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.
Purpose Over Presence
If you look closely at most organisations struggling with attendance right now, you’ll notice something quite consistent. The problem isn’t that people don’t want to come in. It’s that they don’t see the point of coming in. And that’s a very different challenge from the one many senior leaders think they’re dealing with.
There’s been an extraordinary amount of energy spent arguing about the “right number of days” in the office, as if the friction around hybrid working can be solved by adjusting a dial marked “attendance.” Three days. Two days. Anchor days. Mandated days. “At manager discretion.” “Flexible within teams.” Every variation has been tested somewhere, and yet the same underlying issue keeps surfacing: days alone are not a strategy. They never have been.
The real conversation isn’t about presence. It’s about purpose.
People are perfectly willing to commute when they know the day will be valuable. They resist it when the day is badly designed, unstructured, or—most common of all—no different from what they could have done better at home.
And that’s the leadership blind spot hybrid work keeps exposing: people aren’t resisting the office—they’re resisting a day without purpose.
We’ve entered a world where the office is no longer the default location for work. Its value is no longer assumed. It must be earned. And that shift calls for a much more honest conversation about how workplaces function, how teams behave, and what organisations are actually asking people to do when they make the effort to show up.
The Days Fixation: A Very Expensive Distraction
One of the most counterproductive trends of the last two years is the obsession with day-counting. Attendance has become something organisations try to measure like timesheets, rather than something they design like a product. And this is where so many companies go wrong. They tally bodies, rather than interrogate value.
A policy can force presence, but it cannot create engagement, momentum or connection. Numbers might go up temporarily under mandate, but they almost always fall again once the novelty (or the pressure) fades. That’s because people aren’t responding to the policy—they’re responding to the experience.
Whenever attendance dips, leaders often assume the fix is to adjust the rules. In reality, the rules were never the lever. The experience was.
The question companies should be asking is remarkably simple, yet rarely asked with sincerity: “If we’re asking people to come in, what are they coming in for?”
What Actually Brings People In
Across client projects, global surveys and WEX platform analytics, the patterns are consistent. People will enthusiastically come into a workplace when three things are true: they know who they’ll see, they know what they’ll achieve, and they trust that the space will support the work that actually benefits from being done together.
Collaboration is always the first driver—not the vague “we collaborate better in person,” but the specific types of work where being together changes the outcome: problem-solving, sprint planning, decision-making, design refinement, knowledge exchange, early project alignment, cross-functional sessions, mentoring conversations, and the kind of unstructured dialogue that simply cannot be replicated via video calls.
The second driver is relationships. Humans want to feel part of something. Belonging is not fluffy; it is a hard business advantage. People come in when they know their team, their peers, their “work friends,” and their leaders will be in the same space. That sense of rhythm and presence matters more than most organisations realise. When presence becomes a lottery, attendance collapses.
And the third driver is clarity. People need to know what the in-office day is for. They need structure, predictability, and a sense that the effort of commuting translates into value. When the purpose is clear, attendance becomes natural. When it is ambiguous, attendance becomes negotiable.
The Uncomfortable Truth: Most Offices Simply Don’t Work Anymore
If we’re honest, many offices still reflect a world where individual focus work dominated. The work has changed, but the workspace hasn’t. And this mismatch is at the heart of attendance challenges.
Rows of desks. Meeting rooms that are always full or always too big. Poor acoustics. Technology that works beautifully until six people join from home. Hybrid meetings where half the team can’t see the whiteboard. Neighbourhoods that don’t feel like neighbourhoods. Collaboration spaces that are either too few or poorly located. Focus spaces that are noisy. Social spaces that don’t feel social. It’s a familiar story.
Employees are not irrational—if the office makes their work harder, they’ll avoid it. If the office supports their work, they’ll use it.
Design and behaviour are inseparable. A workplace designed for yesterday’s work patterns will never achieve today’s expectations.
Why Activity-Based Working (ABW) Consistently Outperforms Traditional Models
One of the strongest conclusions from the last decade of workplace transformation is that ABW is not a trend; it is the most pragmatic response to the way work actually happens now. It recognises that different activities require different environments and that people perform best when they can choose the right setting for each task.
In organisations where ABW is implemented intentionally, we see measurable gains—higher attendance, stronger collaboration, greater satisfaction and a more efficient footprint. It works because it respects the reality of how modern teams operate: dynamically, socially, and across varied modes of work.
The most successful ABW environments aren’t flashy; they’re thoughtful. They are built around neighbourhoods that anchor teams, collaboration zones that feel truly shared, quiet spaces that protect focus, hybrid meeting rooms that support equity, and design principles that make movement through the space intuitive.
When the workplace feels purposeful, people treat it that way.
The Behavioural Anchor: The Role of Team Agreements
Even the best-designed workplace fails without behavioural alignment. This is the part of hybrid that trips up most organisations—not because people are resistant, but because they’re unsure.
When are we in? What do hybrid meetings look like? How do we protect focus time? What’s our availability rhythm? How do we support new joiners? Where does mentoring happen?What does “being present” actually mean?
Without answers, teams create their own interpretations. And this fragmentation is the silent killer of hybrid performance.
Team Agreements solve this by creating shared norms. They bring clarity to the very areas that hybrid work exposes: communication patterns, collaboration rhythms, in-person rituals, expectations around availability, mentoring commitments and how the space should be used. When teams agree on how they work, the workplace becomes predictable. And predictability creates trust—one of the most powerful drivers of attendance and performance.
A Practical, Honest Roadmap Forward
There is no shortcut here. Organisations that succeed with hybrid and workplace transformation follow a clear pattern—one rooted in evidence, not assumptions.
They begin by understanding the work at a granular level: the activities, the collaboration patterns, the high-value interactions, the barriers, the frustrations and the moments where proximity truly matters. They then design around those insights, not around hierarchy or legacy layouts. They create environments that support performance, not presenteeism. They engage their people early and build behavioural norms that reinforce the space rather than undermine it. And they test, refine and iterate, rather than leaping to a full overhaul without learning.
They treat the workplace as a system, not a building.
The Real Shift Leaders Need To Make
If hybrid has taught us anything, it’s this: attendance cannot be mandated into existence. It must be designed into existence. People are willing to come in—happily, consistently, enthusiastically—when the workplace helps them do better work, build better relationships, and feel more connected to something meaningful.
The organisations that embrace this truth are the ones seeing attendance stabilise, performance rise and culture strengthen. The ones still focused purely on enforcement are fighting a losing battle.
A workplace earns its occupancy. And when it earns it, it doesn’t need to chase it.
Hybrid working did not just change where people work. It fundamentally changed what the office is for.
That distinction matters, because many workplace projects are still being triggered, scoped and designed as if the office’s role has stayed the same. It has not.
Across organizations, work patterns and attendance have settled into something predictable enough to design for. Yet the physical workplace, in many cases, still reflects assumptions that belong to a pre-hybrid world.
This is why so many organizations find themselves renovating, consolidating or relocating offices that no longer work, without being entirely sure what they should replace them with. The challenge is not lack of effort. It is that the starting point is wrong.
The legacy trap, now exposed by empty space
For many organizations, the trigger for a workplace project is no longer growth or expansion. It is underutilization. Empty desks. Floors that feel quiet and soulless, even on core days. Senior leaders asking why so much space is sitting idle while costs remain fixed.
These signals often lead to the same internal response. Conversations begin about how to make the office more attractive or how much space could be reduced. Designers are engaged. Early layouts are explored. Often this happens before anyone has a clear understanding of how the office is actually being used, or how it needs to be configured to support the business going forward.
Hybrid broke the old model of work. Empty space is no longer a mystery. It is evidence that the office does not align with how work happens now.
Treating empty space as a design problem misses the point. It is a strategy signal.
“We do not know what we need yet” is exactly the moment to start
One of the most common responses when workplace strategy is suggested early in a project is, “We do not know what we need yet, so we are consulting internally first.” It sounds reasonable, but in practice it often delays clarity rather than creating it.
Not knowing what you need is not a reason to wait. It is the strongest possible reason to bring in workplace strategy early.
Internal consultation without structure and external appraisal tends to reinforce existing assumptions. Leaders project what they think should happen. Teams describe what they are used to. Opinions vary widely, and without a framework, those views rarely converge into something actionable. The result is a vague brief that forces designers to interpret uncertainty rather than resolve it.
Workplace strategy exists precisely to deal with this uncertainty. It does not assume answers. It creates the process for finding them in the right order.
What a workplace strategist actually does, in practical terms
For facilities management and real estate teams, workplace strategy is often misunderstood as something abstract or overly focused on softer topics. In reality, it is a highly practical discipline.
A workplace strategist focuses on understanding how people work, their activities and interactions, rather than how they adapt to poorly fitting space. It determines what people come into the office to do, which tasks genuinely benefit from being together, and which do not. It translates hybrid work patterns into spatial demand and tests assumptions before they are locked into design.
The output is not a vision statement. It is clarity. Clarity about what the office must support, what it no longer needs to support, and how space should be configured to match actual use.
In simple terms, workplace strategy reduces the risk of designing the wrong thing.
From activities to worksettings, where design starts to make sense
One of the most valuable outcomes of early workplace strategy is the ability to link activities directly to worksettings. This is where design decisions become grounded rather than speculative. We regularly see offices with large collaboration areas that remain empty, while teams struggle to find quiet space for focused work or suitable rooms for hybrid meetings.
Hybrid work has widened the range of activities people perform in the office. Collaboration, focused work, project sessions, hybrid meetings and informal discussions all place very different demands on space. Treating them as interchangeable leads to environments that look efficient on paper but fail in practice.
When activity patterns are understood, the workplace can be designed with accuracy. The right balance of focus areas, collaboration spaces and meeting rooms becomes clear. The size, type and configuration of those spaces are driven by use rather than convention. Teams are located in ways that support interaction where it matters, and separation where it does not.
Good design follows activity, not desk count or legacy ratios. Workplace strategy makes that possible.
Why workplace strategy strengthens architects rather than competing with them
There is sometimes a concern that bringing in workplace strategy complicates the design process or constrains architectural creativity. In practice, the opposite is true.
Strategy gives architects a clear, evidence-based brief. It removes ambiguity. It reduces late-stage changes driven by newly discovered requirements. It allows design teams to focus their creativity on solving the right problems than being forced to interpret uncertainty.
From a project governance perspective, strategy protects the design process. It creates alignment early, supports decision making, and provides a defensible rationale for design choices. For facilities and real estate teams, this clarity is invaluable when navigating internal approvals and budget scrutiny.
Strategy does not slow projects down. It prevents them from going in the wrong direction.
The cost of skipping strategy is rarely visible until it is too late
Organizations that bypass early workplace strategy often encounter the same issues after move-in. Collaboration spaces sit empty while focus desks are oversubscribed. Hybrid meetings struggle because rooms were not designed for them. Teams feel disconnected despite their new spaces. Space reductions fail to deliver expected savings because demand was misunderstood.
These problems are rarely the result of poor design execution. They are almost always the result of decisions made too early, with too little insight.
Most workplace problems are locked in long before construction starts.
A better starting point for workplace projects
The most effective workplace projects now begin with understanding, not layouts. They accept uncertainty as normal and use strategy to resolve it. They focus on how work happens today and how the space needs to support it in the future, not how it used to happen. And they allow design to proceed with confidence once the brief is clear.
The most effective projects bring workplace strategy in before the brief is written, not after the design has started.
For facilities and real estate leaders, early workplace strategy is no longer an optional extra. It is a practical tool for shaping better outcomes, reducing risk and ensuring that investment in the workplace actually delivers value.