What’s the best place for reading emails, analysing documents, creating presentations or attending video calls? Once upon a time, the only answer would have been an ergonomic chair pulled up to a desk somewhere in an office. But when we survey people today, most say they’d rather do these tasks at home.

This presents an existential crisis for the traditional office. If the best place for desk-based work isn’t an office, then what exactly is an office for?

Early in the pandemic, I wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review looking at how workplaces were changing. Drawing on insight from Hassell’s strategy team, I speculated that some offices might become more like clubhouses – social hubs focused on collaboration, culture and creativity. We’d seen this in our research: while many people liked working from home, physical offices were still the preferred place for meetings, events and water-cooler moments.