Your office is not a perk. It is an organizational decision.

The debate about hybrid work has been almost entirely about employee preference and cost per square meter. Almost nobody has asked the more important question: what does this space enable or prevent, in terms of how we actually make decisions together?

Space is not a container for work. It is an active variable in organizational performance. The physical environment shapes the quality of conversations, the distribution of attention, the informal dynamics that either support or undermine the formal governance structure.

An office designed around individual workstations optimizes for focused individual work and systematically fragments the conditions for collective intelligence. A space designed around collision and conversation produces different behaviors, and different decisions.

Neither is inherently better. The question is whether the design of your space is aligned with the kind of work your organization actually needs to do well. In most cases, nobody has asked that question explicitly. The space was inherited, or chosen for the wrong reasons, or redesigned for optics rather than performance.

That is an organizational decision that has not yet been made consciously. And unconscious decisions about space are still decisions, with real consequences.