The Little Things We Don’t Talk About
There are more choices than ever in how we go about our work. Should this be an email, a Teams message, or a phone call? Is now a good time to interrupt? Should I schedule time or send a quick message? Where is it okay to take a virtual call?
For some people, talking through these details can feel unnecessary. “We have work to do, so why do we need to discuss exactly how we’re going to do it?” Yet most of us develop preferences and habits around these decisions whether we discuss them or not.
Don’t text me about work. Call me if it’s urgent. Send me a Teams message before stopping by. Put time on my calendar rather than asking if I’m free.
None of these preferences are inherently right or wrong, and they don’t all need to become rules. The challenge is that our teammates are developing their own systems too, and our systems don’t always match.
As the number of ways we communicate and work together has grown, there is simply more to misunderstand. Talking about some of these seemingly small details can make it easier to establish what works for the team, rather than leaving everyone to figure it out individually.
When We Can’t Just Pick It Up Along the Way
For much of our working lives, many of the everyday practices that helped teams work together didn’t need to be formally discussed. Some expectations came from the organization or manager, while others were simply picked up by working alongside colleagues and observing how they communicated, organized their work, and navigated the workday.
We could see when someone was busy. We learned who preferred a quick conversation and who wanted an email. We noticed where conversations happened and how the team generally operated. While there less platforms for communicating, there was still plenty of room for misunderstanding, but many of these unwritten practices were visible.
As more of our work happens through technology and teams work across different locations and schedules, there is more that we can’t learn simply by observing. At the same time, people have more options for developing their own ways of communicating, organizing information, and accomplishing their work.
What works perfectly well for one person may not work particularly well when it intersects with someone else’s system. That doesn’t mean everyone needs to work in the same way.
It does mean there may be value in talking about things we once expected people to simply figure out.
How Team Norms Make the Invisible “Onboardable”
In our work, we often recommend team norm conversations as one way to provide some structure for these discussions. The conversation might include how different communication platforms are used, when people are generally available for collaboration, expectations around responsiveness, meeting practices, or how the team prefers to use different spaces within the workplace.
Knowing that an organization’s working hours are 8:00 to 5:00, for example, doesn’t necessarily tell someone whether 8:00 is an optimal time to schedule meetings. Talking about these details gives people an opportunity to share what works for them while also considering what works for everyone else.
From there, the team can establish what makes sense most of the time, grounded in organizational guidance and with room for flexibility when business needs require it.
Documenting what emerges can also make the team’s unwritten practices easier for new employees to understand. Instead of spending months observing, interpreting, and trying to figure out how the team operates, they have a clearer starting point.
As new people join, priorities shift, and new technologies are introduced, these conversations can be revisited, allowing the team’s ways of working to evolve alongside the people and work.
Do Team Norms Mean More Rules?
One understandable concern is that discussing this level of detail could create unnecessary rigidity. Does every communication preference or workplace behavior really need its own rule? The purpose isn’t to create a policy for every interaction or accommodate every individual preference.
It’s to build consensus and align on expectations for how the team can work together effectively, while being supportive of different working styles. Sometimes, a point of friction that has persisted for some time can be relatively simple to address once it is brought into the open.
In one workshop, a team realized their standing meeting consistently overlapped with the on-site staff’s break. Those employees had been quietly missing their only opportunity for lunch, assuming leadership already knew. Once it was raised, the leader could consider whether another time would work better. The change barely registered for anyone else, but it meaningfully improved morale for the people affected.
Team Norms Can Support Workplace Change
We often recommend these conversations alongside workplace change initiatives, when teams are already adapting to new environments or ways of working. They can help connect changes to the physical workplace with the everyday behaviors that make those environments work.
Making time for conversations doesn't require a workplace change initiative or a formal Team Norms process. Any team can become a little more curious about the invisible practices shaping how its members work together.
Better Teamwork Starts with Better Understanding
Having conversations about how we work may require a little more openness than some of us are accustomed to. It can feel unnecessary to explain something that seems obvious, particularly when teams have managed for years without discussing these details.
Yet the way we work has changed. We have more platforms, more locations, more flexibility, and more individual ways of navigating the workday. Making some of our assumptions and preferences visible can help us understand where they align and where they don’t.
The goal isn’t to discuss everything. It’s to talk about enough of the right things that people can spend a little less time navigating one another’s invisible systems and more time focused on the work itself.
Want to Have Better Conversations About How Your Teams Work?
CRUX helps organizations and teams establish clearer ways of working as part of workplace strategy and change.
Team Norm conversations can help make expectations more visible, support new ways of working, and give teams a practical framework for discussing how they communicate, collaborate, and use the workplace.
For many years, workplace decisions largely sat within corporate real estate, facilities, or HR functions. The office itself was often viewed as a relatively fixed asset; something operational teams inherited rather than actively shaped.
That is changing rapidly.
Increasingly, the most forward-thinking COOs and CFOs are recognizing that workplace strategy has become deeply connected to operational effectiveness. It now influences productivity, collaboration, decision-making, knowledge sharing, employee experience, and ultimately organizational performance itself. Yet despite this shift, many organizations are still asking the wrong questions.
“How do we get people back into the office?”
“How many days should employees attend?”
“How much space can we reduce?”
These are understandable questions, particularly given the pressure many businesses face around real estate costs and utilization. But they are still secondary questions. The more important question is this:
What conditions enable people and teams to perform at their best?
Once you begin there, the conversation changes entirely.
Workplace Strategy Is No Longer Just a Real Estate Decision
The traditional office was largely designed around individual process work. It reflected an era dominated by paper-based systems, hierarchy, supervision, and fixed workstations. Efficiency was often measured through visibility and occupancy.
Most organizations now operate through collaboration, digital workflows, rapid communication, cross-functional interaction, and distributed teams. Many employees spend less time carrying out repetitive desk-based tasks and more time solving problems, coordinating activity, sharing knowledge, and making decisions.
And yet many workplaces still operate as though none of this has changed.
Today’s Work Requires a Different Workplace
This disconnect is where many workplace challenges begin.
Organizations often find themselves dealing with underutilized offices, fragmented collaboration, weaker onboarding experiences, reduced knowledge exchange, and employees who feel more productive elsewhere. In many cases, the issue is not attendance itself, but rather that the workplace has not evolved to support the type of work people are actually doing.
This is why workplace strategy has increasingly become an operational concern. For COOs especially, workplace decisions now directly influence how effectively the organization functions. They affect:
speed of execution,
quality of collaboration,
leadership visibility,
cultural alignment,
talent retention,
and organizational agility.
The companies navigating this most successfully are moving away from broad, generic workplace policies and instead developing evidence-based strategies built around work itself.
That means understanding:
which activities genuinely benefit from in-person interaction,
which tasks are more effectively completed remotely,
how teams collaborate across functions,
and what types of environments best support different forms of work.
Importantly, they also recognize that different teams operate differently.
An engineering function does not work the same way as legal. Finance teams have different rhythms and requirements from marketing or client-facing groups. Trying to apply a single workplace model across an entire organization often creates friction rather than consistency.
Occupancy Alone Does Not Create Workplace Value
One of the biggest mistakes businesses continue to make is assuming that occupancy alone creates value. It simply does not.
People generally come into the office for specific reasons: collaboration, learning, mentoring, relationship building, problem-solving, social connection, and access to colleagues. If the environment does not meaningfully support those activities, attendance quickly begins to feel performative rather than purposeful.
This is one reason many return-to-office strategies have struggled to gain the traction intended. The focus has often been placed on policies before experience.
In reality, successful workplace strategies usually require a broader operational shift. The organizations making this transition effectively are not simply redesigning offices; they are redesigning behaviors, management practices, team agreements, technology experiences, and workplace protocols alongside the physical environment itself.
That is where change management becomes critical.
Why Change Management Matters to Workplace Strategy
A move away from assigned desks and traditional workplace structures requires employees and leaders to adopt new habits, new expectations, and often new leadership styles. Without support, many people simply revert to old behaviors within new spaces. This is why the most successful workplace transformations tend to involve:
strong leadership alignment,
employee engagement,
clear communication,
team-level agreements,
and structured change support throughout the transition.
The Workplace as Operational Infrastructure
Ultimately, the office is no longer simply a place people attend. It has become part of the operational infrastructure of the business.
The organizations gaining the greatest advantage right now are not necessarily the ones with the most ambitious mandates or the most expensive offices. They are the ones creating environments that genuinely support how work happens today - while also strengthening culture, connection, innovation, and organizational performance.
For COOs and CFOs, that presents a significant opportunity. Because very few operational decisions influence people, performance, cost, culture, and agility as broadly as workplace strategy now does.
The companies that understand this earliest are likely to be the ones that outperform over the next decade.
If this resonates with you, reach out for a discovery conversation on what the next steps should be.