Hybrid Working Needs a Third Space

Many organisations are increasing the number of days they ask people to come into the office. The intention is that more presence would mean more collaboration, more on-the-job learning, and more connection. But it does not always work out that way.

Employees may be coming into the office, but they are often spending the day on Teams calls rather than having face-to-face conversations and the impromptu cross-departmental chats that some leaders expected. This is because online is where most of the work now happens. The digital workspace is where people do their work, meet with colleagues, solve problems, and make decisions.

The physical workspace, the office, no longer has all the stakeholders in the building, and it is often easier to coordinate work online than to try to pull everyone into a room. And so a lot of people sit at their desks with their headphones on, working just like they would at home. It leads to a cycle where people come in, do not connect with anyone any more than they would remotely, and start to wonder why they are bothering to make the journey at all.

Now, this is not the case in every organisation I work with. There are plenty of offices I walk into where I immediately feel the energy, and where there is a good balance between in-person and online collaboration. What I have noticed is that these offices tend to be more populated. There are more people there, which means there are more people to talk to, and it makes more sense to book a meeting room than to send a Teams link. Some of it comes down to the industry; perhaps there was always a cohort of people on-site, which meant the building never got too empty. But a lot of the time it comes down to culture. People get along with each other, and that makes the office worth showing up to.

Before people can use the office well, they need a reason to be there that goes beyond policy. They need existing relationships that make showing up feel worthwhile, and building those relationships requires a third space.

What is the third space in hybrid work?

In the context of hybrid working, the first space is the office, and the second space is home. The third space is somewhere in between, like an off-site team day, the in-person training programme, or the workshop where people from different departments sit together and work through something that matters. It is any deliberately designed event where people gather outside of their usual routines, with enough time and enough intention to actually get to know each other.

Before hybrid work, organisations could rely on proximity to do much of this work. You know your colleagues because you sat near them. You built a relationship with someone from a different team because you ended up at the same lunch table. You learned how your organisation worked by absorbing it gradually, through overheard conversations, corridor exchanges, and watching how more experienced people handled things.

As we settle into hybrid and distributed working as a long-term model, organisations that continue to hope that proximity alone will be left waiting.

What I am hearing from organisations

In conversations with leaders from across Ireland and the UK, a few things come up consistently.

The first is that people are lonelier at work than the well-being or engagement surveys report. I don't mean lonely in the sense of having no friends, but feeling disconnected from work itself, from colleagues they rarely see, and from a sense of belonging to something larger than their immediate team.

The second is that younger employees lack the organisational literacy that once came from simply being inside an organisation and absorbing how it worked. They do not know who to go to, how decisions are made, or how to navigate a workplace without an informal network. You no longer join the grapevine when you are given your employee ID; if you aren't brought in by someone else, then you may always feel “outside the loop".

The third thing that comes up is more positive and hopeful. When people have an existing relationship with a colleague, when they have spent real time with them, worked alongside them, shared a meal or a difficult conversation, everything that follows is easier. The online meeting is warmer, the difficult feedback is easier to give and receive, and the in-office day has more pull. This is why relationships are so important for successful hybrid teams.

How the third space builds relationships

The third space helps build these relationships by removing the usual friction. People are not at their desks, fielding emails and watching the clock before their next meeting. They are somewhere else, with a reason to be present and permission to park the to-do list for a while.

In a well-designed third space, the junior employee can observe how a senior colleague navigates a difficult conversation or topic. The manager can see who on their team flourishes when given room to lead. The person from finance gets to understand what the operations team is actually dealing with. Most importantly, the colleague you have only ever seen in a small box on your screen becomes a person you have shared a coffee and a problem with.

None of this sounds revolutionary. But it is precisely because it sounds ordinary that organisations underinvest in it. It is easy to cut the team day when budgets are tight. It is easy to move the away day online. It is easy to run the training programme as a webinar series rather than a room-based experience. And every time that happens, the third space gets a little smaller, and the office gets a little harder to justify from the employee's perspective.

What the third space needs to succeed

Not all in-person gatherings create the conditions I am describing. A town hall where people sit in rows and listen to presentations is not a third space. A training day where everyone is on their laptops for most of the session is not a third space. An away day where teams sit with their own teams and do not mix is not a third space.

There needs to be space before the agenda starts, during the breaks, and after the formal sessions for conversations that were not on the schedule. The lunch break matters. The drink at the end of the day matters. The fifteen minutes between the last session and dinner matters. These are not inefficiencies or time wasted; they are the point.

The third space needs to bring people together. If people are going to build cross-functional relationships, they need to actually be with people from other functions. This means being deliberate about who sits with whom, which teams share a table, and which groups are put together for an exercise. Left to their own devices, people will gravitate towards those they already know. The design of the event needs to gently work against that instinct.

Finally, the third space works best when people are working on something that genuinely matters, solving a real problem, exploring a real question, or building a shared understanding of something the organisation needs to figure out. When the content is meaningful, the connection that forms around it tends to last.

What changes when you invest in the third space

When you take the third space seriously, everyone benefits.

In-office days become more valuable. When people have existing relationships with their colleagues, going into the office means something different. It goes beyond a policy obligation and becomes a chance to see people they actually know and want to spend time with. The pull of the office comes not from the office itself but from the people in it, and people need a reason to know and like each other before that pull can work.

Online collaboration improves. People are more willing to ask for help, more likely to flag a problem early, and more able to give and receive honest feedback.

Junior employees develop faster. When they have had the chance to see how more experienced colleagues work, to ask questions in a safe context, and to build relationships across the organisation, their development accelerates in ways that formal training alone cannot replicate.

And managers find their jobs a little easier because, even though nothing has changed structurally, their teams are more connected, making the daily work of leading people in a distributed environment less of a constant uphill effort.

A practical place to start

If you are thinking about where to begin, the answer doesn't need to be complicated. You do not need a large budget or a new programme. You need to look at the events and training days that are already happening and consider whether they are designed to do this work.

Is there a proper lunch break, or has it been cut to keep the day tight? Are people sitting with their own teams, or are they being mixed across departments? Is there unscheduled time built in at the beginning or end of the day? Is the content meaningful enough to create a genuine shared experience, or is it something people could have read in an email?

The third space will not solve every hybrid working challenge. But it is one of the most practical and underinvested things organisations can do right now, and the return on it tends to show up everywhere.

If you would like to learn more about how I work with organisations to make the most of the third space, please get in touch.