One of the biggest misconceptions in workplace strategy is that it starts with design.
It doesn’t.
It’s easy to jump straight to polished renderings, attractive worksettings, and “Here’s one we did earlier” examples - they certainly catch the uninformed eye during the procurement process - but workplace strategy is not interior design applied at scale.
A successful workplace begins with understanding the business itself.
Why Workplace Strategy Begins Before Design
Before we can talk about layouts, furniture, or aesthetics, we need to understand:
How people actually work
Where work happens most effectively
Which activities require in-person interaction
Who collaborates with whom
What prevents people from doing their best work
How culture, leadership, process, and technology influence performance
This discovery and diagnostic phase is the foundation of every successful workplace strategy.
Understanding How People and Organizations Work
Without it, organizations risk creating beautiful spaces that fail operationally because they were designed around assumptions, trends, or another company’s solution. What worked for one company may completely fail for another because every organization has different:
Work processes
Team dynamics
Cultural behaviors
Leadership styles
Collaboration patterns
Operational pressures
The workplace should be a response to those realities - not a copy-and-paste exercise.
Using Workplace Research to Inform Better Decisions
We spend significant time understanding the nature of work before developing solutions.
Through leadership interviews, manager discussions, workshops, activity analysis, collaboration mapping, and employee engagement, we build both a top-down and bottom-up understanding of the organization. Supported by our Workplace Experience Platform, this process allows us to capture work activities, interaction patterns, workplace preferences, operational challenges, and cultural dynamics quickly and at scale across entire businesses.
The result is not simply opinion or assumption, but meaningful evidence about how work is actually undertaken, where friction exists, and what employees and teams need in order to perform at their best.
These insights become the foundation for the wider project brief — informing workplace design, architectural planning, technology strategy, operational protocols, change management activities, and ultimately the real estate strategy itself.
Creating Workplaces That Support People and Performance
When workplace solutions are shaped through deep engagement and evidence-based understanding, the outcomes are typically more effective, better adopted by employees, and more closely aligned with the long-term objectives, culture, and ways of working of the organization.
Because the goal is not simply to create a space that looks impressive.
The goal is to create an environment that helps people:
Connect more effectively
Share knowledge
Mentor and learn
Focus deeply
Collaborate intentionally
Build stronger working relationships
Perform at their best
Good workplace strategy is people-centric, operationally informed, and evidence-based.
The aesthetics come later.
And when the groundwork has been done properly, the design becomes far more meaningful because it reflects the organization itself, not the latest workplace trend.
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.