The Industry Did Not Need More Strategy. It Needed a Standard.

Work/Shift Insights - Issue #20 | Fit-for-Purpose Workplace Strategy

By Frederic Libet Descorne

More people are talking about culture, hybrid work, employee experience, leadership, belonging, performance, flexibility, and the office as a tool for connection rather than just a place to sit.

I do not think that is the problem.

What I keep seeing instead is a field that became more fluent before it became more rigorous.

The workplace industry did not suffer from a lack of strategy.

It suffered from a lack of a standard for what strategy should have to prove.

Somewhere right now, a leadership team is approving a workplace decision built on a brief nobody independently tested. They will only discover what was wrong once they are already living with it.

A workplace strategy can be articulate, aligned, and beautifully presented, and still not be strong enough to shape a lease, justify capital, support a new operating model, or define the conditions people will work in for years.

Yet much of what gets treated as credible strategy is still judged by the wrong things.

Did stakeholders like the process?

Did the workshops create alignment?

Did the recommendations sound current, commercially aware, and easy to support?

Did the narrative hold together?

Those things matter. But they are not a standard.

They are signs of momentum.

And momentum is not proof.

The harder question is this:

What has this strategy actually proved before asking an organisation to act on it?

Not because people are careless. Because the category still has not built a serious enough threshold between what sounds plausible and what is strong enough to guide a major decision.

That is where the real gap sits.

A strategy can recommend more collaboration space when the real friction sits in leadership habits, meeting culture, and digital overload. It can frame a relocation as a culture solution when the underlying issue is operating-model ambiguity. It can even generate genuine stakeholder alignment around a direction that was never independently tested in the first place. That is how an unproven brief starts to look strategic.

A credible workplace strategy should be able to show what work actually needs to happen in the workplace, for that organisation, now.

It should be clear about who is being designed for, instead of collapsing everyone into one broad employee category.

It should isolate where friction really sits, whether in space, leadership, behaviour, technology, policy, or some combination of them.

It should make trade-offs visible, rather than hiding them inside polished language.

And it should define success before implementation, so the outcome can be judged on performance, not presentation.

Without that threshold, strategy too easily becomes a bridge between assumption and implementation.

It helps teams move forward.

It helps create alignment.

It helps a brief sound more mature, more thoughtful, more strategic.

But that still does not mean it has been tested strongly enough to justify the decision it is about to drive.

Part of the problem is structural. In too many cases, strategy is being developed inside a process already moving toward design, delivery, leasing, or change. That does not make it automatically wrong. But it does mean the strategy was never fully independent of the outcome it was meant to inform. And a standard cannot be set by the same process it is meant to test.

That is why so much workplace strategy can sound convincing long before it becomes testable.

The documents look right.

The process feels intelligent.

The narrative is coherent.

The recommendations are well framed.

And yet something remains unproven.

Usually because it is.

If workplace strategy is going to sit upstream of major business decisions, it has to accept a higher burden of proof.

Not a louder role.

Not a broader one.

A stricter one.

It has to be clearer about what has been evidenced and what remains assumption.

It has to be more disciplined about separating spatial issues from non-spatial ones before expensive decisions get locked in.

And it has to give leaders something they can still defend long after the presentation is over, when the project is live, the trade-offs are real, and the organisation has to live with the outcome.

The industry did not need more strategy.

It needed a standard.