Has the Meaning of Work Changed?

For generations, work was largely understood as a place. You woke up in the morning, got dressed, travelled to the office and went to work. At the end of the day, you left work and went home. There was a clear physical and psychological boundary between the two.

In that sense, work was almost a noun — somewhere you went.

Today, it increasingly feels like a verb. We open a laptop and begin to work, whether we happen to be sitting in an office, at home, at a client, in a coffee shop or somewhere entirely different.

Technology had been moving us in this direction for years, but COVID accelerated the shift almost overnight. At the same time, a younger generation entered the workplace with very different expectations around flexibility, technology and the role that work should play in their lives.

Several years later, we are still trying to determine what all of this means. The return-to-office debate continues, but perhaps we are spending too much time debating where people should work and not enough time asking what work should look like now.

The argument is more complicated than office versus home

There are compelling arguments on both sides.

For employees, flexibility can be incredibly valuable. Removing a daily commute gives people time back, technology has made many roles genuinely location-independent, and focused work can often be completed just as effectively away from an office.

Research has challenged some of the assumptions that working from home automatically means lower productivity. A large Stanford study, for example, found that employees working a hybrid model of three days in the office and two at home performed just as well and had the same promotion prospects as colleagues working entirely from the office. Interestingly, resignations among the hybrid group also fell by approximately a third.

But productivity is only one measure of whether a working model is successful.

There is another consequence of the shift in working patterns that deserves more attention: 

our exposure to other people has changed.

When you travelled to an office every day, interaction happened almost without effort. You greeted the receptionist, spoke to someone while making coffee, overheard a conversation, joined colleagues for lunch or found yourself chatting to someone from another department. Many of these interactions had very little to do with the work you were actually employed to do, but they formed part of your working life.

When you work predominantly from home, much of that incidental interaction disappears. Your day can become a series of scheduled online meetings and messages, followed by hours working alone. You can be highly productive and still have had remarkably little meaningful human interaction by the time you close your laptop.

There is growing research examining the relationship between high levels of remote work, isolation and loneliness. This does not mean working from home is inherently bad for wellbeing, nor does it mean everyone needs an office to feel connected. It does, however, suggest that we should be careful about treating human interaction as an insignificant part of the workplace.

There is also something subtler that we are beginning to observe: social confidence matters at work.

Being able to walk into a room of unfamiliar people, start a conversation, read body language, disagree respectfully, build rapport, recognise when someone is uncomfortable or simply navigate an awkward interaction are important professional skills. They are developed partly through experience.

This becomes particularly relevant when we think about younger employees entering the workforce. If opportunities for everyday workplace interaction are reduced, are we unintentionally reducing some of the environments in which these skills have traditionally developed?

It is worth asking the question without assuming we already know the answer.

The office isn't necessarily the solution either

None of this means that bringing everyone back into the office five days a week will suddenly solve problems with culture, communication, productivity or employee wellbeing.

An employee can be sitting at a desk from 08:00 to 17:00 and be completely disengaged. Equally, someone working from home can be productive, accountable, collaborative and deeply connected to their team.

Physical presence and performance have never been quite the same thing.

This is where the return-to-office conversation can sometimes miss an uncomfortable reality. Hybrid and remote working have changed not only what is expected of employees, but also what is required of managers.

Managing a distributed team requires a different level of intentionality. Expectations need to be clearer. Outcomes need to be defined. Communication needs to be deliberate. Managers need to recognise disengagement without relying on seeing someone sitting at a desk, and they need to create connection without assuming it will happen naturally because everyone occupies the same physical space.

Not every manager has been equipped to do this.

For decades, many workplaces inadvertently used visibility as a proxy for performance. You could see who arrived early, who stayed late and who appeared busy. Hybrid work removes much of that visibility and forces organisations to become clearer about what good performance actually looks like.

Perhaps, in some cases, remote working has not created a management problem at all. It has simply exposed one that was already there.

There is also a commercial reality employees don't always see

The employee experience is only one side of hybrid work. Behind the scenes, there is an operational complexity that can be easy to underestimate.

An office does not suddenly cost substantially less because employees use it three days a week. Businesses still carry leases, connectivity, security, insurance, equipment, cleaning, utilities, reception and facilities costs.

Hybrid working then adds another layer: coordination.

If employees have complete freedom to choose their office days, what happens when everyone chooses Tuesday and nobody chooses Friday? If the purpose of coming into the office is collaboration, what happens when an employee travels in only to discover that the colleagues they need to work with are at home?

Businesses then begin creating team days, anchor days, booking systems and attendance schedules. They have to determine when reception is required, when cleaning takes place, how meeting rooms are managed and whether an office designed for 100 employees still makes commercial sense if only 30 or 40 people use it on an average day.

There is a strange contradiction here. Flexibility for the individual can create complexity for the organisation.

That does not make flexibility wrong. It simply means there is a cost and operational reality attached to it that employees may not always see.

Likewise, employers need to recognise the cost imposed on employees when attendance is required without a clear purpose. Travelling through traffic to sit at a desk wearing headphones and attending virtual meetings all day is unlikely to convince anyone of the value of office-based work.

Perhaps both sides need to understand the other's reality a little better.

Maybe we are asking the wrong question

The debate tends to begin with a number.

Three days in the office. Two days at home. Four days back. Fully remote.

But perhaps the number should come later.

The first question might be: What is the office actually for?

If the purpose is collaboration, then office days should create genuine opportunities to collaborate. If it is mentorship, junior employees need meaningful access to experienced colleagues. If it is learning, organisations need to create opportunities for people to observe, participate and ask questions. If it is culture and human connection, then the environment should encourage people to actually interact.

And if someone needs several uninterrupted hours to produce focused individual work, perhaps there are occasions when home is the better environment in which to do it.

This shifts the conversation away from attendance and towards purpose.

It also places responsibility on both sides. Employees need to recognise that flexibility requires accountability and that organisations have operational and commercial realities to manage. Employers need to recognise that simply requiring physical presence does not automatically produce collaboration, culture or productivity.

Perhaps the organisations that navigate this next phase successfully will not be the ones that choose the perfect number of office days. They will be the ones that become much more deliberate about why, when and how their people work together.

We are still figuring this out

The interesting thing about the future-of-work debate is that we are discussing it as though someone already has the answer.

Perhaps nobody does.

We have fundamentally changed working patterns in a remarkably short period of time. We have gained flexibility and autonomy, but we are also beginning to understand some of the less obvious consequences — for human interaction, management, culture, commercial property, operating costs and even the way younger employees learn how to navigate the workplace.

At iLaunch, we have the privilege of seeing this conversation from both sides. We speak to employers trying to determine what works for their businesses and to candidates whose expectations of work have evolved considerably.

There are valid arguments on both sides, which is why we don't believe the conversation should simply be reduced to office versus remote.

Perhaps the more interesting question is whether our definition of work has changed faster than our organisations have.

If work is no longer somewhere we go, but something we do, then we need to think carefully about what we may have gained — and what we may inadvertently have lost — along the way.

We would love to hear what others are experiencing. Has hybrid working improved the way we work, or simply changed it? Are we underestimating the importance of everyday human interaction? And, for employers navigating hybrid models, has flexibility made your organisation easier or more complicated to run?

There may not be one right answer. But it feels like a conversation worth having.