Most organisations know what good work design looks like – they’ve read the research, engaged the consultants and nodded through the presentations. The gap is the distance between knowing and doing and in workplace strategy that distance has rarely been wider.
Six years after COVID-19 forced the most rapid workplace experiment in modern history, New Zealand organisations find themselves in a peculiar position. Hybrid work is settled as the baseline and the office has survived predictions of its irrelevance.
Yet the fundamental questions (how do we design work that performs, how do we build culture across distributed teams, how do we make our physical environment earn its cost) remain largely unresolved. Leaders keep rebranding the same problems: hybrid becomes “flexible work,” culture becomes “employee experience,” without resolving what sits underneath.
The knowing-doing gap is the real risk
Deloitte’s 2024 Global Human Capital Trends research captures it precisely. Seventy-one percent of leaders recognise that team-level culture is where real organisational performance lives but only 12 percent are doing anything meaningful about it. We see the same pattern in our own work with New Zealand organisations: property, technology and people decisions made by different teams, on different timelines, with no shared view of the outcome they’re meant to serve.
This is the premise behind Intelligent Work22, TwentyTwo’s integrated model for work design. It’s a tool for establishing where an organisation actually sits and where its strategies are disconnected from its goals. It’s not just a way to flag what’s broken but a structure for connecting decisions that organisations routinely make in isolation. Workplace strategy here, people capability there, digital investment somewhere else. Each workstream produces a reasonable result on its own. What’s missing is the compounding effect – the extra performance available when people, place and technology decisions are designed to reinforce each other.
New Zealand organisations set clear intentions but struggle turning that intent into a cohesive plan. Hybrid policies exist but interpretation varies wildly across teams – offices get redesigned for collaboration while focused work (still a primary reason people come in) gets designed out in the process. Junior staff lose the proximity-based learning that accounts for up to 60 percent of human capital development, according to McKinsey, while organisations simultaneously worry about capability and talent pipelines. These aren’t separate problems, they’re symptoms of the same disconnection.
The pillars work as a system, not a sequence
Intelligent Work22 organises eight pillars across three tiers, structured to mirror how strategy actually moves through an organisation: from the leadership decisions that shape how and where work happens, through the people and culture work that turns that intent into practice, down to the infrastructure of process, technology, space and resilience.
We see the same disconnection play out in how organisations manage their property and people decisions separately rather than as one system. Our own research keeps turning up the same pattern: property, technology and people teams operate in silos, which limits how quickly an organisation can respond when something changes.
The resilience pillar carries its own blind spot. ESG sits at the periphery of most property strategies – acknowledged but rarely integrated. Most organisations know climate risk matters but few have built the reporting or the internal skills to treat ESG as anything more than a compliance box, even as the cost of leaving it unaddressed keeps compounding.
What proactive portfolio management actually looks like
Lease renewals are one of the clearest examples of where intent and action part ways. Right now, tenants carry the risk while landlords retain the value and long lease terms make it hard for organisations to flex space as headcount, delivery models or business priorities shift. That’s exactly the moment where proactive organisations do things differently.
The organisations managing this well treat occupancy data as a strategic input, not a facilities metric. Real-time sensors and booking analytics feed directly into property and people decisions rather than sitting in a dashboard nobody reads. Our own Utilisation22 data shows why this matters: average occupancy across the portfolios we track sits at just 42 percent, peaking at 73 percent midweek and dropping to 27 percent on Fridays.
Lease renewals, treated well, become deliberate strategic moments rather than administrative ones – the chance to right-size, renegotiate terms, introduce break clauses or exit positions that no longer fit the business. As one property lead put it during our research: “If I design it on the occupancy rates at the moment, I should be halving the portfolio size, but leadership won’t commit.”
The organisations we’d call best practice go further. They run iterative trials – testing new desk-sharing ratios, adjusting anchor day patterns, piloting space configurations – then refine based on actual outcomes rather than assumptions. They define comfort thresholds for desk sharing so they know exactly when occupancy is pushing toward the edge before crowding becomes a problem. And they keep senior leadership informed with evidence-based reporting that connects property performance to organisational strategy.
Governance is underrated and shows that property decisions that sit entirely within a facilities function rarely get the strategic scrutiny they deserve. The conversation changes when executives and CFOs see occupancy data alongside financial performance.
