If Your Culture Needs an Office, You Don’t Have One.

An office can make connection easier. It cannot give people a shared purpose, make them trust each other or turn company values into everyday behaviour.

I have been thinking about company culture for more than a decade. Early in my career, I worked around intercultural communication. I wrote my thesis about communication in European projects and spent a lot of time thinking about what happens when people with different cultural backgrounds try to work together.

Later, my interest shifted towards company culture, recruiting and the question of what actually makes people want to join a company and stay there.

This was Berlin in the early 2010s. Startup culture was everywhere. And apparently, building a great company culture was quite straightforward: get a foosball table, offer free food, put some beer in the fridge for Friday afternoon. Culture: done.

Except, of course, it wasn't. More than a decade later, the props have changed, but I am not convinced our understanding has changed nearly as much. We still spend a lot of time talking about where people work, how often they come into the office and which benefits a company offers. Those things can matter, but they are not culture.

You already have a culture

Culture exists wherever groups of people spend enough time together to develop a shared understanding of how things work. Families have cultures. Countries have cultures. Teams have cultures.

Your family might talk openly about every problem, or avoid difficult subjects until Christmas dinner becomes unbearable. You might eat together every Sunday. You might call each other every day or consider one message every three months perfectly sufficient. Nobody needed to write a family culture deck for those patterns to develop.

Companies aren't that different. You don't get to choose whether your company has a culture. You get to influence what kind of culture develops. And that distinction matters, because culture isn't necessarily positive. A company can have a strong culture of trust and transparency. It can also have a strong culture of fear, internal politics or never admitting mistakes. Culture is what people gradually learn about how things actually work around here.

Culture needs something to hold on to

For me, deliberately shaping a healthy company culture starts with shared direction. People need to understand what they are building together. Why does this company exist? Where are we trying to go? What matters to us? How does my work contribute to that?

This is one of the reasons I struggle with the idea that company strategy, brand strategy and company culture are separate conversations. They aren't. The vision, mission and values that eventually influence what a company says to customers should mean at least as much to the people inside the company. Probably more.

A vision isn't useful because somebody put it on a slide during onboarding. It becomes useful when people understand how their work connects to it and when company decisions consistently reinforce it. And that requires communication. Not one town hall. Not a manifesto employees receive on their first day. Ongoing communication about what is happening, where the company is going, what is working, what isn't and why decisions are being made. You cannot expect people to feel that they are building something together if you never tell them what they are building.

Your values are whatever happens on a bad Tuesday

Years ago, I read Tony Hsieh's Delivering Happiness. I couldn't recite the book to you today, but one idea stayed with me: company culture doesn't stop somewhere inside the organisation. It moves through the business. It affects whom you hire, how people work together, how customers are treated and ultimately what kind of company you build.

That is also why perks tell you surprisingly little about culture. Imagine a company with a beautiful office, free lunch, Friday drinks and PEOPLE FIRST written across the wall. Now imagine an employee waking up sick on Tuesday morning and thinking: Shit. I've already had two sick days this year. I better go in.

That thought tells me more about the company's culture than the wall does.

If people feel guilty when they are sick, that is culture. If nobody wants to challenge the CEO, that is culture. If someone can say, “I screwed this up,” without immediately looking for somebody else to blame, that is culture. And if people are trusted to organise their work in the way that allows them to do it well, that is culture too. The things you tolerate, reward, punish and model will eventually matter more than the things you wrote down.

Freedom only works with responsibility

This is one of the principles we are trying to build into Change Strategies from the beginning. I don't particularly care whether somebody starts working at 6 a.m. or 10 a.m. One person's ideal working day might start very early and finish around lunchtime. Mine might include meditation and yoga in the morning, a few hours of work, a surf break and another stretch of work afterwards. Why should those days need to look the same?

I don't need somebody to prove that they sat in front of a computer for eight hours. I need to know that we can rely on each other and that the work gets done to the standard we agreed on. That freedom isn't the absence of expectations. It actually requires quite a lot of responsibility. If a team gives you autonomy, you owe that team reliability. People need to know that you will deliver, communicate when something isn't working and be there when others depend on you.

There is research behind this as well. Self-Determination Theory has long identified autonomy, competence and relatedness as basic psychological needs, and research in working environments has connected their satisfaction with autonomous motivation, well-being and high-quality performance.[1] But mostly, I think this comes down to treating adults like adults.

Remote doesn't mean disconnected

This is where the office conversation gets unnecessarily binary. I like being in the same room with the people I work with. There are conversations that happen differently when you're sitting across from each other. Ideas emerge over coffee. You notice things you might not notice on a scheduled video call. You build memories together.

Research also suggests that fully remote work can have genuine disadvantages. A large study of more than 61,000 Microsoft employees found that company-wide remote work made collaboration networks more siloed and reduced communication across different parts of the organisation.[2] So no, my argument isn't that offices are pointless. My argument is that physical proximity and company culture are not the same thing.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, has been distributed since its early days. It emphasises autonomy over where and when people work and focuses on impact rather than time spent.[3] But it also brings people together physically for team meetups.[4] Buffer has taken a similar approach over the years, combining distributed work with company retreats and smaller team gatherings.[5]

That's not a contradiction. You don't need an office, but you do need connection. Sometimes an office can create the environment for that connection. So can an offsite, a coffee conversation or deliberately making space for people to talk without an agenda attached. The mistake is assuming that putting everybody in the same building has done the job.

Culture needs maintenance

One of the things I find most interesting about Buffer is not that they introduced unusual benefits. It is that they have repeatedly changed them. They once offered unlimited vacation. It sounded wonderfully progressive, but then they discovered people weren't taking enough time off.

So they experimented and eventually introduced a recommendation that people take at least three weeks off each year. After the change, Buffer reported that average vacation taken increased to 18.2 days.[6] I love this example because it shows the difference between announcing a value and operationalising it. “We have unlimited vacation” sounds like freedom. “We noticed you still don't feel comfortable taking enough time off, so we're changing the system” demonstrates that the company actually wants people to rest.

Culture isn't a manifesto you finish. It is an ecosystem you keep shaping. As the company changes, the people change. New situations expose contradictions. A policy that worked for ten people might fail at fifty. Something that sounded generous might produce exactly the wrong behaviour. Good culture requires paying attention to those signals and being willing to adjust.

We are figuring this out too

This has become particularly tangible for me now because we are rebuilding Change Strategies. We're still very small. We don't have a sophisticated HR system or a giant employee handbook. There are things we haven't built yet, from proper onboarding materials to many of the rituals that might eventually become part of how we work. But that doesn't mean our culture starts later. It is starting now.

It is in how we communicate with each other, how much freedom we give each other, and whether we optimise a working relationship only for ourselves or try to create something that genuinely works for both sides. As we start partnering more closely with people and bringing others into how we work, those decisions become more deliberate.

We have business meetings because obviously we need business meetings. But we also want regular conversations where there is no client project to discuss and no deliverable that needs to be finished. Just space to talk, exchange ideas and get to know the people behind the work.

And yes, we are remote. Sometimes we are in the same place, sometimes in different countries. We are also already planning an offsite for early next year. If there are two of us, we'll do it. If there are four or five or ten of us, we'll do it. Being together matters. It just doesn't need to happen every day to matter.

The office is a tool, not a culture

This is perhaps what has bothered me about the return-to-office culture debate. We keep trying to find one universal answer to a deeply contextual question. Office or remote? Three days or five? Mandatory or flexible?

A large randomized controlled trial at Trip.com offers a useful reality check. Among 1,612 employees, hybrid working improved job satisfaction and reduced attrition by a third without damaging performance.[7] That doesn't prove hybrid work is the correct model for every company. It proves something more useful: we should stop pretending there is one.

Different companies have different work, different people and different needs. Culture itself is deeply personal to the organisation building it. The important question isn't whether your people share a postcode between nine and five. It's whether they share enough purpose, trust, information, responsibility and human connection to do something meaningful together.

The Change Strategies position

An office can support culture. So can Slack. So can an offsite, a monthly coffee, a good onboarding process, flexible working hours, Friday drinks or a foosball table. None of those things is culture.

Culture is the shared understanding of what we're trying to build, how we're going to treat each other while we build it, what behaviour we reward, what we don't accept and what people learn they can expect from one another. And it cannot simply be handed down by a founder or CEO. Leadership can give it direction. The people inside the company shape what it becomes. Then, as the company grows, it has to be shaped again.

There should be space for trust, responsibility and different ways of working. There should be space for getting sick without feeling guilty about being human, and for working hard when the situation genuinely demands it without turning exhaustion into a badge of honour. And yes, there should be space for getting everyone into the same room sometimes.

But if your culture disappears the moment people leave that room, the office was holding your people together. Your culture wasn't.

Sources

1. Deci, E. L., Olafsen, A. H. & Ryan, R. M. “Self-Determination Theory in Work Organizations: The State of a Science.” Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 2017.

2. Yang, L. et al. “The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers.” Nature Human Behaviour, 2022.

3. Automattic. “About Us.”

4. Automattic. “Automattic at 20: A Different Kind of Company.”

5. Buffer. “How We Do Team Benefits As a Remote and International Company.”

6. Buffer. “The Best Way We've Found To Get Employees To Take More Vacation Time (And It Isn't Unlimited Vacation).”

7. Bloom, N., Han, R. & Liang, J. “Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance.” Nature, 2024.