Work, Then Place: Designing Office Spaces That Actually Work
What is work really supposed to look like in the 21st century, and why do so many workplaces still feel broken? On this episode of The Real Finds Podcast, I sat down with Corinne Murray and Sara Escobar, co-authors of Work, Then Place, to interrogate our assumptions about productivity, workplace strategy, and the evolving relationship between people, culture, and space. Their core thesis is disarmingly simple: start with the work, what the business needs, how people actually get things done and only then decide where and how place should support it.
Corinne and Sara bring complementary vantage points. Corinne’s career spans CRE, consulting, coworking, and landlord-side strategy (WeWork to RXR), and she’s borderline obsessive about defining “what makes work work.” Sara helped build one of the first culture-driven workplace teams as employee #2 at Hulu, later leading strategy at Netflix with a master’s in organizational development, perfectly positioned to decode how physical, digital, and cultural environments interact.
Below are the most useful ideas from our conversation: practical, non-ideological, and immediately applicable, whether you run a 30-person agency in the Midwest or a global enterprise.
1) Stop Worshiping “Place.” Start With the Work.
We all love to argue about office spaces, open vs. closed, hoteling vs. assigned, two days vs. three. But as Sara puts it, place is downstream of work. The right question isn’t “What should our space look like?” It’s:
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What outcomes are we trying to deliver and why?
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Which teams do what kinds of work, and when?
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How should our physical, digital, and cultural environments combine to support that?
This is why Work, Then Place begins with a rigorous audit, not a blue-sky visioning session. Before you add phone booths or a new meeting policy, take stock of how work is actually happening today. The gaps you discover between what people need and what your environment enables- become the roadmap.
2) The Three Environments of Modern Work
Corinne’s WeWork/RXR experience led her to a deceptively powerful model: every organization operates across three intertwined environments.
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Physical – The rooms, adjacencies, acoustics, furniture, and zoning for different activities.
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Digital – The systems where work actually happens: cloud drives, Slack/Teams, Zoom, project tools, and content pipelines.
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Cultural – The unwritten rules: how decisions get made, how people are rewarded, what “responsiveness” really means, and whether leaders listen.
Most companies over-engineer one and under-invest in the others. For example: upgrading to state-of-the-art collaboration software (digital) without enough focus rooms (physical), or mandating “in-office collaboration” without behaviors that make meetings purposeful (cultural). Performance emerges when the three environments reinforce each other.
3) The Four Modes of Knowledge Work (Design Your Days, Not Just Your Desks)
Another cornerstone of the book is clarifying four modes of knowledge work and being explicit about when and where each should occur:
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Individual Focus – Deep work that demands quiet, predictable conditions.
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Asynchronous Collaboration – Work handed off across time zones or schedules through docs, tickets, comments, and shared artifacts.
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Synchronous Collaboration – Real-time work: workshops, huddles, whiteboarding, pair-programming, writers’ rooms.
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Socializing – The connective tissue: casual collisions, mentoring moments, hallway questions, and trust-building.
The unlock isn’t just zoning your office for these modes; it’s designing your calendar around them. If you’re asking people to commute, in-office days should bias toward socializing and synchronous work, the things that benefit most from co-presence, while home days should protect individual focus and async progress. That’s “Hybrid 2.0.”
4) Outputs vs. Outcomes: Busy ≠ Productive
A theme we kept returning to: outputs (emails sent, calls logged, hours in meetings) are easy to count and increasingly automatable. Outcomes (revenue, shipped features, closed cases, satisfied customers) are harder, and they’re the point of having humans at all.
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If your metrics celebrate outputs, you’ll incentivize busyness.
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If your systems remove friction and measure outcomes, you’ll free people to do the high-value, human parts of the job: judgment, creativity, relationship-building, and cross-functional orchestration.
This reframing is essential as AI matures. Let machines handle the repetitive, precise, error-prone tasks; let humans design, decide, and connect.
5) The Hidden Meeting Tax and How to Shrink It
We all felt it: the 2020–2022 meeting spike calcified into habit. Calendars remain jammed, yet many meetings still lack a clear owner, decision, or desired outcome. Corinne calls this an “invasive species” problem: meetings spread until they choke out actual work.
What to do:
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Default to async for status updates, information sharing, and FYIs.
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Design meetings for decisions owner, inputs, decision rights, and next actions.
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Reset norms: “No agenda, no meeting”; 25/50-minute blocks; meeting-light days for focus.
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Make space for socializing on purpose (see Mode #4) so you don’t try to smuggle connection into every calendar block.
Some companies (Shopify, Dropbox, and others cited in the book) have experimented with calendar purges, meeting-free weeks, or auto-expiring recurring meetings. You don’t need to copy them wholesale; you do need to measure the time cost, test, and iterate.
6) Generational Friction Is Real…Trust Is the Lever
For the first time, many organizations have five or six generations active at once. Seniors often hold decision-making power and deeply ingrained habits. Newer workers bring different norms (asynchronous communication, public-by-default artifact creation, rapid tool switching). The result can feel like a stalemate.
The practical playbook:
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Listen like a statistician. You already have data surveys, tool analytics, retention, promotion rates. Synthesize it, don’t guess.
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Pilot, don’t proclaim. Run small experiments by team and work mode; publish what works; scale what sticks.
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Train managers. Many are anxious because they’ve never learned to manage by outcomes. Give them coaching, dashboards, and clarity.
Trust doesn’t come from pizza parties. It comes from being heard and seeing changes that remove friction.
7) Lead Like a Gardener (Not Just a Carpenter)
One of the book’s most resonant metaphors: the carpenter vs. the gardener.
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Carpenter leaders engineer toward a fixed blueprint, precise, efficient, and fragile when reality changes.
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Gardener leaders cultivate conditions of clear soil, sun, water, and pruning so robust that robust, adaptable growth can occur.
You’ll need both. Compliance, safety, and finance functions demand carpenter-like precision. But most modern knowledge work benefits from the gardener’s stance: set direction, define outcomes, tend the environment, and adapt as the system evolves.
8) Case Study: Hulu’s “Snack Culture” and the Power of Intentional Socializing
At Hulu, instead of free catered lunches like many LA studios, Sara’s team leaned into ingredients and pantries, an “inordinate” spread of snacks designed to spark creativity and collisions. Teams built meals, shared hacks, and even compiled a snack cookbook. It wasn’t about granola bars; it was about designing a culture of invention and making the social mode easy and natural.
Translate that to your context: Where are the intentional magnets that pull people into useful collisions without forcing yet another meeting?
9) CRE Must Catch Up: Transparent, Self-Serve, and City-Shaping
Both guests made pointed observations for those of us in commercial real estate:
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Self-serve expectations: Consumers now research, customize, transact, and track in real time. CRE lags. We need clearer inventory, simpler decisions, and smoother paths to occupancy.
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Urban planning + CRE: These spheres too often operate in silos. The future demands joint design not just office-to-residential one-offs, but coordinated thinking about streets, services, child care, logistics, amenities, and public life. The payoff isn’t just civic well-designed districts create durable demand.
As a Chicago-area commercial real estate agent and operator, I see this daily: the assets that perform best are embedded in human-centered ecosystems with frictionless access, intentional amenities, and a coherent story.
10) Make Work Suck Less (A Practical Checklist)
If you’re a CEO, HR leader, or real estate strategist, here’s a quick starting framework distilled from the book and our conversation:
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Audit first. Map your four work modes by team. Identify bottlenecks across physical, digital, and cultural environments.
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Re-bias your metrics. Shift incentives from outputs to outcomes. Publish what “good” looks like.
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Redesign your calendar. Protect focus, dedicate in-office days to synchronous and social modes, and enforce meeting hygiene.
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Upgrade manager muscles. Teach outcome management, async leadership, and tooling literacy.
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Prototype place. Treat space like software: version it. Test quiet labs, project rooms, and social magnets; measure and iterate.
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Pair humans + machines. Systematically move repeatable work to tools/AI; free people for judgment, creativity, and relationships.
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Communicate like product managers. Release notes, pilots, feedback loops, and visible wins. That’s how you rebuild trust.
The Big Takeaway
Work doesn’t have to suck! The answer isn’t ping-pong tables or mandatory Tuesdays. It’s an integrated system that reduces friction, channels effort toward outcomes, and returns energy to people so they can perform at work and have a life after it.
If you’re rethinking your workplace strategy, this episode with Corinne and Sara is a masterclass in asking better questions before you buy another tool or knock down another wall.
Explore More
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Book: Work, Then Place — on Amazon and in bookstores.
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Learn more: workthenplace.com and their Substack: workthenplace.substack.com
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Connect with our guests:
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Corinne Murray — https://www.linkedin.com/in/corinnejmurray/
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Sara Escobar — https://www.linkedin.com/in/saraescoux/
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About the host: The Real Finds Podcast is produced by Van Vlissingen & Co. brokerage and property management team (est. 1879), one of the Midwest’s oldest commercial real estate firms that preforms 100+ transactions annually across Northern Illinois and Wisconsin.