What does your company actually still need an office for?
"Why do we even need an office anymore?" is the right first question for any office-related decision. Yet, most companies never answer it concretely. It remains a headline rather than a diagnosis. Without a clearly defined problem, you end up with a space that addresses a vague feeling but fails to fix the root cause.
Why the question alone is not yet an answer
The question sounds like a stance. Executives nod when it’s raised. But it is merely a redirection to a second, more uncomfortable question: What specific problem is office attendance actually supposed to solve? Without this answer, any decision about space ends up being purely cosmetic. A new lounge area, a bit more greenery, perhaps a more open structure. The underlying problem remains untouched. This is not to be confused with the question of how many days of attendance make sense—more on that in "Why 'back to the office' is the wrong question".
No company strictly needs an office, but many things are harder without one
It is worth being honest here: there is no obligation to have an office. Fully remote companies exist, grow, and function. What an office provides is not necessity, but simplification. Communication that must be organised via appointments, tools, and conscious initiative in a home office happens automatically in the office—in passing, in the hallway, in the breakroom. Cultural exchange, which must be actively designed remotely through formats, rituals, and effort, emerges in the office through mere presence and observation.
This does not mean that remote companies cannot achieve these things. It means they require conscious measures and continuous effort that an office provides automatically. Anyone deciding against an office or against high attendance should plan for this effort, rather than silently assuming that the same effects will occur digitally on their own.
Four problems hidden behind the question
In practice, what companies actually mean when they talk about "office requirements" can be traced back to four recurring problem areas. They rarely occur in isolation, but usually, one dominates.
Communication that has shrunk to the length of a shout
Hybrid and remote work shift interaction into calendar appointments and Teams messages. What used to be resolved in a thirty-second hallway chat now requires an appointment, an agenda, an invitation—or it simply stops happening. The result is not acute chaos, but a slow silencing of the informal coordination that actually keeps many processes running.
Steve Jobs solved this problem radically when building the Pixar headquarters in the 1990s: he placed the only toilets in the entire building in the central atrium, along with mailboxes, a café, and a theater, forcing everyone in the building to walk through the same space several times a day. Some employees initially found this annoying. What followed was described by Pixar's creative chief John Lasseter later: he constantly ran into colleagues he hadn't seen in months. Jobs' thesis on this, as recounted in Walter Isaacson's biography: if a building doesn't encourage collaboration, you lose a large part of the innovation and magic that arises from serendipity.
This radical approach is an extreme example, not a recommendation for every company. Having only one toilet in an entire building would rightly meet with resistance in most organisations, and not every culture benefits from forced encounters to this extent. However, the principle behind it—designing circulation paths so that people inevitably cross paths more often—can be applied in a much more moderate form, for example, through the placement of coffee machines, printers, or meeting rooms. And here, years after reducing to, say, one coffee machine in the company, I still receive absolutely positive feedback and appreciation for the courage that was shown back then.
Belonging, which is harder to build without a physical space
Anyone who knows a company almost exclusively from their own calendar develops a different bond than someone who has physically experienced colleagues, rooms, and rituals. This affects new employees particularly strongly: remote onboarding often works well technically, but rarely culturally.
An example of how architecture solves this instead of just claiming to: at SoundCloud in Berlin, the office design firm Kinzo equipped the reception area with acoustic baffles on the ceiling, whose shape abstractly replicates the sound wave of the greeting "Hello, Welcome to SoundCloud." To outsiders, they look like felt panels of varying lengths. Anyone working at the company knows what is actually hanging there after the first tour at the latest. This is not a design gag. It is a story that resides in the space rather than in a welcome PDF, and that is exactly what creates the kind of belonging that cannot be mandated.
Culture that is no longer passed on through observation
A large part of what actually shapes a corporate culture—how conflicts are resolved, what tone is accepted, how leadership shows itself in small moments—is transmitted through observation, not documents. If the shared stage disappears, the transmission channel is lost, not just the content.
Airbnb consistently followed this through to its logical conclusion at its headquarters in San Francisco: the meeting rooms are not interchangeable glass boxes, but exact replicas of real, popular Airbnb listings. One room is the original flat of the very first Airbnb listing; others follow the design of a mountain cabin near Moscow or an English country manor. The company's goal: the promise "Belong Anywhere" should be felt, not just stated on the website. Every meeting literally takes place within their own product.
Knowledge that disappears faster with every resignation
Casual knowledge transfer—the quick question at the next desk, overhearing a solution—hardly happens anymore in a remote-first world. What remains is the expectation that knowledge should be documented. In practice, it is rarely documented completely, and this effect intensifies as turnover increases.
Toyota developed the Obeya room in the 1990s to solve exactly this problem during the development of the first Prius. Chief Engineer Takeshi Uchiyamada faced a situation where no single expert possessed all the necessary knowledge alone. His solution: a dedicated room where everyone involved in engineering, production, and quality met regularly to make progress, problems, and decisions visible on the walls—permanently, not just during meetings. Knowledge was no longer locked in individual heads that could leave the company at any time, but resided in the room itself.
However, a room alone does not make for a good meeting culture. We covered the specific rules that help keep knowledge circulating in the room—rather than letting meetings spiral out of control—in our article "How to reduce too many meetings in your daily work life?" as a starting point, not a blueprint—that could backfire!
Why the simple answer is misleading
The common reaction to these four problems is a one-size-fits-all spatial solution: more open space, more collaboration zones, more informal seating areas. This often helps with the first problem, as the Pixar example shows, albeit in a more moderate form. For the fourth problem, knowledge loss, the same solution tends to work against it. An open lounge area is no substitute for an Obeya room. It signals that knowledge transfer remains accidental rather than making it more likely through structure.
Four problems, four different spatial responses. A bathroom atrium would not have helped SoundCloud with their sense of belonging. An Obeya room would not have conveyed culture at Airbnb. If you don't distinguish between these, you end up building an office that works a little bit for everything and properly for nothing.
What to do instead
Before making any floor plan decisions, it is worth conducting an honest assessment: Which of the four problems is actually most palpable in your company? Is the sense of belonging measurably declining, for example, in turnover rates among new hires? Are there frequent misunderstandings that a quick conversation used to resolve? Is a disproportionate amount of knowledge being lost when experienced colleagues leave? These questions cannot be answered by a fundamental discussion in the executive suite, but only by surveying the people who actually work in the office or avoid it. Once the diagnosis is clear, the next question usually follows: how much space that actually means in a hybrid model.
How we approach this at wow tomorrow
Before we plan a single square metre, we clarify the question from this article together with management: Which of the four problems, or which combination of them, should the office actually solve? We define this goal in workshops with leadership before we even talk about square footage.
To do this, we talk to employees in advance, analyse their pain points and specific needs, and try to understand the cultural landscape before the first strategy meeting with leadership so we can bring these insights to the table.
Only then do we dive deeper, together with the employees. With our wpi survey (workspace performance insights) and supplementary workshops, we determine how people in the company actually work, where their working style contributes to the previously defined goal, and where the existing office hinders them. Six thematic areas, including communication & collaboration, identification & pride, and innovation & inspiration, make it clear which of the four problems dominates and to what extent. Only from this dual perspective—the goal of the leadership level and the needs of the people who actually work in the office—do we determine the concrete requirements from which space, zoning, or renovation plans emerge.
The most important points in brief
Does a company absolutely need an office?
No. Fully remote companies have been proven to work. However, an office significantly simplifies communication and cultural exchange—effects that can only be achieved remotely through conscious, continuous effort.
What is the difference between a communication problem and a sense of belonging problem in the office?
A communication problem manifests as slowed or absent informal coordination between colleagues. A sense of belonging problem manifests as a weak emotional connection to the company, often measurable by higher turnover among new employees.
What is an Obeya room?
An Obeya is a dedicated project room where interdisciplinary teams keep progress, issues, and decisions permanently visible on the walls. The approach originated during the development of the Toyota Prius in the 1990s and makes knowledge accessible independently of individual people.
How does a company identify which of the four problems is the most pressing?
Clues include turnover rates among new hires, the frequency of misunderstandings that could have been cleared up by a quick conversation, and the loss of knowledge when experienced colleagues leave. However, a reliable assessment only comes from a structured survey of the employees themselves.
Is more open space enough to solve all four problems?
No. Open spaces typically help with communication, but they tend to work against knowledge retention because they leave knowledge transfer to chance rather than structuring it. Each of the four problems requires its own spatial solution.