Do we actually need offices in 2026? Or has the world of work become more nomadic, more fluid, and frankly more sensible?
From my experience, the value of having a dedicated office with your entire team sat in it full time has massively diminished. That doesn’t mean offices are useless. It means the old assumption, that serious work only happens in one fixed place, no longer holds up.
The economics alone make that obvious. Business rates keep going up. Employing people is more expensive than ever. On top of that, you’re expected to spend serious money fitting out offices, maintaining them, heating them, insuring them, and justifying why people need to commute to them every day. For what, exactly?
For a lot of businesses, that model no longer makes sense.
What does make sense is flexibility. Freelancers. Strategic partnerships. Small, capable teams that can scale up and down quickly depending on the work in front of them. That approach reduces risk, keeps overheads sane, and lets you bring in the right people at the right time, rather than carrying permanent cost “just in case”.
That’s the direction I’m leaning into even more in 2026.
I want to spend less time in the office and more time in communal spaces. Working alongside clients, partners, collaborators. Being out in the world rather than locked into a single building because that’s what businesses used to do.
I don’t want to be tied to an office, and I don’t think it’s necessary anymore. At least 50% of my time this year will be spent mobile: still working, still producing, just not sitting at the same desk five days a week. I want to use that as an opportunity to meet people, have conversations, and build relationships that simply don’t happen when you’re shut away.
That said, I’m not pretending offices are dead.
I’ll always keep a small office. It matters to me to have a space that is only for work: somewhere to think, plan, and focus without distractions. But I also want to challenge myself to leave it more often. To work in new places. To stop treating the office as the default and start treating it as just one option.The way we work has changed. The costs have changed. The tools have changed. It feels like the habits just haven’t caught up yet.Maybe 2026 is the year they finally do.
