One of the things I've always enjoyed about workplace strategy is that, every so often, the data quietly undermines the certainty of the headlines.
For the past three or four years we've been told, almost weekly, that the great return to the office is either gathering unstoppable momentum or destined to fail spectacularly. Depending on which article happens to appear in your feed, remote working is either breathing its last breath or the office has become obsolete. The conversation has become increasingly polarized, with both sides finding evidence to reinforce their own position while conveniently overlooking anything that doesn't.
Then, every now and again, a piece of independent research appears that isn't trying to prove a point.
Last week Professor Nick Bloom shared the latest figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, showing that despite the highly publicized return-to-office mandates, a greater proportion of Americans worked from home during 2025 than they did in 2024. Bloomberg reported much the same findings. The increase isn't dramatic, but it is enough to make you pause and question whether the narrative we've all been hearing really reflects what is happening across the wider economy.
What interested me wasn't whether this somehow proves that remote working has "won". It doesn't. Equally, it doesn't suggest that offices have become any less important. What it does suggest is that we may finally be reaching a period where organizations are settling into operating models that genuinely work for their own circumstances rather than reacting to headlines or following whatever the latest trend happens to be.
That certainly reflects the conversations we've been having with clients.
Over the last year or so I've noticed something interesting. Whether the discussion starts with a lease expiry, a relocation project, rapid business growth, an office that feels too full, or one that sits frustratingly underused, the conversation almost always ends up in the same place. Clients are no longer asking whether hybrid working is the right answer. For most organizations that question has already been answered, at least for now.
Instead, they're trying to understand whether the workplace they are investing in is actually aligned with the way their business operates today, and perhaps more importantly, how it is likely to operate over the next five or ten years.
Those are much more interesting questions. They're asking whether they have enough collaboration space rather than enough desks. They're trying to understand whether a relocation should simply recreate the office they already have or become an opportunity to improve the way teams work together. Others are questioning whether they're about to invest millions in real estate without really knowing how much space they'll need once their business evolves over the next few years.
On the surface those sound like completely different challenges, yet they usually lead back to exactly the same place.....
What does this business actually need from its workplace?
I've often found that once you can answer that question with confidence, many of the other decisions become considerably easier. The discussion moves away from opinions about attendance and towards evidence about work itself. Which activities benefit most from people being together? Which tasks are equally effective elsewhere? How do teams collaborate? What kinds of spaces genuinely support those interactions? Only once those questions have been answered does it really make sense to decide how much office space is required, what it should look like, or even where it should be located.
Maybe that's why the latest statistics don't surprise me nearly as much as they seem to surprise some commentators.
Different organizations will continue to arrive at different answers because their businesses are different. Their cultures are different. Their clients are different. Their people are different. Expecting one universal solution was probably never realistic in the first place.
What does feel different today is the quality of the conversation. Compared with two or three years ago, there seems to be far less interest in debating whether people should work remotely or from the office, and far more interest in understanding how work is actually being carried out and what that means for future investment decisions. To me, that's a healthy shift because it moves the discussion away from ideology and back towards business.
Perhaps that's what the latest data is really telling us. Not that one side of the debate has finally won, but that many organizations have recently stopped arguing altogether. Instead, they're getting on with the far more valuable task of understanding their own business, making evidence-based decisions, and creating workplaces that genuinely support the way their people work.
Personally, I think that's where the workplace conversation should always have been.
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.