What Return-to-Office Mandates Reveal About Modern Workplace Design
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
Hybrid Workplace Design Isn’t Broken. The Thinking Behind It Is.
Collin Burry has been in workplace design for 40 years. Twenty-nine of those years at Gensler, where his portfolio has included Apple, Pixar, Nike, Samsung, and Airbnb. He has had a front-row seat to every major shift the industry has gone through, from hierarchical cube farms built around metrics and square footage to open-plan offices driven by the internet era, to the social-media-era obsession with brand experience and talent attraction. The current moment, he says, is the biggest shift he has seen. And the reason many organizations are getting it wrong is that they are responding to hybrid work with return-to-office mandates instead of rethinking what the workplace should offer.
The right question is:
“Why would anyone want to come back – and what are we doing to make that true?”
What Mandates Actually Accomplish
Burry’s position on return-to-office mandates is direct: they do not work as a long-term strategy in hybrid workplace design. The Gensler workplace survey data backs this up: organizations that have mandated office attendance are finding that people still find ways to do what they need to do. The mandate creates friction, resentment, and in some cases attrition; particularly among the working parents, caregivers, and employees with legitimate flexibility needs who built their lives around the arrangements the pandemic made possible. What does work is a space that gives people a genuine reason to come in.
Not an obligation. A pull.
The most successful workplaces today are not enforcing attendance. They are creating environments people actively choose to spend time in. It has been designed around what human beings actually need when they are together: belonging, stimulation, comfort, the ability to find a quiet corner or a social table depending on the hour and the task. It communicates, visually and physically, that the organization behind it has thought carefully about the people inside it. The organizations that are figuring this out are not the ones writing stronger enforcement policies. They are the ones redesigning what people actually walk into. The problem with return-to-office mandates is that they focus on attendance rather than experience.
What the Office Has to Become
Burry uses the word “frictionless” to describe the direction workplace design needs to move, and he is precise about what it means and does not mean. Frictionless does not mean minimal, or stripped-down, or emptied of personality.
A frictionless workplace means:
- People can navigate it intuitively
- They can find the people they need
- They can find the proper setting for their task at hand
- The environment supports their work rather than competing with it
This sounds obvious. But most offices, even recent ones, fail this test. They are organized around the organization’s structure rather than around the human experience of moving through the space. They reflect financial decisions more than they reflect people decisions. One of the most telling indicators of where priorities sit, Burry notes, is where real estate responsibility lives within an organization. For most of the last few decades, it reported to the CFO. The calculus was square footage, headcount, and cost per seat. Increasingly, it is moving to the Chief People Officer or the Chief Talent Officer, and that shift in ownership produces a fundamentally different set of questions about what a space is for. This shift in thinking is what separates successful workplaces from organizations still relying on return-to-office mandates as their primary strategy.
But functionality is only part of the equation.
Even when people can move through a space effortlessly, the environment is still communicating something about the organization behind it.
Everything Communicates
Burry borrows a phrase from designer Bruce Mau: everything communicates. The implication for workplace design is significant.
A message is sent if:
- an organization is publicly committed to sustainability but fills its office with cost chosen materials
- the stated values involve inclusion and belonging but the space has no diverse and accessible areas
- the bran promises innovation but the office looks like it hasn’t evolved from its original design
This is the core argument for why intentionality in workplace design has moved from optional to necessary. The office is now a three-dimensional representation of who the organization says it is. In a world shaped by hybrid work and return-to-office mandates, that physical experience carries more weight than ever.
For new hires who joined during or after the pandemic and have never experienced the culture in person, the physical environment may be the first tangible evidence they have about whether what they were told during the hiring process is actually true.
Burry points to Amazon as an example of the scale of this challenge. Since the pandemic, many employees have joined without ever experiencing the company’s culture in person. The workplace is one of the few ways culture can be experienced rather than simply described.
The Budget Is Not the Barrier
One of the most practical challenges in discussions around return-to-office mandates is the assumption that better workplace outcomes require larger budgets. In reality better hybrid workplace design isn’t about spending more but about prioritization.
A recent Gensler project in Soho demonstrates this clearly. Despite a lean budget, the design team did not dilute the ambition behind the space. Instead, they committed to stronger thinking in the early stages of workplace design. The decision was made to give roughly a third of the floor plate to a community space that doubles as a café and event area. The design team used Soho’s neighborhood energy, one of London’s most vibrant districts, as a reference to shape a space that felt like part pub, part restaurant, part hotel. The designers applied color and form to standard work areas, pushing them away from the corporate default. The overall effect was an office that communicated care, belonging, and identity. None of that required a large budget. It required a different set of priorities and the willingness to commit to them from the beginning.
Gensler’s founder Art Gensler held that every project, regardless of scale, deserved the same level of thinking. A 600-meter tower in Shanghai and a small advertising firm in London are different in resources. They are the same in terms of what good design leadership demands of the team working on them.
The key insight for hybrid workplace design is simple:
Better outcomes are driven by decisions, not dollars.
Neurodesign Is Not a Niche Concern
The design industry is increasingly engaging with how physical environments affect people who process them differently, whether through diagnosed neurodivergence or simply through the broad range of human variation in how people respond to light, pattern, noise, and spatial density.
Burry’s observation is that this has progressed significantly in the UK compared to North America, where it is still largely seen as an emerging consideration rather than a baseline requirement.
In the UK, major clients like Virgin Media and BBC come to projects with inclusion mandates that treat neurodiverse design the way they treat sustainability:
- not optional
- not decorative
- but a non-negotiable deliverable
What this looks like in practice
Design levers include:
- monochromatic rooms with no jarring patterns – creates a calm space
- quiet library zones with active phone-free rules
- variety in spatial options for different states of mind
The goal is not to design a special space for a special population. It is to design an environment that has enough range that no one has to work against their own nervous system to be productive inside it. The generational dimension here is significant too. Younger designers entering the field treat this as a given, not as something a client has to ask for but as something they are simply going to do. Burry describes watching this shift as a career highlight.
Circularity Is Coming for the Industry
The tension Burry names openly is between:
- hospitality-influenced workplace design (rich, layered, curated)
- sustainability commitments
The honest question is whether those two things can coexist. Creating experiential richness tends to use more materials. More materials means more waste, more embodied carbon, moreend-of-life complexity. The stripped-down modernist aesthetic he gravitates toward personally happens to be one of the most sustainable approaches, but it is not what most clients want from a space designed to generate belonging and make people feel that showing up was worth the commute.
His answer is circularity. The precedent coming from the Netherlands is instructive:
- Government mandates require 70% reused furniture in new commercial projects
Instead of new procurement, richness comes from:
Vintage pieces
| Reclaimed furniture
| Curated objects with history and character
The upcycling culture that younger generations have normalized in their personal lives is a model that commercial interiors are only beginning to seriously adopt.
The outcome, when done well, is a space that is visually layered and humanistically warm without the material footprint of a conventional new build. Burry describes this as probably the future of how the field resolves the tension between hospitality aesthetics and genuine sustainability commitments.
The Pattern That Separates What Feels Right from What Only Looks Right
Asked what distinguishes the standout projects in his portfolio, Burry’s answer is simpler than the question implied.
Authenticity.
When an organization comes to a project knowing who they are, or willing to go on the journey of discovering it, the space that results carries a quality that no amount of budget or visual sophistication can manufacture.
When they are not being genuine:
- the brief says one thing
- the values say another
It shows in the tension between elements. It shows in the experience of moving through a space that is beautifully composed but does not feel like it belongs to the people inside it. The space that feels right is the one that could only belong to that organization. The space that only looks right could have been designed for anyone.
That distinction, Burry argues, is what the field is really being asked to navigate right now.
Not which palette is trending.
Not which collaborative furniture system is most specified this year.
But whether the people responsible for these environments are genuinely asking what human
beings need and building around the honest answer.
We explore all of this in our recent episode. Watch on YouTube or Listen on Apple or Spotify
About the guest
