Keeping Up with the Workplace Curve

You know what grinds my gears? When a train company proudly declares that you can hook into their onboard WiFi and crack on with your emails during your three-hour trek up the country to Audiem HQ in Sheffield, only for the signal to drop out almost immediately after pulling out of London.

Hours spent staring at the buffering circle, wondering at what point your email will finally leave the outbox. Or when, if ever, the page will refresh.

And as I’m gazing out of the window, meditating furiously to avoid snapping my laptop in half, I have a moment of clarity. Imagine telling myself ten years ago that I’d be frustrated by the lack of WiFi on a train. Or on a plane, for that matter. At what point did this cutting-edge technology, this first-class convenience that lets you access the internet while hurtling through the countryside at 125mph, become a basic expectation instead of a mind-blowing value-add?

There are loads of examples — more than you realise, until you become a parent and catch yourself telling your screen-deprived kids, who’ve been without a device for all of twenty minutes in the car, that the only entertainment you had on the six-hour drive to Glasgow for your ‘summer’ holidays was picking a raindrop on the window and watching it race another one to the bottom.

Times change. And so do our expectations.

Now, plenty of people will tell you that the basic set-up of your average office hasn’t changed in decades. But they’re usually looking at the desk, the physical set-up, the design. Because in my mind, the services now on offer are on another planet compared to the office I first walked into in 2003, fresh out of college.

I’ve had the privilege of mooching around a lot of different offices over the years. Admittedly, these are often the homes of global organisations, not your average 200-person business tucked away in a leafy corner of the Home Counties.

But I’ve seen some remarkable amenities.

Sure, there’s the classic scattering of table tennis tables (the go-to cliché of modern office design) but it goes way beyond that. I’ve seen basketball courts, drum rooms, massage chairs, even running tracks on the roof. I’ve heard tales of in-house hairdressers and tattoo studios tucked into sprawling campuses. I’ve walked past mini arcades, a half-pipe, and, genuinely, a DJ spinning vinyl on turntables in reception.

Now, I’d put most of those firmly at the gimmick end of the spectrum. And, tellingly, whenever I’ve asked about how much they’re actually used, or returned months later, the answer tends to be the same. The gimmick quietly disappears.

And those gimmicks stick out - they’re designed to. They make you notice them, precisely because of how outlandish they are. But take a moment to think about the things we’ve fully taken for granted. The things that have quietly shifted our expectations without fanfare. The best example? Coffee.

Back in 2003, when I started out as an administrator, there were free hot drinks — which felt like a perk. But we’re talking Klix machines and sachets, the kind you slot in and top up with a splash of UHT milk. Other offices had a kettle, a jar of instant, and a lonely box of teabags on a grey corner counter. If you were lucky, there’d be a semi-labelled bottle of milk in the fridge that hadn’t gone off.

Now? It’s common - expected, even - to have a full barista service in the workplace. Beans, milks, syrups, alt milks, seasonal specials. A barista who knows your name and your order. A little morning chat to start the day. And it doesn’t stop there. I recently saw a workplace where you could order your flat white through an app, time your pick-up to perfection, and glide through reception with it waiting for you. It won’t be long before desk delivery is just a thing, and nobody will blink.

Perhaps the defining “amenity” of recent years – more than the coffee, the gimmicks, the gadgets – is flexibility. I don’t need to explain why or how the pandemic was a big deal. Its impact will echo for decades – economically, politically, socially – but the effect on how we work has been profound.

I had one job pre-pandemic that let me work from home a day or two a week, and even then, I was the exception in my friendship circle. Now? It’s just normal. I spotted a headline recently claiming that over 50% of the Fortune 100 have asked employees to return to the office at least three days a week. The tone was all “pushback against hybrid”, but step back a second. Show that headline to someone in 2016 and their head would spin. “Three days a week in the office? What are they doing the other two?” Because back then, five days in was the unchallenged norm.

Expectations change. And they change fast.

Regular readers will know I’m a big fan of Rory Sutherland – behavioural science wizard, advertising veteran, and one of the most entertaining minds in the business. In a recent clip, he compares today’s expectation of hybrid work to something like pausing live TV. For years, we didn’t even think about it – then suddenly we could, and now we can’t imagine going back. It’s not just a perk anymore. It’s the norm.

Podcast host and ‘Dragon’ Steven Bartlett’s sometimes puts it like this:

“Luxury becomes normal. Normal becomes expected. Expected becomes disappointing.”

So how do you keep up? The organisations we work with are beginning to realise that you can’t sit around waiting for a static satisfaction score to land once a year and hope it tells you what’s going on. Instead, you need to tune in constantly. You need to collect feedback from across your entire workplace ecosystem (surveys, tickets, pulses, polls) – and channel that into a single data landscape (ideally, powered by Audiem 😎).

That’s how you monitor, understand, and respond to shifting expectations – so you’re not just chasing change, you’re ahead of it.

Because if you're reacting, you're already late.

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