'Workplace experience' has become the buzzword du jour. And like most buzzwords, it's been reduced to a checklist. The desk-booking app. The artisanal coffee. Wellness Wednesday. Tick the boxes, post the photo, call it done.
But here's what's really happened: we've thrown the pre-COVID office perks back on and dialled the volume up to 11 in a crazed attempt to lure everyone back. And now we're calling it 'experience.'
It's not. Ticking boxes doesn't create experience. It creates expectations. And when those expectations aren't met with something deeper, we're left with disillusionment dressed up in nice furniture.
What really shapes how a workplace feels isn't in the amenity catalogue. It's in the rhythms: the patterns that hold people together, that allow work to flow, that keep culture alive.
As Bruce Daisley explores in his piece on adapting to new rhythms of work, organisations need to rediscover tempo, not tempo-tracking. A healthy rhythm isn't about how much time we spend together. It's about how well things fit together.
Starting Point: WORKTECH's Four C's
WORKTECH Academy's recent research with Smart Spaces identified four dimensions of workplace experience: Convenience, Coordination, Connectedness, and Customisation. It's a solid framework that maps how spaces serve both personal and collective needs, both efficient and adaptable work modes.
But my recent conversation with Jeremy Myerson (chairman of WORKTECH Academy and one of the most influential workplace researchers of the past three decades) revealed something critical. Myerson, having spent decades advocating for flexible work, is now examining its limitations. "Culture has suffered, coordination has suffered, collaboration has suffered," he observes. (More C's!)
Hybrid work has exposed gaps in how we think about workplace experience. So let's rebuild the framework. Not just reference what others have published, but wrestle with what these dimensions actually mean when you're trying to make workplaces that people want to return to.
1. Convenience: Make It Worth It, Not Just Frictionless
The workplace industry is obsessed with frictionless everything. Frictionless entry. Frictionless booking. Frictionless coffee ordering. And yes, when the basics don't work (when the WiFi drops, when you can't find a desk, when the building access system treats you like a security threat), people legitimately ask "what's the point of coming in?"
But here's where we've gone wrong: over-indexing on convenience cultivates entitlement. We pile on perks that nobody asked for, creating expectation inflation where nothing feels special anymore. The fancy coffee machine becomes the bare minimum. The wellness room sits empty while people complain they don't have enough meeting space.
Convenience isn't about removing all friction. It's about making the commute worth it. And that calculation isn't just about what happens inside the building. It's about the experience in the round: how work fits into the design of my day, my life.
As Daisley's analysis of Leesman research shows, the commute "sets the tone for the day," and people who walk or cycle (88-89% satisfaction) are far happier than those with two-hour journeys (35% satisfaction). But it's not just duration. It's what that time gives or takes away. Can you pick up the kids? Get your steps in? Read that book? Listen to your podcast? For many, hybrid work gave them those pieces back. Now we're asking them to give them up again without offering something equally valuable in return.
And here's the paradox: sometimes what makes it worthwhile is the very thing that feels inconvenient. The human moments that don't appear on any convenience checklist but turn out to be what matters most.
The question isn't "how do we make everything effortless?" It's "what makes the effort worthwhile?" When people arrive and find vibrant collaboration, meaningful connection, and work that genuinely benefits from being together, the friction of commuting becomes acceptable. When they arrive to empty floors and back-to-back Zoom calls, no amount of frictionless desk-booking saves the experience.
Make the basics work, absolutely. But stop there. The real work is making what happens in the office worth the journey.
2. Coordination: The Hard Work That Actually Pays Off
This is the C that requires the most effort and gets the least attention. Coordination operates at three distinct levels: individual, team, and organisation. And each level has different needs.
Individual coordination is relatively straightforward: can I see who's in today? Can I book the spaces I need? Can I plan my week?
Team coordination is harder: are we aligned on which days we'll be together? Have we thought about what we actually need to do face-to-face versus what can happen asynchronously? Are we designing our in-office time intentionally or just showing up and hoping for the best?
Organisational coordination is the most complex and most neglected: how do we orchestrate presence across departments so that the serendipitous collisions we claim to value actually happen? How do we avoid the situation Myerson describes where junior people come in desperate for mentorship while senior people stay home in their comfortable home offices?
According to JLL research, only 15% of organisations define specific office days. This feels like maximum flexibility, but it creates what researchers call "commuter regret"—that sinking feeling when you trek in and none of the people or resources you need are there.
But here's where we've gone wrong in our post-pandemic response. Rather than solving the hard problem of coordination, we've obsessed over optimisation. JLL's 2024 research found that 100% of tech companies cite optimising space utilisation as their primary hybrid workplace goal. Space utilisation. Not collaboration quality, not cultural coherence, not employee development—utilisation rates and occupancy metrics. When your primary measure of workplace success is how efficiently you're filling seats, you've already lost sight of what makes workplaces actually work for humans.
This over-indexing on efficiency has had physical consequences too. As Steelcase research from June 2025 observed, post-pandemic offices saw "assigned desks sometimes removed to make room for more communal areas, further reducing access to private or enclosed environments for focus work." We built collaboration hubs and called it progress, forgetting that collaboration without space for individual deep work is just performative presence. We've become so focused on coordinating bodies in space that we've forgotten to ask whether those bodies are doing meaningful work together, building relationships that matter, or simply sitting in proximity because the dashboard says we should.
Effective coordination isn't about herding people into the office on the same days or maximising desk utilisation. It's about intentional orchestration: ensuring the right people are together at the right time to do work that genuinely benefits from co-presence. It's about creating what Tony Hsieh called "collisionable hours"—not forced proximity, but designed opportunities for serendipitous connection.
Coordination is effortful. It requires communication, planning, and some sacrifice of individual autonomy. But when it works—when the right people are in the right place at the right time doing work that matters—it pays dividends. The alternative is the "halfway house" Myerson describes: "halfway in and halfway out. It's a very uncomfortable place to be."
We need to stop pretending coordination happens by magic, stop measuring it purely through utilisation metrics, and start treating it as a core capability that requires investment, tools, and cultural commitment.
3. Connection: Authentic, Not Forced
McKinsey research shows employees who feel connected are almost twice as likely to report belonging and engagement. But here's where workplace designers consistently miss the mark: connection isn't created through "forced fun."
The pizza parties. The mandatory team-building. The beer trolley that comes around at 4pm when half your team doesn't drink and the other half is on calls. These aren't connection. They're theatre. And people can smell the difference.
Real connection happens in the margins Daisley describes: before meetings start, while making tea, in the post-meeting debrief. It happens when Myerson could write a considered editorial "with 25 people on the same desk, by osmosis." It's the "short circuit mentoring" where someone can ask "how do I log into this database?" without scheduling a 30-minute meeting.
Connection is what makes offices feel safe. Myerson points out that depopulated spaces make women feel unsafe, like being alone in a railway carriage. It's what makes culture transmissible: the social cues and etiquette that new graduates missed developing online during the pandemic.
But connection requires density and regularity. You can't engineer serendipity in a space that's 30% occupied on random days. The rhythm has to be consistent enough that people relax into it, that they build relationships through repeated low-stakes interactions rather than high-pressure networking events.
The question isn't "how many social events should we run?" It's "are we creating the conditions where natural human connection can flourish without feeling forced?"
4. Collaboration: The Unmeasured Organisational Glue
Here's what's missing from most workplace frameworks: collaboration as a distinct, measurable dimension. We talk about it constantly, but we don't design for it, measure it, or reward it.
Tony Hsieh, late CEO of Zappos, was onto something with his concept of "collisionable hours." He calculated that he spent 1,000 collisionable hours annually in downtown Las Vegas, deliberately creating opportunities for serendipitous encounters. But most organisations don't have any mechanism for understanding whether their workspace actually generates this kind of collaborative value.
Collaboration is different from connection. Connection is relationship. Collaboration is the creative friction that happens when diverse perspectives collide in real-time to solve problems, generate ideas, or make decisions. It's what Myerson describes losing in hybrid work: "We have not got the level of human sophistication you get when you get people in a room."
The challenge is that collaboration doesn't happen automatically. It requires:
- Temporal alignment: people present at the same time
- Spatial proximity: not scattered across floors or on different screens
- Cognitive space: time to think that isn't chopped into 30-minute increments
- Psychological safety: permission to think out loud, disagree, iterate
And here's the paradox: true collaboration requires the balance between "me work" and "we work." You can't collaborate effectively if you haven't had time to think, process, or develop your own perspective first.
Despite employees saying individual focus work is still critical (89% expect to do this, per Leesman research), post-pandemic office redesigns have swung hard toward collaboration at any cost. In the rush to create "collaboration hubs," organisations have removed assigned desks to make room for more communal areas, further reducing access to private or focused work environments, according to recent Steelcase research. Open plan spaces have multiplied with little thought to HOW people actually collaborate, or what different types of work require.
Not all collaboration is created equal. The intimacy needed for difficult feedback conversations is different from brainstorming with your team, which is different from cross-functional problem-solving. And in a hybrid world, we need to design for both in-person and digital collaboration, as well as the awkward reality of hybrid meetings where some people are in the room and others are on screens.
We haven't invested in true collaborative infrastructure. Not "collaboration spaces" with breakout booths and whiteboards that sit empty, but the nuanced understanding of what interactions are needed for varying levels of relevant collaboration (whether face-to-face or digital), and the rhythms, rituals, and cultural norms that make sustained generative work possible.
If we want people to value coming to the office, we need to understand what enables meaningful collaboration and create the conditions that make it possible. But here's the structural problem: most organisations measure and reward individual performance, not collaborative contribution. KPIs are about "me" not "we." When your performance review, bonus, and promotion depend on what you personally delivered, why would you invest time in collaborative work that doesn't show up on your scorecard?
Until we change how we measure contribution to include the collaborative work that actually drives innovation, we're asking people to sacrifice their individual metrics for collective good. And then wondering why they'd rather stay home where they can actually concentrate on hitting their numbers.
The 5th C: Culture - the WHY that holds everything together
Culture is the most overused and least understood word in workplace discourse. Everyone claims they're "building culture" or "protecting culture" but few can articulate what they actually mean.
Here's my definition: Culture is the shared understanding of why we come together, what we believe in, and how we do things. It's not the values poster in reception. It's the unwritten rules, the daily behaviours, the things that get celebrated and the things that get sanctioned.
And here's the critical insight from Myerson: culture is what gets smashed when organisations enforce return-to-office mandates without thinking about HOW they do it. Sponge research shows almost half of employees feel "numb, indifferent, or nothing" toward their company culture. That numbness is the sound of culture dying.
Here's what's interesting: all-remote organisations that have always worked that way tend to thrive. They've intentionally built processes, social norms, and ways of working around distributed teams. They attract people with specific personality types and skillsets suited to remote work. And critically, they still come together for culture injections several times a year. It's intentional. It's clear. Everyone knows what they're signing up for.
Most organisations aren't like that. They started as place-based cultures that suffered massive disruption during COVID. For a brief moment, everyone was in the same boat, united by shared challenge. But hybrid work has created something harder to navigate: flexibility without clarity.
Ironically, some of the most human-centred cultures have struggled most. They didn't want to "force" people back, didn't want to mandate, didn't want to seem untrusting. But that well-intentioned flexibility became ambiguity. Without clear expectations, people couldn't align. Without something to rally behind, culture dissipated.
People need something to align behind. Organisations need to stand for something. That doesn't mean rigid mandates, but it does mean being clear and intentional about what kind of culture you're building and what rhythms sustain it.
Culture can't be manufactured through quarterly town halls. It accumulates through daily micro-interactions. It's transmitted when junior people observe senior people, when behaviours are modelled, when someone encounters something unexpected and thinks "oh, so that's how we do things here."
Myerson argues that the office serves a crucial democratic function: "In a large organisation, you've got no say over who else is being recruited... you have to moderate your behaviour, listen to others, understand other cultures." The office as equaliser. The office as social cohesion engine.
But culture atrophies without regular reinforcement. And here's the uncomfortable truth: you can't maintain culture with 3.5 days a week attendance on undefined schedules. Culture requires consistency, density, and time.
This is the WHY that needs to align with everything else. If your culture values autonomy and trust, mandating five days in the office contradicts it. If your culture values innovation and collaboration, leaving coordination to chance undermines it. If your culture values inclusion, but senior people work from home while juniors come in, you're breeding resentment.
Culture is the integrating C, the one that determines whether all the others actually work together or just coexist uncomfortably.
When the C's Don't Align: What Breaks
The power of this framework emerges when you see what happens if you over-index on some dimensions while neglecting others:
Over-index on Convenience, neglect Culture: You get a hotel-like environment where everything works smoothly but nothing feels meaningful. People use the space transactionally and leave. No loyalty, no community, no competitive advantage.
Over-index on Connection, neglect Collaboration: You get lots of socialising but limited output. The office becomes a social club rather than a productive environment. Leadership gets frustrated and imposes mandates.
Over-index on Coordination, neglect Convenience: You mandate days but the basics don't work. People show up because they have to, experience frustration, and mentally check out. Resentment builds.
Nail Collaboration and Culture, neglect Coordination: You create amazing experiences when it works, but it only works sporadically because nobody's actually there at the same time. The magic moments are too rare to sustain momentum.
The C's form an interdependent system. Strengthen one and others benefit. Weaken one and the whole thing becomes fragile.
Beyond the Perk List
This is why the perk-list approach fails. Perks might address Convenience (barely), but they don't touch Coordination, Connection, Collaboration, or Culture. You can't purchase these. You can't install them.
They emerge from intentional design of rhythms: the patterns of when, how, and why people come together. We need tempo, not tempo-tracking.
The organisations that will thrive aren't the ones with the longest amenity lists. They're the ones who understand which rhythms their culture needs, then create the conditions (spatial, temporal, and social) for those rhythms to take hold.
Because in the end, what shapes how a workplace feels isn't what's in it. It's whether the patterns of Convenience, Coordination, Connection, Collaboration, and Culture work in harmony to create something that feels right. Whether the rhythm fits.
I'll be exploring these themes and more in my upcoming podcast Spatial Attraction, where I dive deep into how environments can restore workplace rhythms rather than disrupt them. Sign up at kurstygroves.com to be notified when it launches.
Further Reading & References
- Bruce Daisley: We Need to Adapt to New Rhythms of Work
- WORKTECH Academy & Smart Spaces: The Connected Office Report
- Leesman: Workplace effectiveness research on rhythms and occupancy
- JLL: 2025 Global Occupancy Planning Benchmarking Report
- Steelcase: Privacy Crisis: The Risks of Open Offices and Strategies for Reclaiming Privacy at Work
- McKinsey: Building social capital and belonging research
- Gallup: Employee engagement general research and State of the Global Workplace
- Sponge: "Generation Numb" report on employee culture sentiment
