When work is distributed across office, home and other places, the first reaction is to shrink the space. The second – rarer and more useful – is to rethink it. The office does not lose value with distributed work: it gains a precise role, and that role calls for a space very different from the one that used to house assigned desks.
What remote work does not offer
Remote work handles individual concentration and asynchronous activities well. It struggles with dense collaboration, with building relationships between people who do not know each other yet, with transmitting the organisation's culture. These are not technological limits – they are structural limits of physical proximity. The office enables what a screen cannot convey: reading non-verbal language, the serendipity of corridor encounters, the sharing of a common space that gives the group its identity. Gallup measured this while studying engagement: the most engaged people are those who alternate presence and remote work with full awareness of why they come to the office.
Designing for today's actual attendance
The wrong sizing of distributed work stems from a mistake at the outset: continuing to calculate space on the nominal headcount instead of on actual attendance. If a team spends most of the week off-site, keeping one desk per person produces empty space on low-attendance days and overcrowding at peak times. The starting point is the survey: how many people come to the office, on which days, to do what. From there we define the desk sharing ratio and the mix of work settings – free desks, collaboration areas, phone booths, informal spaces – calibrated on actual attendance.
The office as a hub: what changes in the design
Designing the office as a collaboration hub means shifting the weight from individual spaces to support areas: meeting rooms equipped for hybrid remote work, informal work zones where thinking can circulate, spaces that invite people to pause and exchange ideas. It also means equipping the office with the technical tools – acoustics, connectivity, screens – that make collaboration effective with those who are not physically present. The design always starts from reading the typical day; the outcome is a space people choose to use, because it offers something their home does not. To explore the distributed work model further, our Smart working page illustrates the ARCHIlabs method.
Relative weight of space by type of setting – schematic comparison