The workplace cul-de-sac: where next for workplace strategy?

Workplace as a specialist real estate industry activity is relatively new – less than four decades old. It is a strategic activity which helps prepare occupier organisations for the future by providing strategic briefs of requirements, by challenging accepted business practices and operational matters, and by contributing to tri-lateral initiatives with HR and IT to bring about business change.

In this short space of time much has been achieved. Workplace has helped corporate occupiers navigate various shifting agendas, leading to occupational flexibility, enhanced specification, agile workstyles, the integration of work and technology, space optimisation, quality of fitout and workplace productivity have all greatly improved in recent decades.

The result? The corporate office today is an order of magnitude better than it was in, say, 1986. Offices designed in the 1960s and 1970s were, by and large, grim, mean, grey and dull; full of hierarchy and sub-division, and completely lacking in amenity. They were oppressive and the work often repetitive.

From the perspective of 2026, it is fair to say that these shifting agendas have all contributed to a rapidly improving workplace for most. Despite the incessant noise around workplace satisfaction, tangible progress has been made on all of these fronts: today’s workplace is designed, delivered and managed an order of magnitude better than before the 1990s.

But I have a sense, having experienced the whole four decades of change, that Workplace finds itself today stuck in a cul-de-sac. In particular, it seems that Workplace has evolved very little since the Covid-19 pandemic. New ideas and innovation seem in short supply.

The state of current thinking

It is becoming clear that much post-pandemic thinking is recycled from the past, or does not stand up to scrutiny, or in the extreme amounts to psycho-babble. Compared to the workplace-changing agendas listed above, what is the workplace agenda today? I really do not know.

Despite this falling off of thinking (if my thesis is correct), we are inundated with publications, reports, articles and posts all prognosticating on the future of the Workplace. Everyday there is a stream of new output claiming to have a new insight. And much of this output shamelessly uses the term ‘research’ to describe their thoughts. The depressing fact is that the combined contribution of all this output to the advancement of knowledge and practice in Workplace is very slight.

What is for sure is that most workplace discourse today revolves around tactical interior design matters. Mantras become unquestioned orthodoxy: no evidence is needed it seems, to discuss a workplace ‘truth’. Take the following.

The workplace as ‘an experience’. People go to work because they must. I’ve yet to meet an office worker who relishes their workplace experience as they board the 07:15 from the burbs. What does ‘experience’ mean here?

Designing for biophilia. Or providing plants to enrich the workplace. Strategy? Or common sense? We’ve known the restorative qualities of plants for decades; but CFOs take pleasure in shrinking overheads with fewer/no plants.

Designing for multiple generations. One of the richest seems of psycho-babble; the notion that arbitrarily drawn lines in time delineate people with different and discrete needs.

Health and wellbeing. The modern office is probably the safest, most healthy, most intensely managed work environment ever created by mankind. Surely we’re just doing incremental changes now?

Human-centric design. A wholly vacuous term.

In short, the post-pandemic debate has been largely circular; recycled and re-imagined from the past. None of the mantras listed above address strategic Workplace issues; they are tactical, interior design issues, and that is fine. But that is not the role of Workplace.

In short, we have not moved very far from where we were in 2020. Welcome to the cul-de-sac.

The focus on interior design issues has led to a near total neglect of the need for a deep discussion about work itself. Yet fundamental changes are taking place in work and in our engagement with it.

Looking beyond interior design issues

Workers deserted their offices in 2020 because they were told to by the government. But the reason they failed to return later was not because their offices were too cold or too hot, nor because of the distractions and interruptions; nor due to a shortage of meeting rooms. No, they stayed at home to escape routinised work and suffocating, out-of-date management regimes. Home working offered freedom and privacy, the office meant meddling management and pointless processes.

The fact is that, for many people, for much of the time, office work is mundane, it is routine, it is pressured. And much more importantly than this, their daily experience of work is determined less by the hermetically sealed environment of space planning, ergonomics, air quality, noise and so on, and much more by the culture of the organisation and the relationship they have with their jobs and colleagues as well as their personal circumstances and preferences.

There is also a shifting attitude to work itself: the work ethic is changing, radically. And the notion of collective endeavour is becoming an historic novelty. The pandemic has reinforced a longer term decline in the protestant work ethic. Most workplace discussion takes place in the first person and there is virtually no commentary on what is best for ‘us’ or for ‘our’ organisations. Jobs have become little more than short-term contracts and there is falling mutual investment in training and development.

Workplace continues to deal with the symptoms rather than causes of dissatisfaction; the real causes lie in work itself and how it is changing, rather than in the place of work. And therein lies the challenge for Workplace: how to take a more strategic role in corporate decision-making to ensure that workplace transformation involves the software of workplace culture as well as the hardware of facilities services.

What strategic decision-making looks like today

So what should the Workplace agenda be today, in 2026?

As discussed in my recent book, A History of the Office and Office Work, one of the most powerful outcomes of the digital era for the office has been the democratisation of work. The historic social structure of corporate organisations with layers of deference being expressed between different classes and roles has been replaced with a workforce that increasingly exercises choice and manages itself. Growing numbers of technology-enabled workers exercise choice in how, when and for whom they work.

This process will extend in the network era ahead as more self-managing specialists replace hierarchies and task-driven workers; all bound together by a common sense of purpose and shared interest. Traditional notions of company structures and career paths will be swept away. Networks will be the defining feature of the office economy. Self-managing specialists will demand a different approach from the organisations they belong to. Instead of a one-size-fits-all style, organisations will need to offer personalised support and development. In some senses the emphasis will shift from managing people to suit the organisation’s objectives to managing people to suit individual objectives.

Work and culture will need to evolve to meet these challenges, and once the nature of the relationship between organisation and worker becomes clearer, then we will better understand what kind of physical spaces are required to support work.

Dr Rob Harris is Principal of Ramidus Consulting Limited. He is a writer, consultant and analyst in the built environment sector, where he has spent four decades advising developers, investors, occupiers and public sector bodies. Rob has published three books, most recently ‘A History of the Office and Office Work: from Castle to Condominium’.