The Fixed Office Is Over. Here's What Replaces It.

Your headcount plan changes quarterly. Your budget is under pressure. Half your team works somewhere you've never seen. And your workplace strategy is still built on a lease someone signed years ago.

That mismatch is the subject of this Croissant webinar, where Zoltan Szalas, CEO and co-founder of Croissant, sits down with Scott Mackin, CEO and co-founder of Hello Operator. Scott built a premium coworking platform across Barcelona, Madrid, and the UK before, during, and after COVID, and he now runs distributed digital companies himself. He has seen both sides of the table: the operator building the space and the leader trying to manage a team across borders.

The 30-minute conversation lands on one big idea. Work went variable. Workplace strategy has to become variable too. Here's the playbook they lay out.

Why can't companies just pick a model and move on?

Because the ground keeps moving. Zoltan describes a seismic shift he hears in every conversation with HR and CFO leaders: teams are more distributed, headcount plans change faster than ever, budgets are tight, and AI is accelerating all of it.

"People are not really sure if they're going to be hiring 20 people by the end of the year, or if they're going to be laying off 40, 50 people," Zoltan says. Hub and spoke, fully remote, RTO: the frameworks keep multiplying, but no one-size-fits-all answer has emerged.

The talent market makes the stakes concrete. Scott points to the rise of fractional work: over 40% of the US workforce already works as contractors or freelance consultants, and projections have that crossing 50% around 2028. His conclusion is blunt. "If you're hiring for a full-time position, you don't have access to the full talent pool. You have access to half." Leaders who want the best people have to get flexible about how, and where, those people work.

Meanwhile, roughly half of teams now work in some hybrid capacity, and people have rebuilt their lives around it. A five-day office mandate is not a turnkey option anymore. As Scott puts it, the best performers have other options, and they will simply say no.

The market flipped: landlords now want flex

Scott spent the late 2010s pushing a flex model on skeptical landlords. Commercial real estate is a very traditional industry, he explains. Owners wanted their fixed yield and nothing else.

That dynamic has inverted. Landlords are now pulling flex operators into their buildings, or building flex floors themselves, because companies stopped wanting 10 and 15 year commitments. A one or two year outlook, or even month-to-month terms, is far more attractive to a CFO who does not know what headcount looks like in 18 months.

For buyers, this is leverage. There is excess supply in most markets, including tier one properties, and the alternative for owners is empty space. Scott's advice to finance leaders: negotiate aggressively. Try before you buy. Expand or collapse as your needs become clear.

Zoltan frames the shift in one line: there's a transfer of risk happening. Companies used to carry all of it in 15 and 20 year leases. Now that risk is being distributed across owners, operators, and companies. That's a healthier market. But it creates a new problem inside the company.

Who actually owns workplace strategy?

Usually, nobody. Zoltan is direct about what he sees: workspace programs are owned by committees. HR, the CFO's office, workplace experience, facilities. A cross-functional cluster of leadership with no clear line item owner.

That gap has a cost, and it lands on your teams. Scott describes product and sales leads spending five to ten hours a month just coordinating: who's available, which day, which location, what's central. "This is a tax on their time and their brain power," he says. Energy that should go to the job goes to logistics instead.

The fix is a mindset change, and it's the sharpest moment in the conversation.

Workspace deserves the same discipline you apply to any other system your company runs on: clear ownership, clear access rules, and data behind the decisions.

Do stipends fail at scale?

A webinar attendee asks the question straight, and Zoltan's answer is nuanced. Stipends can work if all you want is the easy button: give everyone 200 bucks a month and stop thinking about it.

But the easy button hides two traps.

First, stipends turn into compensation. Zoltan has led teams of 100 plus people, and he has watched it happen. "Employees no longer think of it as, hey, I have a place to go to meet with my team every two weeks. They start to think of it as, now I get an extra $3,000 a year." Try to change the policy later and it feels like a pay cut. What started as a workspace program becomes a comp liability.

Second, stipends don't solve the actual problem. A sales team has different needs than an engineering team. A stipend treats them identically and gives you no governance, no consistency, and no visibility into whether it's working.

Zoltan's test is first principles: what is your workspace program actually solving for? Cost reduction? Talent acquisition and retention? Collaboration and culture? Geographic expansion? Client-facing professionalism? "If you're trying to improve talent retention, perhaps a stipend is not the best way, because that's not really solving the problem that you have," he says.

What do people actually come in for?

Not to sit around three days a week. Both speakers see demand shifting toward purpose-driven space.

Zoltan shares what Croissant sees in its own usage data: R&D teams' biggest use case is rituals. They gather a couple of times a month, deliberately. Sales teams travel and need a professional place to meet clients. The unit of workplace planning is becoming the use case, not the desk.

Scott sees the same thing from the design side. Everyone lives on Zoom and Slack now, so the coworking floor he's calling from has more phone booths than he has ever seen in one space, and they're full all day. Meanwhile, enterprise teams returning under RTO mandates are walking into offices designed for a different era: big conference rooms, not enough breakout areas, broken chairs, sometimes not even enough seats. Then the commute, the parking, the daycare logistics. If the space does not serve a purpose, every one of those costs gets questioned.

The old question was "how much space do we need?" The 2026 question is "what experiences does our team actually need, and how often?"

Entering a new market? Rent the answer first.

Asked what a company should think through before opening in a new city, Scott offers a simple sequence:

1. Know what you're optimizing for. Cost, talent, collaboration, expansion. Write it down before you sign anything.
2. Start flexible. Coworking is a natural soft landing: no fixed overhead, plus built-in networking with the local ecosystem. Newer "HQ as a service" models offer private space on coworking-style terms.
3. Test, audit, iterate. Audit your usage, audit your spend, audit the experience your team is having. Double down on what works, cut what doesn't.
4. Govern it like real spend. "There's a lot of slippage and leakage here," Scott says. "It should have the governance rules of any other expense item you have on your P&L."

That last point ties the whole conversation together. The fixed office era let companies set a real estate decision and forget it for a decade. The variable work era doesn't allow that. Workplace strategy is now an ongoing operating discipline, with owners, metrics, and iteration cycles, not a one-time transaction.

Croissant helps companies manage distributed workforces with governed, on-demand access to a global network of flexible workspaces. Instead of fixed leases and unmanaged stipends, teams get workspace where they need it, with the visibility and controls finance expects. Learn more at getcroissant.com.

Watch the full conversation:The End of the Fixed Office: Designing Workplace Strategy for 2026 (with Scott Mackin)