Teamspirit or Fixed Costs

Downsizing office space reduces fixed costs, but is it really worth it for the team? The CFO looks at the Excel spreadsheet and is delighted to see fixed costs plummeting. The HR manager sees the company culture crumbling and gets nervous. Both have a valid point.

The kitchen table on Tuesday morning is incredibly efficient. Your employees open their laptops and get right to work. No half-hour traffic jam on the highway, no train delays. This way, your company saves thousands of euros per month because you’ve simply cut the leased office space in half. The raw numbers clearly speak in favor of working from home. Productivity during focused individual work remains measurably high.

When the company is nothing more than a window on the screen

Still, something happens to a team when it only sees each other via video calls for months on end. The work becomes transactional. You log in in the morning and work through your tickets. You usually see your colleagues and coworkers as small tiles in a Teams call. Your brain no longer registers your colleagues as real, flesh-and-blood people, but as digital avatars. When you shut down your computer at 5 p.m., the emotional transition back to your personal life is often difficult because there’s no physical separation.

That deep sense of belonging is slowly fading. These days, anyone who no longer feels an emotional connection to their employer or their team will switch jobs at the first better offer they see on LinkedIn. A purely virtual company offers little psychological support, and employee retention is declining.

Culture doesn’t emerge from a PDF manual. It emerges in those unplanned moments—like when two people stop in the hallway after a meeting and resolve an issue in three minutes. Working from home, that would have required eight emails. When a new colleague unpacks their company laptop on their first day, they need real people to make the onboarding process easier. They need the laughter at the coffee machine and the shared walk to lunch to build psychological safety within the new team. A physical office gives your team exactly that space.

The office has to be able to do more than the sofa at home

Even though we have to stick up for the physical office: the old open-plan office with gray carpets is truly a thing of the past. No one gets on the train in the morning just to sit in the office with headphones on and type exactly what they could have typed on their own couch. When your team comes into the office, it’s primarily because of the other people.

This is where concepts like our myhive Offices come in. With us, you’re not just renting desks and electricity. You get an environment that, thanks to smart services and well-designed acoustics, is almost like a hotel. Our spaces are designed to foster connections. There are open lounges for casual interaction, community zones for meaningful conversations, and quiet retreats for focused work. With us, your headquarters becomes a social hub for the entire company.

No matter what you decide, a future-proof location strategy requires an honest assessment of your team’s reality. These days, you probably no longer need a dedicated desk for every employee. What you need is a central hub that brings people together. Turn the office into a place where your team wants to come—and is happy to do so.