Thirteen years ago, almost to the day, in Business Reimagined, I put forward a definition of flexible working that the RSA and the fabulous Andrew Park brought to life in nine beautiful minutes of animation: choosing both the most appropriate time and the most appropriate location for the specific task in front of you. Not a location. Not a day of the week. A match between what you’re trying to achieve and where and when you’re best placed to achieve it.


I actually thought we’d all agreed at that point. What I now realise is we never followed it through. We built the first part, and stopped there.


What we built instead was a coin flip. “Flexible working” collapsed, almost immediately, into a binary: home or office. And even that binary got flattened further, into a fixed pattern - the same day every week, the same desk on the days you’re in. Working from home on a Friday because Friday is always work-from-home day isn’t flexible working. It’s relocated presenteeism. You’ve just moved the seat you’re required to occupy.


Then came the pandemic, which should have settled the argument for good - millions of people experiencing, for years, that the work got done regardless of whether they were sat inside the physical container of their organisation. For a while it looked like we might actually have solved it. Emerging from the horrors of lockdown, bleary-eyed and in actual shoes for the first time in years, it looked like the joy of what we’d learned might actually stick.


But it was another area where we only did half the job. We may have changed the way we work, but we retained the same old measurement system, measuring people in time spent, not outcomes achieved. The old measures dictate the old behaviours, and so, inevitably, then came the “back to the office” memos, and presence quietly reasserted itself as the proxy for productivity. If I can’t see Dave, how do I know he’s working? Turns out we’d relearned nothing. We’d just proved the theory and then filed it away unread.


I’ve flogged this particular dead horse for well over a decade, and I’ll keep flogging it for the rest of my career. But there’s a newer angle that’s been bugging me. How come I can walk into any conference room, in any organisation, anywhere in the world, and find almost exactly the same set-up that would have been there in the late 1990s, when “video conferencing” was first a thing?


You know the layout: the big screen and a camera at the top of the room, pointed at one end of a table that’s been quietly designated “where the real meeting happens.” Everyone in the room is a participant. Everyone on the screen is an audience member watching a meeting happen to other people. Yes, it got cheaper, and the mainstream platforms take some of the pain away, but hybrid meetings still suck. We play AV roulette with whether today the picture will hold but the audio drops, blissfully unaware of how our conversation is actually landing on the other end.


You’d assume that after years of pandemic-driven investment, someone would have solved this properly by now. And they have. I spent an hour recently in a briefing room seeing what some of the newest kit on the market can actually do, and it’s a genuinely different category of thing to what’s bolted to most boardroom walls: panoramic lenses that stitch together a full view of a room, AI that tracks whoever’s talking and frames them individually. The technology has moved on. It’s just not in your boardroom. The gap isn’t between what’s possible and what’s been invented. It’s between what’s been invented and what anyone’s actually bothered to install.


Which is what makes it galling that teenagers run a better production livestreaming their games from their bedrooms than most boardrooms manage with a five-figure AV budget. They worked this out for fun. We haven’t worked it out for a living.


And here’s the moment that’s coming for a lot of organisations whether they’ve noticed it or not: a hardware refresh. Most of what’s bolted to your boardroom wall was either installed before the pandemic, or bought in the scramble of 2020 and 2021, when nobody had properly worked out what a camera, a bar, or a screen needed to do differently in a hybrid world. That kit is ageing out. And the real danger isn’t that facilities gets the brief wrong, or that IT does. It’s that whoever ends up holding the budget will ask for exactly the same undersized thing: a better camera, a bigger screen, or both. A perfectly reasonable request. Nowhere near ambitious enough.


The opportunity


Here’s why this matters for the bigger argument. Every “back to the office” memo of the last few years has leaned on the same unspoken objection: you can’t really be part of it unless you’re physically there. Fix parity of experience, and that objection disappears. There’s no longer a legitimate reason to insist on the office as the default, because the room no longer privileges the people sitting in it over the people dialling in.


And to be clear, that isn’t an argument for staying home either - that’s the same tired coin flip, landing on the other side. It’s an argument for choosing properly again: some conversations genuinely are better face to face, and once the room stops punishing the people who aren’t in it, you’re free to choose the office for that reason, not out of habit or suspicion.


What’s actually on offer, if you ask for it properly, isn’t better hardware. It’s parity of experience - panoramic awareness of the room instead of a single fixed angle, remote colleagues woven into the actual texture of a conversation instead of a talking head waiting to be unmuted. The obsessive attention I put into my own engagement, whether I’m in the room or dialling in, shouldn’t be a personal eccentricity. It should be the baseline for anyone joining a meeting from anywhere.


The challenges

So why, years on, haven’t we fixed this? Four reasons, and only one is really about the technology.


The first is trust, not tools. Nearly three quarters of the workforce believe remote colleagues aren’t working as hard as people in the office - despite having been remote themselves. Only a quarter cited technology access as the barrier.


The second is Taylor’s inheritance. We still measure presence because we’ve never stopped measuring hours instead of value - the same root cause as the flexible working failure, just showing up in a different room.


The third is the oldest trick in the book of human inertia: a demonstrably worse system can persist for over a century simply because nobody questions it. The QWERTY keyboard was designed in 1867 to slow typists down. It’s been provably inferior to alternatives - Dvorak gets 70% of your typing done without leaving the home row, against roughly 30% for QWERTY. For the entire time either has existed we know the better way exists but we type on the worse one anyway. Sound familiar?


The fourth is newer: even when an organisation buys the good kit, the hardware and software haven’t caught up with each other. The best new room cameras can split a single view into individual feeds, one per person, so a remote colleague sees each of you in your own window. Of the small number of platforms most organisations rely on daily, only one currently knows what to do with those feeds - the rest simply recombine them back into the flattened view the camera was trying to escape. The hardware has moved. The software hasn’t finished catching up.


And underneath all four is a signal we usually only discuss in an IT-leadership context: elephant paths. Someone propping a phone against a water bottle so they can see the room. Someone dialling in from inside the building because it’s more reliable than the room’s system. Those workarounds aren’t people being difficult - they’re telling you exactly where the design has failed. And where the newest rooms can measure it, that signal stops being anecdotal: how often a room is booked versus actually used, how many people show up against how many it was built for. We’ve spent years guessing how our buildings are used. We finally have a way to just look.


Moving forward


Put all of that together and it points to one shift. We need to want more from our meetings - not just a better camera, not a shinier room. We need parity of experience: an equal seat at the table for every participant, wherever they’re sitting.


Redefine flexible working properly this time: stop measuring who’s in the room, start measuring what it produced.


If a refresh is coming your way, use it to ask for parity, not just a better camera - and check what you buy is actually supported by the platform you run it through.


Treat parity as a design requirement, not an afterthought. Go and look for the elephant paths already worn into your meeting technology, and design for what they’re telling you.

And take the standard you’d apply if you actually cared how you looked on a call, and make it the baseline for every attendee, not a personal indulgence.


We proved, years ago, that the where and when of work could be genuinely flexible. We never finished the job on the how. Solve parity properly, and you’re not just buying better kit - you’re giving yourself permission, at last, to build the flexible working we described thirteen years ago, and remove the last excuse standing in its way.


And that’s not permission to stay home. It’s permission to choose properly again - the office when the room and the people in it are genuinely where the work needs to happen, and everywhere else when they’re not.