Workplace Strategy Across the Atlantic: Different Histories, Shared Goals
As organizations continue to rethink the role of the office, it’s become clear that the path to modern workplace strategy differs markedly between the UK and the US. Both markets are now pursuing similar goals: more flexibility, more collaborative space, more value per square foot — but their starting points and trajectories have been very different.
Understanding those differences isn’t just an academic exercise. For organizations operating across both regions, a successful strategy needs to respect the local context, legal, cultural, and spatial.
At CRUX Workplace and IPWC, we’ve built our methodologies around exactly that: providing informed, grounded workplace strategy tailored to how each market has evolved.
UK Workplace Strategy: Building on a Culture of Flexibility
The UK has had flexible working legislation in place since 2003, and many employers were early adopters of remote and hybrid working models. Activity-Based Working (ABW) principles have long been integrated into office design, with progressive management styles enabling shared space use, non-territorial working, and a culture of trust allowing flexibility in the location of work.
When the pandemic arrived, the transition to mass remote work was not such a shock to the system for most professional services employees, it was an acceleration of an existing trajectory. As a result, today’s office strategies in the UK are often iterative rather than revolutionary.
Change management focuses on enhancements: refining worksettings, aligning environments with evolving team needs, and optimizing portfolios in a measured way.
At IPWC, our UK workplace practice reflects this maturity. Our methodology builds on what's already familiar to UK organizations, supporting evolution, not wholesale reinvention.
US Workplace Strategy: A Moment of Transformation
By contrast, many US organizations entered the pandemic with a more traditional office mindset. In-office attendance was the norm, with workspace design focused heavily on individual, task-based environments: cubicles, private offices, and assigned desks.
The sudden pivot to remote work exposed the limitations of those legacy layouts. Once associated with productivity, static environments quickly became redundant. As employees adapted to new ways of working, leadership teams were forced to reconsider long-held assumptions about visibility, presence, and performance.
This disruption created a need for deeper, more transformational change. In the US, workplace strategy has become a quantum leap: from fixed to flexible, from ownership to access, from layout to behavior.
At CRUX Workplace, we’ve developed a methodology tailored to this moment, supporting first-time adoption of ABW, defining new working norms, and helping organizations lead through uncertainty.
Global Workplace Strategy for a Distributed Workforce
For multinational organizations with offices across both the UK and the US, consistency is important — but so is local relevance.
A one-size-fits-all global workplace strategy risks falling flat in one market or the other.
Through our combined expertise, CRUX in the US, IPWC in the UK, we offer integrated, bi-regional support. That means:
Shared principles tailored to local expectations.
Aligned design frameworks with cultural nuance.
Unified reporting and benchmarking across geographies.
Workplace strategy is never just about space. It’s about people, context, and culture. And when those factors differ by country, your strategy should too.
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