Work can now happen anywhere, but the return-to-office debate will not settle because the costs of hybrid have become harder to ignore.
This episode explores why the return-to-office question keeps resurfacing, what the last few years have revealed about the less-visible work that keeps organisations functioning, and what it might take to redesign work for the reality we’re actually living in.
Kursty’s guest is Jeremy Myerson, one of the most influential voices on work and workplace in the UK.
Jeremy is Professor Emeritus at the Royal College of Art, founder of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, and co-founder of WorkTech Academy.
This conversation moves past the binary of office versus home.
It looks at what hybrid work has revealed.
Not only the freedoms people gained, but also the costs we didn’t always anticipate.
Listen to the episode here:
Prefer to skim?
- Opening: the “halfway house” feeling (00:15)
- What hybrid has cost: culture, coordination, collaboration (03:20)
- Naming the condition: “careful what you wish for” flexibility (04:41)
- How we got here: Jeremy’s three waves of office evolution (05:34)
- Wave 1: efficiency and the Taylorist office
- Wave 2: the social democratic office
- Wave 3: the networked / mobile office
- What the pandemic did: pushing flexibility from the margins to the mainstream (09:11)
- Why the halfway house fails: the coordination tax of hybrid work (12:32)
- What gets harder to sustain: mentoring, tacit learning, and informal help (16:32)
- Me work vs we work: what the office is becoming for (22:00)
- The missing C: (social) cohesion (22:54)
- Redefining the office: experience metrics and the “vibrancy index” (26:16)
- Measuring the wrong things: why metrics bend behaviour (30:59)
- Familiarity versus novelty: the psychology of adapting to space (33:37)
- Inclusive design: widening the bandwidth of work environments (36:24)
- Looking ahead: the next waves of work (AI, automation, and the human edge) (40:09)
- Closing: invisible work as infrastructure (44:08)
Key ideas
- Hybrid work created new freedom. It also increased friction, because coordination and context that used to happen through proximity now has to be rebuilt deliberately.
- The office is still central. Even when people work from anywhere, the office remains a psychological reference point, and many organisations still behave as if it is the default centre of gravity.
- A mandate is not a strategy. Attendance alone does not create mentoring, culture, or shared judgement.
- What we measure shapes what we do. If we reward visible activity, we can accidentally push out the work that sustains real value.
- As AI accelerates visible output, the work that's less visible matters more. Trust, cohesion, imagination, judgement, and shared meaning become the human advantage.
About Jeremy Myerson
Jeremy Myerson is design writer and academic, based in London. He is Professor Emeritus at the Royal College of Art; Visiting Professorial Fellow at the University of Oxford; and Academic Director of the Healthy City Design Congress.
A former journalist and editor on such titles as Design, Creative Review and World Architecture, he founded Design Week magazine in 1986 and later co-founded the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the RCA in 1999, which he directed for 16 years. In 2016, he set up the WORKTECH Academy, a global intelligence network for the future of work and workplace, which he led for 10 years.
Jeremy has consulted internationally with business and government on inclusive design and the future of work. He is the author of a number of influential books in the field; his latest title, Unworking: The Reinvention of the Modern Office, was published by Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press in 2022.
Research and further reading
This episode draws on research exploring coordination costs, attention fragmentation, tacit learning, and the economics of intangible value, including:
- Microsoft WorkLab (2025): Breaking down the infinite workday. (Work Trend Index special report on interruptions and the “infinite workday”.)
- Murty, Dadlani & Das (2022): How Much Time and Energy Do We Waste Toggling Between Applications? (HBR article on app switching and the attention cost of “toggling”.)
- Mark et al. (2008): The cost of interrupted work. (Foundational evidence on task switching and the recovery tail after interruptions.)
- Hitachi Research Institute (2025): Expanding Corporate Value Through “Ideal Intangible Asset Management”. (A recent, explicit statement of the “intangibles dominate value” argument used in the episode.)
- Graham (n.d.): Comparing Goodhart’s and Campbell’s law. (A clear explainer of how metrics can distort behaviour once they become targets.)
- Watanabe et al. (2014): Exploring relationship between face-to-face interaction and team performance using wearable sensor badges. (Call-centre study linking interaction patterns to performance.)
- Waber & Pentland (MIT Tech Report): An Investigation with the Sociometric Badge. (Background on sociometric badges as a method.)
- Twidale (2005): Over the Shoulder Learning. (Brief, opportunistic help episodes as a major channel for informal learning.)
- Xu et al. (2022): Mentoring and Tacit Knowledge Transfer… (Mentoring predicts tacit knowledge transfer, including via job crafting.)
Spatial Attraction is written, produced, and hosted by Kursty Groves.
Original music and sound production by Lee Golledge.
To suggest a theme or guest, email kursty@spatial-attraction-podcast.com.
For episodes and updates, visit kurstygroves.com/spatial-attraction — and follow Spatial Attraction on LinkedIn and Instagram.
