IBA Forum-Gastbeitrag Hybrid working models have fundamentally changed office work. Greater flexibility means new challenges for collaboration, team culture and spatial planning. This article shows how office space, patterns of use and team dynamics are changing – and why organisations today need spatial anchors more than ever.
changing spaces
More and more knowledge workers are switching flexibly between office, working from home and third places. This freedom creates new opportunities, but also brings its own challenges: how much flexibility boosts productivity and when does fragmentation occur?
Organisations are responding in different ways: some are reducing their office space, while others are bringing employees back to the office to a greater extent. But one thing is clear in all approaches: the world of work remains flexible. This requires new ideas, new spaces and solutions that ensure collaboration, orientation and efficiency in the long term.
FLEXIBILITY: SOLUTION OR NEW PROBLEM?
Flexibility is considered one of the key resources of modern knowledge work. However, in the debate about working from home, it is often overlooked that flexible working models have not only a spatial dimension but also a temporal one. This means that we not only work in different locations, but increasingly at different times (Wessels et al., 2019). Many of these patterns arise from autonomous decisions made by employees. Research on temporal and spatial flexibility shows that employees benefit when they have a say in when and where they do their work. At the same time, this newfound freedom presents many with challenges: work and leisure time become blurred, work locations overlap, boundaries are lost. Studies also suggest that employees often plan their work locations less rationally than assumed: decisions are based on personal routines, team structures or situational preferences rather than a consistent analysis of the task at hand (Kurzmann et al., 2025). Too much freedom of choice can lead to additional stress: constant availability, blurred boundaries or the feeling of having to be present in several places at once. Too much freedom of choice can lead to additional stress: constant availability, blurred boundaries, or the feeling of having to be present in several places at once. This increases the pressure to think more carefully about which environment really supports the task at hand and what conditions organisations should provide to make these decisions easier.
At the same time, location-independent working opens up new opportunities: organisations can build global teams and significantly expand their recruitment pool. However, this also creates new coordination and integration tasks, for example when a company enables all employees to work from any location, but at the same time has to create common time slots, communication standards or hybrid meeting rules so that distributed teams can work together effectively despite a high degree of individual flexibility.
SPATIAL CONSEQUENCES: WHEN TIME AND SPACE DECOUPLE
With the rise of flexible working models, the role of the office is changing fundamentally. When employees regularly change their place of work, they actively interpret and shape spaces – a process that describes a dynamic relationship between space and users in terms of spatial agency (Stephenson, 2020). Spaces are perceived differently (Lefebvre, 1991) and these perceptions directly influence the decision of where to work.
Current reports show clear patterns: many employees stay at home for concentrated work; they go to the office for exchange, collaboration and social encounters. As a result, the office is increasingly becoming a meeting place, a social hub or a place for teamwork and creative processes. Offices that promote creativity are those that specifically enable social interaction, spontaneous encounters and knowledge exchange, while also offering flexible, well-equipped spaces for concentrated work, participation and belonging (Lucius and Dambert, 2024).
The need for concentrated work opportunities in the office remains. The task, therefore, is to create spaces that do both: facilitate encounters and collaboration while also offering places for retreat, focus and quiet work.
INSPIRATION: HOW ORGANISATIONS ARE RESPONDING
Organisations are employing various strategies to respond to the new hybrid working reality and adapt their spaces accordingly:
- Anchor days, instead of ‘I come to the office... and no one is there’
Fixed attendance days ensure that teams meet reliably in the office. Joint lunches, short updates or after-work formats create routine, strengthen culture and prevent office time from becoming purely online meeting time. - Activity-based working with modular spaces, instead of the classic ‘corridor of closed doors’
Instead of traditional cubicle offices, many organisations are opting for flexible, modular workspaces. This not only allows employees to choose the right workspace for each task, but also allows teams to adapt rooms to suit the situation when work processes or needs change. - New collaborative spaces, instead of ‘the coffee kitchen where you’d rather not linger too long’
High-quality meeting areas, lounges and co-working spaces replace cramped, perhaps even enclosed coffee kitchens and encourage spontaneous interaction and cross-team exchange, making the office more appealing. - Experimental phases instead of ‘We’re doing everything new now and it’s going to be colourful and open’
Many organisations first test different room layouts and gradually develop suitable workspace strategies based on usage and feedback. For example, a department or floor can be given a prototype redesign with borrowed furniture, and the redesign can then be adapted or rolled out further depending on how successful it is perceived to be.
These examples alone clearly show that interior design is increasingly being used as a strategic tool to strengthen hybrid collaboration, promote cultural cohesion and noticeably improve the quality of shared office time. However, organisations should not be guided by return-to-office mandates. The latest research is clear: mandatory return-to-office requirements do not lead to higher performance indicators or better financial results. Instead, satisfaction declines while emotional exhaustion and turnover risks increase (Ding and Ma, 2024; Kunze and Hampel, 2025). Instead of coercion, what is needed are spaces that people enjoy using and working environments that create genuine reasons to come together.
CONCLUSION: FLEXIBILITY NEEDS A SPATIAL ANCHOR
Hybrid working is here to stay. For flexibility to be productive, organisations need spaces that provide orientation, enable identification and strengthen collaboration. Digital tools such as reservation systems or utilisation analyses can help, but social space remains crucial: interactions create a sense of belonging, provide structure and make collaboration tangible.
The next article in The Spatial Thinkers Series shows how organisations are dealing with this new flexibility, what opportunities and risks office consolidation and desk-sharing concepts bring with them, and why good space planning today needs one thing above all else: clear orientation despite freedom.
