Five years later, MillerKnoll‘s Ryan Anderson comes back to the Work Design table and discusses the restaurant analogy that continues to shape the future of the office.
In December 2020, I had the privilege of writing an article for Work Design addressing a question that dominated conversations at the time: “Will we ever need offices again?” Nine months into quarantine, many business leaders who had never previously considered remote work were now questioning the very future of the office.
The piece, Rising to a New Standard for the Future Workplace, posed an analogy: “Do you think we still need restaurants?” The idea was simple—after months of cooking at home, no one doubted the future of restaurants, while offices faced uncertainty. The key difference? Restaurants held a place in people’s hearts that offices did not. This highlighted the need for offices to offer a more personal, desirable, experience-driven value.
Looking back, I see that my article got one key point right, missed a crucial perspective and confidently offered a statement that now seems open for debate.
What It Got Right
The conclusion still holds: “Those restaurants that fail to offer great experiences, that are mediocre and only on par with what we can experience at home, won’t survive. Neither will future offices.”
I believed this then, and I believe it even more now. While I certainly wasn’t the first to suggest that uninspiring offices wouldn’t last in an era of flexible work, the piece framed it in a way that seemed to resonate. The restaurant analogy took hold, sometimes being referenced at industry events and in discussions, reinforcing the idea that the workplace must compete with other work environments by offering a unique, valuable experience.
At the time, I was leading research at Herman Miller—before the formation of MillerKnoll—and had spent years studying distributed teams and remote work. We had engaged in scenario planning to better understand the future, and even shared a 2018 Worktech presentation that encouraged the audience to better understand the potential value of offices by imagining prolonged office closures. Our research found that even remote-first companies still sought physical workplaces, not for routine tasks but for the interactions, relationship-building, and for immersive experiences such as workshops that technology struggled to replicate. Those companies recognized the need for in-person interactions. Today, excessive amounts of screen-based interactions has led to increased social isolation, a decreased sense of belonging, and can harm innovation. This reinforces a key takeaway: the limitations of remote technologies was where the value proposition of the office began.
What It Missed
What I failed to acknowledge in my original piece was that many office experiences weren’t just mediocre before the pandemic—they were demoralizing.
Having worked with some of the world’s best office spaces, I had overlooked the reality that many workplaces were uninspiring at best and oppressive at worst. Densified desk farms, poor lighting, excessive noise, lack of color, an absence of natural materials and other design choices communicated a clear message: the office was an institutional vehicle for supervision and control, not a tool for empowerment and engagement. No wonder so many people sought to escape them.
While it can be difficult to admit, even aesthetically beautiful offices often lacked a true connection with employees. French anthropologist Marc Augé coined the term Nonplace in 1992 to describe spaces devoid of identity and meaning, like post offices or bus stations. Offices, for millions, had become nonplaces—corporate, impressive but unapproachable and impersonal. The idea that an office could be as beloved as a favorite restaurant would have seemed absurd to many workers.
What’s Still Up for Debate
One statement from my original article remains unproven. Regarding business leaders questioning the need for offices, I confidently wrote, “It might not seem like it, but this is good news.”
I believed that deeper scrutiny of office spaces would lead to investments in better design, ultimately improving retention, engagement, and well-being. In some cases, that has been true. Many organizations have improved their workplace strategies—right-sizing their real estate portfolios while reinvesting in a diverse mix of workspaces, higher-quality environments and better ergonomics.
However, just as often, companies have stuck with traditional layouts while reducing space and increasing desk-sharing—further commoditizing and depersonalizing the office experience. Why have some leaders embraced the office as a strategic investment while others treat it as a cost to minimize?
One reason may be that, as an industry, we failed to shift the conversation to what truly matters. The term hybrid—useful for describing work location policies but frustratingly vague for defining teams, work or workplaces —dominated discussions and often inhibited decision-making. The conversation shifted towards “days per week” with the underlying assumption that time spent away from the office benefited employees, while time in the office benefited the company. This transactional framing did little to create meaningful change. References to “collaboration” in return-to-office mandates often felt like veiled attempts to restore the pre-pandemic norm rather than redefine the office’s purpose. A conversation dominated by the term “return” was never likely to move us forward.
Forging Ahead
At MillerKnoll, we see a path forward: involving business leaders and employees to create offices that foster better relationships. Relationships are the common thread that unites all stakeholders:
- Employees crave meaningful in-person interactions, friendship, mentorship and connection.
- Managers want cohesive, high-performing teams.
- Executives seek cross-functional communication and collaboration.
- New hires need guidance from experienced colleagues.
- Everyone wants to feel a sense of belonging and purpose within their organization.
Achieving this requires a shift in how organizations approach office design. At MillerKnoll, we emphasize “designing with, not just for” employees. Gone are the days when senior leaders alone could understand and convey the requirements of a high-performance workplace on behalf of their staff. Employees must be involved in the process through focus groups, employee resource groups, and pilot programs. By creating meaningful engagement in the design process, workplaces become more inclusive, adaptable and more valuable to those who use them. People place greater value on things they help create or of which they feel ownership. To encourage better office utilization, organizations should involve employees in the design process and ensure they feel a sense of control over how the resulting space is used.
We should recognize that moving forward, work activities can be completed anywhere, but relationships require intentional spaces. As a result, our focus on activity-based working must shift to include a focus on relationship-based work. Offices that thrive in the future won’t be those that merely accommodate work—they will be the ones that strengthen organizational networks by fostering interactions that won’t otherwise happen digitally. To make an office as valued and irreplaceable as a beloved restaurant, it must foster deeper relationships between the people who dwell there, which also forges a new relationship between those people and the space itself. In order to thrive, people must associate offices with the joy that is derived from improved relationships. That is the new standard we must rise to meet.
