Hybrid work has stabilized—but workplace needs haven’t. As companies rethink how much space their people truly require, modularity is emerging as the design strategy built for constant change.
Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping, if it were not.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Space Between – Navigating the Hybrid Frontier
As we reach the end of 2025, already half a decade after the initial boom of remote work, one workplace trend has become undeniable – hate it or love it, hybrid work is here to stay. This year, Gallup reported that among remote-capable employees, 26% are exclusively remote and 22% are exclusively working from the office, meaning the other 52%, a majority of workers, have landed somewhere in between. Not only have these percentages stabilized since around 2023, but polls have also shown a desire for even more hybrid opportunities.
These numbers leave business owners, brokers, and designers alike all tackling the same question – how much space do these employees actually need?
Some organizations have decided to remove the variable altogether. Be it sweeping return-to-work mandates that run the risk of scaring off their top talent or half-baked hybrid strategies that turn the office into a ghost town every other day, ignoring the issue can have its pitfalls. But speculating at future square footage needs using dated programming metrics is just as risky, as the relationship between a growing business and a growing floor plate becomes more convoluted every year.
If the post-pandemic landscape has taught us anything, it’s that the way people work, connect, and even think is changing faster than ever. The workplaces that succeed in this era will be those that embrace movement instead of resisting it, balancing risk and reward by leaning into the uncertainty with an office design that can adapt to whatever challenge or opportunity comes its way. Designers can’t predict the future, but an agile workplace can prepare companies for the unprecedented.
Luckily, these last five years have also been a time of incredible innovation in design. The most successful of these emerging planning strategies and products come from a shared perspective – a mindset of modularity. By designing an office that can respond quickly to the changing needs, goals, and culture of a business, designers can avoid the trap of trying to guess what their clients will need in the next five, ten, twenty years, and focus their efforts on the office their clients need today.
Don’t Box Yourself In – Rethinking Demountable Partitions
For those who were around when demountable walls were in their infancy, there may be a bit of trust building to be done here. Too often, early modular partitions would over-promise and under-perform – acoustics were poor, rework was difficult, and the sticker shock alone could be a deal-breaker. Since then, manufacturers have worked through the growing pains and modular construction has become the standard for some of the biggest names in the corporate world.
From a planning perspective, developing a modular footprint suited for a variety of uses will give business owners the most to gain from these systems. For instance, a 120 square foot area could become a private office, a pod of workstations, a collaborative lounge area – the list goes on and on. Starting with this fundamental building block and tessellating it to develop the greater floor plan results in a space that can be carved or opened up into any number of different configurations. By adopting this mindset early in the planning process, designers can strategically place fixtures, devices, and finish transitions so that clients’ floor plans can ebb and flow with their headcount and culture – all while keeping costs and waste to a minimum. (That’s right – modular thinking supports more sustainable construction practices as well.) On top of this, today’s demountable partitions can relocate power, swap markerboards for digital displays, and integrate height adjustable furniture into an existing system over the course of a weekend, minimizing disruptions to an occupied workplace.
Small Moves with Big Impact – Letting Furniture Do the Heavy Lifting
Modularity in workplace design can be found in the smaller moments as well, though that doesn’t mean their impact isn’t just as strong. While demountable systems can give companies peace of mind over a long lease term, modular furniture allows them to be truly nimble, changing the office landscape on a day-to-day basis and responding to the needs of their employees the moment the need arises, instead of waiting on plan check and permits.
Not too long ago, hoteling or desk sharing seemed to be the perfect furniture fix for hybrid work, but many employers were quickly reminded that people can be very territorial creatures. If you’ve ever arrived at the office ready to start your day, only to find that someone else has lowered your chair, moved your monitors, and fiddled with your desk height, it isn’t hard to understand why this trend is already falling out of favor. Surveys continue to show that concerns about an unproductive workplace, a lack of comfortable seating, or simply not having the proper tools to do one’s job play a significant role in the mindset of employees avoiding coming into the office.
Looking to the future, rather than suggesting hybrid businesses allocate fewer desks for their people, designers can direct them to efficient furniture that does more with less and can even help incentivize their staff to show up and do their best work. Workstations with a center spine that can be easily reoriented for different types of teams or even pulled away on casters for quick collaboration reduce the need for redundant spaces, giving businesses enough room to provide their employees the dedicated home base that behavioral research tells us they need in order to thrive.
Designers of a responsive workplace should also be wary of specifying furniture with too much built-in tech, or those without modules that can be easily swapped out, as the devices from which we work change every day. If the web of defunct cables and chargers filling so many of our junk drawers is any indication, designers should not be expecting a client’s hardware needs to be consistent over the lifespan of their furniture. A simple and elegant system that can easily integrate a range of end-user IT and AV solutions is far better suited to evolve with a client’s business than one that’s overloaded with flashy bells and whistles. In fact, some of the strongest modular furniture solutions are entirely analog.
Modular lounge seating can be reconfigured for different styles of connection or oriented to create division in a larger space.
A modular storage system can be used to carve out a new path of travel or create a sense of privacy for distinct teams within an open office. Sometimes the solutions that carry the workplace through uncertain times are not the most groundbreaking new products, but the truly timeless pieces that can be reimagined into new settings over and over again.
Forecasting a Flexible Future
Ultimately, a mindset of modularity isn’t a strategy for anticipating the unexpected, but rather a recognition by designers that the unexpected has become the new norm. Demountable partitions and adaptable furniture systems are more than just tools in the toolbox – they represent a design philosophy rooted in responsiveness, resilience, and sustainability. When businesses can reconfigure and reimagine their spaces without starting from scratch, they gain the confidence to evolve and face whatever surprises the future may hold.
