working for at least part of the working week has continued for many of us, as have coffee shops, churches and hotels become co-working locations for the foreseeable future.

So do we need the office at all?

I think we do. While some of us enjoyed the forced retreat, most started to tire of living like a hermit. We craved a meaningful level of warm human contact. The natural breaks that happen in office life - coffees, chance encounters - are scarce when you work at home. And we’ll know of others with jobs like ours whose personal circumstances make their homes a pressure cooker and escape a necessity. 

We’ll continue to need the professional workplace. The questions are when, how often and - a more fundamental starting point - why?

The Workplace as a venue. 

If we don’t need to travel to the traditional office to get work done, then what is its purpose in 2025 and beyond? Here are some questions I think we all need to answer.

What’s the ‘why’ of the office now? 

Many prestige businesses have prestige offices at prestige addresses. That’s to do with presence and reputation - it’s branding. 99.99 percent of businesses do pretty well without them. A swanky address that looks good on a business card is not in itself a sufficient ‘why’. So what is the purpose of offices now?

How often will you want or need to go there?

I’m in conversation with large professional businesses who are dividing their workforce into teams. Each team has bookable office days and - within a bookable day - bookable neighbourhoods or zones. It’s a pragmatic way to orchestrate a hybrid workforce. In these schemes there might be two or three days in any week when the office is open for you and your colleagues. How do you feel about that? Enough? Too much? In-flexible?

How can you feel a sense of wellbeing there? 

Emotions are biological algorithms for evaluating the world around us. Back then, we were feeling grief and fear as RTO was being considered. Now there is a sense of normality, yet we haven't returned to pre-COVID behaviours, and our concerns are not for our safety in the workplace, moreover our wellbeing. When you’re calm and away from work or life pressures, it’s worth paying some attention to those feelings. Because we have choices where and how we work, and we need to exercise our personal agency to make good ones. 

Which elements of the old way are essential to your sense of wellbeing? How much of the hybrid, RTO and remote policy works for you? Take those insights continually into your business, and get into the conversation, frequently revisiting the subject. There is much that employers, individuals and technology can and should do to help everyone find a balanced equilibrium. 

Here’s a thought experiment and metaphor to help us radically reimagine the workplace:

| Why do we still value real shopping excursions, when there is a universe of choice and convenience online?

Whether it’s the artisan bakery in town or the big shopping galleria, it’s because they provide such vivid and valuable experiences. There is a feast for the senses. There is expertise there. There are surprises. And there is immediate fulfilment. You can combine experiences - shopping, eating, entertainment - spontaneously and in infinite combinations. They have a clear ‘why’. 

To understand the role of the professional workplace, perhaps we must re-imagine it as a venue, just like that galleria. A place to spend some of our time, mindfully, for experiences that aren’t available to us any place else, where productivity and wellbeing meet generating excellence. 

Designing smarter spaces now and for the future

It’s now obvious that digital transformation in the workplace is expected, as are Smart Buildings and the obvious benefits. However, we’ve underestimated and under imagined almost everything about it. 

| What experiences could the workplace deliver, that you just can’t get anywhere else? 

Whatever comes next has to fully embrace those aspects of community, individual wellbeing and agency - terms we’ve only recently begun to fully understand. With those in place can we move on to radically re-imagine personal and group productivity and job fulfilment and how these, in turn, help us recruit, nurture and retain our best talent?

We’re in the business of building better relationships between humans and their workplace, which includes helping them find their spaces and their tribes. It also means helping them - us - to be productive and feel our wellbeing is acknowledged.  

The tech can help you answer four key questions - where are you now, where do you want to be, what do you need, and when do you need it - and then assemble that massive (and ever changing) jigsaw puzzle to everyone’s benefit. 

You might need access to expertise, a learning experience, a place to play and create, or a space to tune out and concentrate. Right now, you might just need a guaranteed desk, meeting room or a space that supports a team stand-up. What the tech achieves is up to you. 

Digital transformation has to begin at the grassroots, imagined with people like us, for people like us. Technology should follow - not lead - that process. 

Presenteeism shouldn't just be a tick in the RTO policy box, it should drive an organisational benefit, add value to personal experiences and be met with flexibility and understanding as we are still evolving, we may never stop.

And organisations will need to fully invest in it. There are tempting cost savings to be made by shrinking office space, and some of that will need to be reinvested in continuous change. Local and global economies need people to use office spaces and city centres, we have to appreciate where RTO policy have become mandatory it isn't always the employer driving the agenda.

We’ll definitely need investment in the digital experience both in the workplace and we need to make buildings smarter, more sustainable and everywhere else we choose to work from. We might need investment in the travel experience. Maybe even in the fabric of our homes. 

No one knows more than we collectively do. No one’s experience is more relevant or valid. Imagination is in all of us. So - over to you.