For the past few years, leaders across industries have clung to a deceptively simple idea: if people just come back to the office, innovation, collaboration, and culture will fall back into place. The logic feels reassuring. It’s concrete, it’s visible, and it looks like leadership.
But according to Sara Escobar and Corinne Murray, co-authors of Work Then Place: Navigating Modern Work and Where It Happens, this belief is actively hindering real transformation.
When Sara summed up why they wrote the book, she didn’t reach for lofty language or corporate platitudes. “We want to make work suck less,” she said. That blunt framing sets the tone for their argument. Return-to-office mandates may feel decisive, but they are not strategies. They are, at best, partial tactics. And unless leaders grapple with the deeper systems shaping how work actually happens, those mandates won’t deliver the outcomes executives are hoping for.
The real work, as Sara and Corinne see it, starts well before any conversation about where people sit. It starts with understanding what work is being done, how it’s done, and what people need in order to do it well.
Why Return to Office Became a Shortcut
Corinne is careful not to dismiss offices altogether. In-person time has value, and for some organizations, it always will. The problem isn’t the office itself. Instead, it’s treating presence as a proxy for progress.
Many organizations declared victory once they announced how many days employees were expected to be onsite. Leaders assumed collaboration would improve simply because people were co-located again. What they failed to examine was whether the environment, norms, policies, and tools actually supported the kinds of collaboration they claimed to want.
People returned to offices only to find meetings that could have easily stayed virtual, spaces that didn’t match how teams worked, and systems that added friction instead of removing it. The hypothesis behind return-to-office was rarely tested. Why would this drive better outcomes? What specifically would change when people showed up?
Instead of answering those questions, many organizations moved on, convinced they had “done their part.”
Now, a bigger forcing mechanism has arrived. Artificial intelligence and the broader fourth industrial revolution are confronting leaders with a harder truth. The tensions around hybrid work weren’t enough to force organizations to rethink their operating models, but AI might be.
As Corinne put it, the moment feels less like an incremental shift and more like an alien invasion. There is no opting out. Organizations that haven’t built adaptability, resilience, and learning into their systems are discovering that presence alone does nothing to prepare people for what’s next.
Why “Work Then Place” Changes the Conversation
Sara and Corinne both come from the workplace world, where discussions too often revolve around square footage, seating density, and architectural features. Their central argument flips that focus. A workplace, they say, only truly exists when the work informs the place.
That sequencing matters. Organizations routinely design spaces, select tools, and launch programs without deeply examining how work actually flows through the organization. Only afterward do they try to fit the work into what they’ve built.
In Work Then Place, “place” is not shorthand for an office. It’s a broader system made up of three interdependent elements: physical, digital, and experiential environments.
The experiential layer is where behaviors, norms, and daily interactions live. Corinne describes it as the emulsifier that binds the physical and digital together. Buildings and platforms are expensive and slow to change, but behavior is where adaptability lives.
This distinction also reframes how leaders think about culture. Culture often floats above organizations as aspirational language. The experiential environment brings culture down to earth by asking practical questions. Can people find who they need to get work done? How much friction exists in everyday processes? What does it feel like to move an idea from concept to execution?
From that perspective, culture becomes the accumulation of lived experiences, not the values printed on a wall.
The Unsexy Foundations Organizations Keep Skipping
One of the most telling visuals in the book contrasts Maslow’s tidy hierarchy of needs with a much messier reality. The base remains solid and universal. Above it, everything becomes chaotic.
In workplace terms, the base consists of foundational needs that rarely get attention because they aren’t exciting. Reliable connectivity. Functional tools. Power. Psychological and physical safety. These basics are not inspiring, but they are indispensable.
As Sara noted, leaders often avoid these areas because they aren’t sexy. They don’t photograph well. They don’t sound transformational. But when they fail, everything else collapses. An infrastructure outage can bring even the most thoughtfully designed culture to a halt.
Modern employees may expect highly personalized experiences, but those expectations sit on top of shared fundamentals. Corinne’s experience has taught her that many workplace transformations falter because organizations try to customize too early instead of standardizing what should be universal.
Five Generations, One Anchor
Today’s workforce spans five generations, from traditionalists to Gen Z, with Gen Alpha just over the horizon. Each group carries different assumptions about how work should be structured and where it should happen. Flexibility, once considered a perk, has now surpassed compensation as a top factor in job decisions.
Sara is blunt about the challenge: no leader will ever fully understand the needs of every generation at work. The goal isn’t perfect understanding. It’s facilitating understanding across power lines.
The people most demanding change are often the ones with the least formal authority. And the people with the most authority often built their careers in very different conditions. That tension isn’t resolved by whose preferences win but by pulling the conversation back to the work itself.
When leaders get empirical about what work requires, they create common ground. The work is the work. Focusing on workflows, dependencies, and outcomes reduces the emotional charge that generational debates often carry.
At the same time, leaders must acknowledge that every generation has found ways to deliver results under different conditions. Gen Z, for example, entered the workforce just years before the pandemic reshaped everything, but they still grew, learned, and contributed. Ultimately, different does not mean deficient.
Burnout Is the Context, Not a Side Issue
When the conversation turns to preparing for the future of work, Sara starts with a sobering reality. A vast majority of the workforce reports feeling burned out. Good managers notice exhaustion, disengagement, and quiet withdrawal every day. But too often, their response is tighter oversight or increased visibility rather than a serious examination of how work is structured.
Sara argues that many leaders have fallen back on presence because they’re not managing to outcomes. They’re managing to observation. That may feel safer, but it avoids the harder work of defining success clearly and trusting people to reach it.
Corinne adds that executive anxiety is rising. Leaders worry their organizations aren’t agile or adaptable enough for what’s coming, but the solution isn’t more top-down control. Adaptability comes from setting up systems that test, learn, and respond. While organizations fear over-surveying employees, as Corinne put it, the real problem is asking questions without acting.
Change as a Skill You Practice Together
In Work Then Place, change itself is treated as a core competency, not a one-time initiative. Building that competency requires patience and restraint.
Sara emphasizes starting small. Behavioral change is cognitively demanding, especially in already overloaded systems. Small, meaningful shifts compound over time.
Corinne pushes the point further. Executives can’t sit above change as orchestrators. They have to be participants. In uncertain environments, trust grows when leaders model learning, experimentation, and even failure alongside their teams.
The book draws on the “carpenter versus gardener” metaphor. The carpenter works from a precise blueprint, assuming predictability. The gardener creates conditions for growth, knowing the environment will always introduce surprises. Today’s leaders need gardener instincts. They must design for uncertainty rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.
Breaking Silos with the Workplace Daisy
One of the clearest frameworks in the book is the workplace “Daisy,” a model with six interdependent petals:
- Individual work
- Support services
- Culture
- Experiential environment
- Built environment
- Digital environment
At the center sits the workplace function itself.
Sara describes Daisy as the product of years of learning what happens when even one of these elements is left out. Change rarely fails because people resist it outright. It fails because critical contributors weren’t included.
Her advice to leaders is simple but uncomfortable: If you want to break silos, empower workplace teams to operate at the center of the system with real access across functions. That means fewer territorial boundaries and more shared ownership.
Turning Pilots into Memory
One of the most practical insights Sara shared is about learning decay. Organizations run pilots constantly, but lessons evaporate unless they’re captured in a form people can use.
A minimum lovable knowledge base doesn’t overwhelm. It clarifies, evolves, and respects that people will interpret change differently unless meaning is made explicit.
Corinne adds that documentation should never be static. Too many organizations record decisions at the moment of change and treat them as permanent truth. Real learning happens after theory meets reality. Knowledge bases should be revisited, revised, and refined as conditions shift.
Designing for How Work Actually Happens
To position a workplace intentionally, Corinne recommends starting with an audit before adding anything new. What physical, digital, and experiential resources already exist? How are they actually being used?
Once visibility exists, leaders can map resources against four common modes of knowledge work:
- Synchronous collaboration
- Asynchronous collaboration
- Individual focus
- Socializing
This exercise often reveals misalignment. Spaces and tools designed for one purpose get repurposed because they fulfill unmet needs. Observing those patterns without judgment gives leaders valuable data. The goal isn’t to force compliance with original intent but to redesign systems to support real behavior.
From Projects to Living Systems
Change, as both authors emphasize, is never finished. The difference between reactive workplaces and resilient ones lies in how leaders respond. Sara argues that organizations need people whose job it is to observe behavior critically and adjust environments accordingly. Not with panic, but with curiosity.
Corinne returns to the idea of response versus reaction. Knee-jerk adoption of every new trend, including AI, adds noise without value. Strategic pauses allow leaders to clarify objectives and place new tools where they genuinely enable the work.
That’s why Work Then Place isn’t a book about hybrid work or A-I alone but about building change processes that remain useful regardless of what the next bright shiny thing turns out to be.
Listening, Then Letting Go
The book closes with a reminder that workplaces have always been in conversation with us. Employees communicate needs through surveys, behaviors, tool usage, and workarounds. The information is already there.
The commitment leaders must make is to listen and then step out of their own way. Fear is driving much of today’s leadership behavior: fear of losing control, fear of the unknown, fear of irrelevance. Retreating to old models doesn’t resolve that fear. It only delays the reckoning.
Return-to-office mandates give the illusion of certainty. Transformation requires something harder. It requires understanding the work, designing the place around it, and keeping physical, digital, and experiential systems in honest conversation with the people using them every day.
The work is the work, and the rest has to follow.
Brandon Laws is a workplace culture and leadership enthusiast, host of the Transform Your Workplace podcast, and VP of Marketing and Product at Xenium HR.