The office is back, but you may not recognize it

Walk through LinkedIn’s new 250,000-square-foot global headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, and you’ll hear an inviting hum as people chat in the 500-seat cafeteria or exchange pleasantries on the wide, skylit staircase. On higher floors of Building One, as it’s called, you’ll see teams pitching ideas in glassed-in multipurpose rooms, remote members joining virtually onscreen, while a manager and her mentor huddle on elevated benches. On the top floor, hushed as a library, workers at desks and in deep-focus pods hunker down on deadlines.

Teams are back on site at the social media company—but their environment has changed. In 2021, a year after the pandemic sent everyone home to work remotely, Lisa Britz, director of workplace design, and her team scrapped their original design for Building One and went back to the drawing board. “We realized, even before we had a hybrid policy in place, that things were going to be different when we came back,” Britz recalls.

Welcome to the new, hybrid office. With 83% of workers preferring to work remotely at least part of the week, according to Accenture research, companies are throwing out the old pre-pandemic rules and reimagining space where they work together: the office. And this reinvention isn’t just happening in Silicon Valley, but everywhere, with 77% of global companies planning to redesign their offices, according to a survey by B2B research firm Sapio. Business leaders are recognizing a simple fact: To entice employees back to the office will take more than coercion. The physical office will need to give them a reason—and the inspiration—to come in.

That means adopting a few new rules: Bake wellness into the design. Create different zones for people’s different ideal work styles. Infuse technology into everything to make virtual collaboration effective. In short, create a space where people can do their best work when, where, and how they want.