For decades, we treated office space as the default builder of company culture. We relied on proximity, physical cues, and accidental interactions to do the work of connection. But culture by osmosis doesn’t scale—and it certainly doesn’t travel.
The pandemic proved what some already suspected: we can work effectively without sitting together. But it also surfaced the deeper truth. If culture isn’t built into the building, it must be built into the work. That shift—from office-dependent to intentionally designed culture—is the transformation leaders now face.
Breaking the Office = Culture Myth
Culture is not where we sit. It’s how we show up. And companies can no longer confuse floorplans with values. The first step is to recognize that most assumptions about in-person culture were never universal. Not everyone benefited from hallway chats or open office serendipity. Not everyone felt included or seen.
As Mark Dixon, founder and CEO of International Workplace Group, said in our conversation on The Future of Less Work podcast about the many people in large office buildings:
“No one talks to them. They just sit there. They know their neighbors, but there isn’t any effort to communicate. Communication is happening by chance and that’s the real change with technology: don’t do things by chance. Coffee machine conversations? Curate it.”
If you’ve ever worked in a global organization from anywhere other than the headquarters, you’ve probably felt this. Maybe you had to travel to HQ just to feel part of things. Or maybe you found yourself on countless conference calls, trying to contribute from afar while others shared eye contact and informal cues in a conference room. Trust, visibility, influence—none of it flows naturally when you’re not in the room.
When you stop treating the office as your culture engine, you start asking better questions. What actually builds connection, meaning, and commitment? Who gets included or excluded in how we do things? And how do we design culture that travels with people, wherever they go?
Culture by Design, Not by Location
Culture doesn’t just happen. It must be curated. It’s not enough to hope people bump into each other in the hallway or linger in the break room. Today, culture needs to be designed into the fabric of how people work and connect. And that doesn’t just mean creating better moments for when we’re in the same building—it means building the systems, the rituals, and the connections for when we’re not. Instead of relying on accidental run-ins, organizations must create intentional moments of interaction. That includes investing in interactive platforms that allow people to collaborate meaningfully across distance. And it means establishing clear rituals and rhythms that give structure and emotional consistency to the employee experience, whether you’re in a shared space or working from a laptop halfway across the world.
As Dixon put it:
“Manchester United has hundreds of millions of supporters all over the world. They’ve never visited the Football Ground. They’ve never been to England. But they support the branding, the team, and the people. They feel part of it. Having never met anything else.”
If a football club can create global belonging without proximity, so can companies. Think of culture less as a place and more as an ecosystem: emotional resonance, shared rituals, recognizable signals, and consistent communication. That’s not luck. That’s design.
Redefining Leadership and Empowerment
In a world without desks and doors, culture doesn’t trickle down from the top. It flows through people—especially those in the middle. First-line managers became the connective tissue of organizations when office walls disappeared. It was in the micro-moments—the quick check-ins, the tone of an email, the way feedback was given or withheld—that culture either flourished or fractured.
During the pandemic, decision-making shifted downward by necessity, giving rise to more empowered leadership at every level. Video calls, once seen as a barrier, made leaders unexpectedly more visible and available. Employees who had once been peripheral gained new access and voice.
But the lesson isn’t just about what happened when we all went remote. It’s about what happens when culture isn’t dependent on shared physical space. Managers, by virtue of proximity in the workflow, are the ones who shape culture moment by moment—in everything they say and do, and just as powerfully, in everything they don’t. Culture is lived, not laminated, and it comes to life through the small, human choices we make in how we treat one another at work.
Building a Remote-First Cultural Mindset (Even If You’re Not Fully Remote)
This isn’t just about where people work. It’s about how we design work to be inclusive, regardless of location. A remote-first mindset doesn’t mean everyone is remote all the time—it means that everything from onboarding to collaboration is designed as if no one is in the same room. It forces us to decenter the office from our cultural assumptions.
When you adopt this mindset, you’re not simply enabling remote work. You’re creating a culture that’s accessible to everyone—those in headquarters and those halfway across the globe. You’re designing with intention: ensuring that everyone has access to the same information, the same visibility, the same opportunities to participate, no matter where they sit.
It means building transparent communication flows that don’t depend on being in the right meeting. It means emphasizing outcomes over face time. And it means investing in tools and processes that support inclusion, equity, and access by default. Even if your team is largely office-based or hybrid, this mindset ensures that no one is left out simply because they weren’t in the hallway when a key conversation happened.
From Proximity to Participation
This is the big shift we’re living through. We are unbundling culture from place. The office still matters—but it no longer defines culture. It becomes a tool, a convening space, a symbol. Not the source.
Culture no longer depends on showing up to a building. It depends on how leaders communicate, how decisions get made, how people experience the organization in their day-to-day work. Are they included? Do they feel safe? Do they see themselves in the values being lived out? These are the new cultural markers.
The future of culture is participatory. It’s something we build actively, not absorb passively. And that means everyone has a role to play—especially leaders who are now responsible not just for performance, but for connection, cohesion, and clarity.
It’s in every interaction. Every check-in. Every decision to share or withhold information. Every small choice that says, “You matter here.”
Your best people work not because they have to, not because you tell them to, and not because you measure them on it. They work because they want to—because working for you is their way of achieving their purpose in life.
So build a culture that doesn’t depend on buildings. Build one that moves with your people, wherever they are.