The office has never been just a place to work, it both reflects and shapes an organization’s culture. The furniture, the light, the layout, the ratio of private to shared space—all of it sends signals, whether leaders intend them to or not.

Paul Cooper and Christopher Good have spent their careers translating between what organizations say they value and what their spaces actually communicate. Paul is a principal at the architecture firm, TEF Design, and has spent 30 years designing places where people come together. Christopher is Chief Creative Officer at One Workplace, a workplace design and furnishings company, with the philosophy that no one should have to come into an office by default anymore, the office needs to earn it.

On this episode, Paul and Christopher join organizational culture experts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava to discuss what offices should look like now in the age of remote and hybrid models, why rents in one AI-centric San Francisco neighborhood have doubled why downtown office space sits empty, and the unknowns of designing for the future as AI takes off.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

3 Main Takeaways:

  1. One solution does not fit all spaces. Come up with some guiding principles, as a team, that align with the overall mission and vision for that space’s design.
  2. Ask why your workplace exists. If it’s about people, own that, invest in it, and design for what their needs are.
  3. Design for the in-between experiences. When workers aren’t at their desks or in a conference room, how does the design of the space create moments for connection?

Show Links:

Transcript

[00:00:00] Jennifer Chatman: Hey, Sameer. I have a question for you. Where was your very first job?

[00:00:05] Sameer Srivastava: So, I’d have to go back to the end of high school and before college, that summer when I worked at a discount retailer on the East Coast called Caldor. So, think of a Kmart you might have gone to in the 1980s and now imagine a lower end version of it. That’s where I worked.

[00:00:24] Jennifer Chatman: What was the physical space like?

[00:00:26] Sameer Srivastava: So, it was chaotic. Everything was, kind of, disorganized. The lighting was terrible. It was not a very nice place to be. How about you?

[00:00:34] Jennifer Chatman: I was an aerobics instructor.

[00:00:36] Sameer Srivastava: Oh, interesting. And what was that physical space like?

[00:00:39] Jennifer Chatman: Well, I think it’s pretty easy to imagine big wooden floors that were suspended so they weren’t too hard to land on, and then enormous mirrors surrounding the entire room that everyone fought to get space in. I mean, it’s interesting to think about that because our guests today have very deep expertise on what the physical space says about the organization that you work for. And they’ve spent their careers thinking about the relationship between physical space and the culture of the organization that occupies it. But first, introductions.

[00:01:17] Sameer Srivastava: I’m Sameer Srivastava, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and co-founder of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation.

[00:01:26] Jennifer Chatman: And I’m Jenny Chatman, a professor and dean at the Haas School, and this is The Culture Kit.

Today, we’re joined by two practitioners who’ve been on the front lines of some of the most significant shifts in workspace history. Paul Cooper is a principal at TEF Design, a Bay Area architecture firm, and he spent nearly 30 years designing places where people come together, from the Bay Area Metro Center to SFO’s Terminal 3 — I’ve spent a lot of time there — to the Haas Jr. Foundation headquarters.

Paul, welcome.

[00:02:01] Paul Cooper: Thank you, Jenny. It’s a pleasure to be here with you today.

[00:02:04] Sameer Srivastava: And our other guest is Christopher Good. He is chief creative officer at One Workplace, an outspoken voice in this field. He’ll tell you flat out, if your office doesn’t actively support your culture it has failed. His philosophy comes down to something simple: no one should have to come to the office by default anymore, the office really has to earn it.

Chris, great to have you here.

[00:02:26] Christopher Good: Thank you both for having me. I’m happy to be here and hopefully get a chance to earn my spot on your podcast today.

[00:02:33] Jennifer Chatman: So, we saw both of you present at our Culture Connect Conference in January at Haas, and we’ve been looking forward to this conversation. So, let’s get into it.

Before we talk about what’s changing, I think it’s important to establish the foundation. We’ve all seen research showing that remote teams can be just as productive. So, make the case for our listeners. Why does physical space matter for culture at all anymore? What does it do that a Zoom call can’t?

[00:03:01] Paul Cooper: Well, I think the word that is important is “can be.” The challenge of the research about remote teams is that, are we as productive when we’re together? Are we not as productive when together? You know, we don’t really have the research to back up for, I would say, different types of learning. When you are doing casual learning, they call it, you know, when you are at the cooler, when you’re in the hallway. People are missing out on these opportunities. And how is that going to affect them as they advance in their career? You don’t get that over Zoom.

[00:03:36] Christopher Good: Something I might add to that in this kind of “can be” scenario is I think all of us understand innately — I hope we all understand innately — why spaces matter, right? They’re here to shelter us, care for us, offer lots of things to make us be our best people. But most organizations don’t design their offices for that purpose. They’re designed for efficiency. They’re designed for hierarchy. They’re designed to observe you. And if I were to ask you to close your eyes and imagine a place that you care about, that you love, you’d be able to imagine it instantly. It pops right at the tip of our brain.

But the more interesting question is, what if we are being asked to design places, not that we love, but that love us back? To me, that’s the real goal of a workplace: a place that cares for me and my colleagues as much as I care for it. So, how do we create those kinds of places?

[00:04:32] Sameer Srivastava: Can you just give us an example, Chris? When you say a place that loves us back, what’s an example that comes to mind?

[00:04:37] Christopher Good: Sure. So, you know, we know the basic needs, like shelter, safety, belonging, right? But all the Maslow stuff. How do we support all the other things that make us be our best person? So, for me, a place that loves me back is a place that understands what I need when I’m coming to work that day, that provides all the things that make my work experience the best work experience it can possibly be. And the challenge in that is it’s deeply unique. You know, the needs for a software engineer are very different than the needs for a nurse. That software engineer needs a place for intense focus. And then those sparse moments in between focus to have great connections with others. The nurse on the other hand, she is battling physical, mental, and emotional fatigue. So, if we think about the people that we’re serving and what they need to be their best people, how do we offer that to them?

[00:05:35] Jennifer Chatman: So, let’s go back in time. The modern office has gone through some pretty dramatic changes over the years. We can think about the bullpen, the private executive suite, the open plan, a tech campus. Walk us through some of that history. What were those spaces actually designed for? And what did each era communicate about what organizations valued?

[00:05:54] Paul Cooper: Yeah, I mean, I think that the office place, Chris mentioned this, was more company-first. It was more about fixed—it was more about efficiency. And we’ve, kind of, gone through this spectrum to get to worker wellness, which is about how people are in the space, how they’re feeling. And I think there’s lots of steps along that journey, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t still have the fixed workspace in some instances and we don’t have a workspace that is people sitting on a couch with a laptop. There’s still the whole spectrum in the job force. And, for BAHA, this Bay Area regional headquarters that we did for them when they were doing their space, they really wanted to go from a “me” to “we” culture. So, they had a culture where it was all about me — “my office, my space, my… me, me, me.” And we created a space for them where it was more about the “we” — “how do we come together” — in their culture. That was what they were looking for. They were looking for coming together. So, it became about the coffee bars. It became about the stair that connected the four spaces with their map behind it of the region that they served. And it became about where they sit and look out the window at nature. And it became more about, how do we come together? So, I think space can give you that kind of cultural backing.

[00:07:23] Jennifer Chatman: So, were there any eras or design movements that actually got it right? You’re talking, Paul, about how the space can connect with the organization’s culture and maybe reinforce it. So, has that happened through any particular design movement?

[00:07:38] Paul Cooper: Yeah. Chris, I don’t know how you would take this on, but when you asked me this question, I think about—we have so many different generations in the workforce. How do we actually meet people where they’re at? It’s not just one size fits all, right? We can’t design a workspace that does this for you because you might have different needs than I would have or somebody else would have. So, I think this is a difficult question. I don’t know if there’s an erathat has gotten it right. I think that there might be a mixture that’s got it right.

[00:08:12] Christopher Good: And I think it depends on who’s answering your question. If you were asking that question of the organizations, I think throughout most eras, they would say that we got it right because it solved for what they were trying to solve for. And now, we’re in an era, as Paul mentioned, the focus is shifting from the needs of the organization first to the needs of the employee first in service to the organization. And so, it’s a very different kind of environment that we may be looking to create in the next five to 10 years in service to us and our needs.

[00:08:44] Paul Cooper: Yeah, I mean, it also makes me think about, so we did the schematic design, the early concept for Marques Brownlee, who is a technology reviewer. And when we were reviewing with him what his needs were for his office, he wants to be able to film anywhere in the space. So, the lighting’s got to be right, the acoustics got to be right, but he wants this, kind of, casual feel. So, he was backing his goals and looking at his space and building space out that were for his needs and for his employees in a way that supported doing videos. So, it’s a very different type of space.

[00:09:24] Jennifer Chatman: I was thinking about when companies went remote in 2020, and it seemed like a lot of leaders discovered for the first time that their culture had really been riding on physical proximity more than they realized. What did they lose? And did they even know they had it?

[00:09:42] Christopher Good: Well, if they didn’t know they had it, I imagine they definitely lost it. But, you know, the remote work question’s interesting because we did go through this window of time where suddenly remote work was possible and then not just possible, it was expected. And now, on the flip turn of this, now, we’re questioning, is that, in fact, the right experience for our organizations and for our people?

We’re going to talk a lot about probably AI in a little bit, but AI’s an interesting case in this, in the sense that a lot of AI firms are shifting the conversation from, is remote work acceptable or allowable to, “I really, truly want my people in the office every single day.” And what I think is important about that is we’re learning a lot about what it means to be together for certain kinds of work. When the work in front of us is individual, it’s focused, it’s tied to a known problem, with a relatively defined expectation of how to do it, remote work can work fairly well. But when that work changes to something that has no rules that is difficult to describe, has no roadmap, and we’re trying to figure out what, in fact, unfamiliar problem I’m trying to solve with lots of ambiguity around it, that kind of experience doesn’t work so well in the remote environment. I need people around me that I can bounce ideas off of, that I can collaborate with at the speed of thought and touch and tactile interaction that the haptic world around me is important sitting next to this person writing on a whiteboard. And AI firms who are doing that kind of work and probably doing it in a way that has some secrecy to it, they want to keep the lids on what they’re doing, requires that in-person kind of interaction. And we’re seeing the focus change again, at least for this subset of organizations.

[00:11:28] Sameer Srivastava: Yeah, we’re seeing the focus change, but we’re also seeing a lot of variation across firms. So, some firms are bringing people back five days, others, you know, three days, two and a half, and so on. What’s your take on this return to office push? And what seems to be driving this variation? And do you think firms are getting it right?

[00:11:46] Christopher Good: My take on that is, most organizations are doing their best to solve an ambiguous situation based on what they know about their needs, their people and what they’re trying to solve for, and what they value, which is why you’re seeing such a wide range of responses. What my organization’s doing and what Paul’s organization’s doing and yours are going to be uniquely different because we’re all figuring this out for the first time with our own subset of expectations and goals. And so, there’s no right or wrong answer, I would just add, so long as you’re keeping your people in mind as to why you’re making those choices.

[00:12:27] Paul Cooper: Yeah, I’m not sure that we know what the outcomes are yet, right? When I was, you know, working 30 years ago, I overheard all the conversations next to me and I was learning when I was seeing all these things. And what is going to happen to those people that don’t have that learning? But I think, you know, maybe there’s a discussion that it’s replaced by AI, or how does it, kind of, evolve? I don’t know. But I think that it’s really a question mark about what this remote work is going to do to the generation of people coming up.

[00:13:00] Christopher Good: You know, it’s funny, I and Paul too, we lead organizations that create spaces for other people. That is what we do. And at the same time, I’m a huge proponent of remote work because it supports us in all kinds of other ways. It makes our lives easier to navigate. There’s less commutes. I can spend time with my family. So many benefits. But my employees create workplaces for other people. And to do that well, you have to work in a workplace with other people and experience that firsthand. I mean, this is, kind of, an off-color analogy, but, like, I wouldn’t hire a dentist who doesn’t know how to take care of his own teeth. And so, I want to hire a design firm who lives and works in the kinds of experiences that we’re asking them to create for us, or we’re going to create for them. That’s an important aspect. And so, I need my team to be in the office as much as I can. It’s an innate way of how we learn about how they should be.

[00:13:54] Paul Cooper: Yeah, I think the creative fields and our field are very tactile, right? We need to look at materials. We have a material library. We need to… we look at drawings. We put photos up. We get together. I mean, all of those things are really difficult to do in a remote way. And we’re hybrid. We’re in the office three days a week and remote two days a week. So, we do both to try to give that flexibility.

[00:14:17] Sameer Srivastava: So, let me pick up on the hybrid theme because one of the implications of having hybrid arrangements of the kind you just described, Paul, is that, when people do come into the office, it’s not as reliably full as it used to be in a world when everyone came in five days a week. How do you first of all think about design, given that you won’t be at full utilization most days? And is a half empty office worse for company culture than no office at all?

[00:14:45] Paul Cooper: I think that one thing you need to do is strengthen the hybrid connection. For some of our clients, we try to make the experience of being hybrid better. So, like, think of a conference room, a traditional conference room. You have a long oval conference table, right? Cut that table in half. Push it against the wall. Put screens on the wall. Put tables behind it with people elevated so you can see everybody. And if you make the connection better with hybrid, people will want to come in.

The other thing that we do is you’ve got four workstations altogether. Instead of them being individual workstations off in their corners, you take it out, put a table in the middle, and have teams come in together at the same time so that they’re all together. They’re not off in different places.

So, I think there are steps that you can do to help a place that’s not full all the time but feel energized.

[00:15:37] Christopher Good: Sameer, your question super-resonates with me. I mean, our offices aren’t just the places that we work. They also double as a showcase for what the future of work can look like to others. And a half empty office is not a great experience to show others what that can look like.

Now, our Santa Clara headquarters, we’re actually getting ready to renovate it. It was designed for over 400 people to show up every day. We don’t, today, have that many people showing up every day. The work has changed. And we sincerely discussed, do we downsize? Do we let go of this space? It has a lot of history. It means a lot to us. And move to something smaller to create that compression and that buzz, or if we decide to keep it, do we reinvent what an office means and imagine all new use cases for what has to happen in this space?

And we chose the reinvention model. And so, we’re going to keep that big space. We’re going to compress the workspace, the shared task and connecting and conferencing component, into a very small footprint and use the rest of it for a whole host of new purposes — from piloting spaces and prototype spaces, event spaces, hospitality zones, gathering areas, places to bring in the outside community into our workplace, not just our own employees and thinking about other audiences and other communities that we can serve. It’s a complete reinvention of why this place exists.

And I would imagine a lot of organizations that are sitting on a lot of real estate are now trying to ask that question for themselves, too. Do we let this space go? Or do we reimagine why we even have it in the first place and use it for something new?

[00:17:10] Paul Cooper: And that’s leaning towards the wellness of the worker, basically.

[00:17:14] Jennifer Chatman: So, you started to talk a little bit about some of the work you’re doing with AI companies. And of course, San Francisco and the Bay Area are the center of the AI universe right now. So, you’re probably seeing a lot of what’s happening, kind of, on the cutting edge. What are you seeing in terms of how they’re approaching physical space? And, you know, what’s been surprising to you?

[00:17:35] Christopher Good: Something funny on my end. So, I live across the bay in San Francisco and I live very close to Hayes Valley, which has picked up, kind of, a really cringe nickname that they’re calling it Cerebral Valley. And I hate it and I refuse to use it. So, I feel bad I even said it here because I’m giving credence to it.

But in addition to getting that really goofy name, it’s become an impossible place to get an apartment, in part because a lot of AI startups have moved in and are buying up or renting homes and apartment buildings in the neighborhood, which is really curious, because here we are talking about spaces that care for us and that we love and that love us back, and what more great model of that is a home. And these AI startups are moving into homes to create the shared experience with their colleagues where they can collaborate and build community and break bread and think of that work experience as something much different than what we traditionally think of as an office, a place I badge in and I clock in my eight hours and go home. I mean, it’s different psychologically. It’s different symbolically. And I, kind of, love this idea, except for the fact that my rent has doubled.

[00:18:47] Sameer Srivastava: Chris, I assume they have a regular office. So, how are people using the home space relative to the office space?

[00:18:54] Christopher Good: Well, in the cases of these small startups, this is their office. They’re choosing in lieu of a traditional office space and there is a glut of office space available to go get. They’re choosing this instead, in part because they probably likely all came out of working from their homes. This feels familiar. And what better way to model the experience you wish to have, which is this kind of supportive residential experience than to just go rent an apartment and move all your desks in? It’s an interesting hack, and I don’t know that it can scale. In fact, I would hope it doesn’t because people need a place to rent to live. But it’s an interesting way to achieve that experience that they want to create, this communal moment for their small team.

[00:19:37] Paul Cooper: I wonder how COVID contributed to that, maybe. I wonder if that allowed people to, kind of, envision this, “Oh, hey, let’s have this,” you know.

[00:19:47] Sameer Srivastava: Yes. Now, I’m imagining, like, groups of developers in their pajamas in a house, working together alongside each other.

Okay. So, zooming out a bit, as AI begins to take on more work and we have AI agents working alongside human employees, what does that mean for how we should think about the design of physical workspaces? Does the balance shift towards human collaboration and away from, like, more heads down concentration? How do these AI agents factor into the mix? I mean, say a little bit more about the future you envision.

[00:20:19] Christopher Good: Well, I’m a believer that the future of work is going to be far less task-oriented and far more aligned to the individual needs of people and the needs of discovery and connection. When machines are doing all our grunt work, it’s going to be up to us to spend more time navigating this future where there aren’t roadmaps. And that requires a physical environment that’s aimed at places for thinking and teaching and inspiring others more so than sitting heads down on a computer and hammering out my code.

And I have to imagine that, in that future, we are rethinking completely what it means to go to work. Work is not the place I go to to just get things done. It’s the place I go to connect with others, to share ideas, to be an inspiration to others, to be physically seen.

Now, it’s interesting you mentioned the agent part because what happens when your coworkers, the people you’re collaborating with that I came to the office to spend physical time with aren’t physical people anymore, they’re an agent, or my team is a host of agents in a wearable that I’m keeping in my lapel and they’re going everywhere I go, that’s a really strange future. And I don’t know what the workplace looks like in that world when half of my team doesn’t have physical substance and the other half does. But I imagine it’s a challenge we’re all going to be asked to solve for fairly soon.

[00:21:47] Paul Cooper: The thing I think about is that, really, as you’ve seen with COVID, that, kind of, made this remote work go faster, the physical world cannot keep up with the kind of changes in technology and the changes that we’re talking about, right? That’s why you see downtowns that are, you know, inactive and everybody’s asking, “Well, why can’t you just change it?”

Well, the physical world changes slowly. And construction is a slow industry. It is not a fast industry. So, we’ve got, kind of, this fast industry that’s doing this and then we’ve got a slow industry that’s doing that. So, it’s interesting to see them right next to each other.

[00:22:26] Christopher Good: Which is perhaps another reason why we’re seeing these hacks where, you know, a small startup rents a house and tries to do something completely different, because they aren’t waiting on the speed of industry to manage that for them. They’re going to do it in their own way.

[00:22:40] Paul Cooper: Industry and regulation.

[00:22:42] Christopher Good: Yeah.

[00:22:42] Jennifer Chatman: Well, Chris, Paul, super interesting. We always learn so much here, Paul. I’m married to a contractor, a residential contractor. And what you said that the construction industry moves slowly, I appreciate you saying that because he’s done remodels on our house and those have indeed been slow.

So, we try to end the podcast with something practical. So, if you could give leaders some key tips for how they approach their physical space, what would they be? Maybe two or three things top of mind.

[00:23:15] Paul Cooper: Yeah, I would say that people need to realize that one solution does not fit all spaces. I would encourage people to come up with guiding principles to, if they’re looking at designing something that they can stick to, like, talk about where it is, and then put your money where your mouth is, and then you’ll have a successful space that aligns with your vision.

[00:23:41] Christopher Good: I love that. I might ask organizations to be truly honest with themselves about why their workplace exists. And if it is efficiency and hierarchy, great. If it’s not and it’s about people, own that. Find out what drives them, what their needs are, and design for that, and design for all the in-between experiences.

We can create great places for someone to focus at work. They likely have better focus at home. We can create great places for people to collaborate at work. That might be something worth coming in for. But the real magic is finding all those in between things that aren’t being solved for and solved for those — those moments of pause, of surprise, of connection, of inspiration that happen in between the focus time at my computer and the time in the conference room. Let’s design for those.

[00:24:33] Sameer Srivastava: Well, Paul and Chris, thank you both really much for these terrific insights. We really appreciate it.

[00:24:38] Jennifer Chatman: Thank you.

[00:24:39] Christopher Good: Thank you for having us.

[00:24:40] Paul Cooper: Thank you so much.

[00:24:46] Jennifer Chatman: Thanks for listening to The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer!

[00:24:50] Sameer Srivastava: The Culture Kit Podcast is a production of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at the Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to hit that subscribe button, leave us a review, and share this episode online so others who have workplace culture questions can find us, too!

[00:25:12] Jennifer Chatman: I’m Jenny.

[00:25:13] Sameer Srivastava: And I’m Sameer.

[00:25:14] Jennifer Chatman: We’ll be back soon with more tools to help fix your work culture challenges.

Updated May 19, 2026

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