Flexible Work Isn't Failing. The Way You Manage It Is.

Quick question. Do you know what your company spent on workspace last month?

Not what was budgeted. What was actually used. Coworking passes, reimbursements, offsites, drop-in bookings, all of it.

If you can't answer, you're in good company. In a recent Croissant deep dive session, co-founders Zoltan and Adam put that exact question to a live audience of HR, finance, and ops leaders. The silence was the point.

Most companies have no idea what they spend on workspace. And as Zoltan puts it, "that's the problem."

This session, recorded live from New York, lays out the case that flexible work itself is not broken. The tooling underneath it is. Here's the full argument, and what the Croissant team is building to fix it.

Why did the old office model stop working?

Croissant has been in this market longer than almost anyone. The company launched in 2014, back when, as Zoltan remembers, "you would say coworking and people would look at you like you have six heads."

Over a decade, the customer changed. First it was digital nomads and freelancers. Then it was companies. COVID accelerated the shift, but it didn't cause it. The real driver is structural: the workforce used to be fixed, and now it's variable.

Business cycles are faster. AI is compressing planning horizons. Hiring plans change quarterly, not decennially. Signing a 20-year lease against a headcount projection no longer makes sense, because nobody can project headcount 20 years out anymore.

Companies also stopped hiring by geography. "We go where the talent is, not the other way around," Zoltan says. That means employees in 10, 15, 20 cities, and a workspace question in every one of them.

Who owns the workspace line item at your company?

Here's the second question from the session, and it's the sharper one. At your company, who owns the workspace program? The budget, the logistics, the employee experience. Is it HR? Finance? Ops?

The honest answer at most companies: "Today, no one owns it, but everyone owns it," Zoltan says.

HR owns the stipend policy. Finance owns the reconciliation headache. Ops owns the Slack scramble when three people land in Austin on the same Tuesday. Nobody owns the whole thing, so nobody can see the whole thing.

The result is a familiar mess:

• No visibility until after the fact. Spend shows up on cards and expense reports weeks later, across multiple cities and currencies.
• Soft budgets. Limits exist in a policy doc, not in the booking flow, so they drift.
• Policy by Confluence. The hybrid workspace policy lives in a document you dust off when a new hire joins. Enforcement depends on which manager you ask.
• Vendor sprawl. Finance teams reconciling 10 or more workspace vendors across countries, every single month.

That's the broken version of flexible work. Not the flexibility. The management layer that was never built.

The five pillars of managed workspace spend

Croissant's answer is to stop treating workspace as a perk and start treating it as a spend category, managed the way you already manage software licenses or cloud. The team organizes this around five pillars, drawn from conversations with companies from 10 employees to 1,000 plus.

1. Access infrastructure. The foundation. When someone on your team needs a workspace tomorrow, in any city, they get it instantly. No contracts, no regional vendor relationships, no ops overhead. One vendor, one invoice, workspaces across 59 countries.

2. Spend governance. This is the pillar that changes the game for finance. "Budgets are enforced before the spend happens," Zoltan explains. Not tracked after the fact. Enforced up front, in the booking flow. His summary of the shift: "from tracking spend to actually controlling it."

3. Policy consistency. Different teams have different needs. Your sales team travels constantly and needs global access. Your engineering team meets twice a month and thrives on local rituals. You define those rules once, and the system enforces them everywhere, automatically. No more policy-by-vibes.

4. Vendor consolidation. Replace the 10-vendor reconciliation nightmare with one contract and one invoice. Your team stops managing vendors and starts managing a single system.

5. Intelligence. Once workspace runs through one system, you finally get real data. One Croissant customer used their usage data to design a hub and spoke model: offices in the cities where the data justified them, flexible workspace everywhere else. That's a real estate decision made on evidence instead of instinct.

And a note for smaller teams: none of this is enterprise-only. "There's no such thing as outgrowing or being too small for Croissant," Zoltan says. At 10 or 20 people, you just want access without the reimbursement chaos. The governance layers switch on as you grow.

What does policy enforcement actually look like?

Adam, who leads product, walked through the live demo, and the details matter here because this is where "policy" stops being a document and becomes software.

His framing for the whole build: Croissant is "not a coworking directory, not a perk." It's distributed work infrastructure, "the layer between people and the places they work."

In the demo, admins group people into teams by role, department, or location, then attach policies to each team. Three enforcement levels are available for any rule:

• Warn. The employee sees they're out of policy but can proceed.
• Block. The booking simply doesn't happen.
• Approve. The request routes to an admin, who approves it with one click.

Policies stack. Want to steer people toward HQ but allow flex options beyond commuting range? Done. Want to cap the distributed work program at 20 hours per person per week? One rule, applied to the whole team, with a live compliance view.

What do 3 to 4 million hours of coworking reveal?

Croissant has logged roughly 3 to 4 million hours of coworking across its network, and the insights layer turns that history into something operators can use.

Team dashboards show hours used, busiest days, average session length, active members, and most popular locations across every city where you have people. Beyond raw usage, the system classifies how workspace is actually being used, across five modes: focus work, travel work, collaboration, meetings, and team gatherings.

That classification answers the questions leadership actually asks. Are people using this to escape their kitchen table, or to work together? Is the London team gathering weekly or never? Is it time to open an office in Barcelona, or would that money be wasted?

Booking a desk from your chat window

The session closed with a look at something genuinely new: Croissant's MCP server, which connects workspace booking to AI clients like Claude, plus a Slack app built on the same system.

In the demo, Adam types "can you find a space to work" into a chat client. It pulls his usual spaces, suggests options, confirms the time, and reserves the seat. The booking shows up in the app seconds later. Microsoft Teams support is on the roadmap, and SSO integration is coming for team admins.

The workspace layer is heading to where your team already works: chat.

The takeaway for HR, finance, and ops leaders

Flexible work won. That fight is over. The unfinished work is operational: turning a pile of stipends, reimbursements, and one-off bookings into a managed spend category with an owner, a budget, and a policy that enforces itself.

Start with the two questions from the session. What did we actually spend on workspace last month? And who owns that number? If the answers are "unknown" and "no one," you've found your gap. That gap is fixable, and the companies fixing it now are making sharper real estate decisions, giving employees fairer programs, and closing their books without a vendor reconciliation marathon.

Croissant helps companies manage distributed workforces with governed, on-demand access to flexible workspaces in hundreds of cities worldwide: one vendor, one invoice, with budgets and policies enforced before the spend happens. Learn more at getcroissant.com.

Watch the full conversation: Why Flexible Work Is Broken (And What Replaces It) | Croissant Deep Dive