What Readers Want to See in the Workplaces of the Future
Ideas for improving office life, courtesy of those who have to work in them.
By DEMETRIA GALLEGOS
Tue, Jan 6, 2026 1:10pm
4 min
4 min
From mazes of cubicles to plentiful lush balconies , office designers keep re-envisioning spaces to support our professional lives. Not all of their ideas have been…work-friendly, shall we say.
We thought it would be productive to ask the workers themselves—in this case Wall Street Journal readers—for a little brainstorming to see what their employers could be doing better.
We asked, What office-design change would you most like to see?
Their responses covered a lot of ground, from workplace conventions to technology to the environment itself.
Put your phones away
Similar to a lunch break, I wish we could have a phone break each day. Staff members would place their phones in a box that would then be removed and face-to-face conversation would be encouraged instead.
This is an important cognitive disconnect. People are responding more slowly to face-to-face conversations as their minds alternate between concentrating on their device and in-real-life interactions.
This no-device speakeasy would be less structured around work and more like a hangout: Someone just kicks off a conversation and folks follow on.
• Desmond Latham, Pearly Beach, Western Cape, South Africa
No hoteling
One way companies could make the return to office smoother would be to have assigned offices and desks.
Having a consistent space provides employees with stability and a sense of belonging, rather than navigating the uncertainty of finding a spot each day.
• Gabriela Valdez, Prosper, Texas
Some place like home
I would like to see office buildings that blend seamlessly into residential neighbourhoods. I
nstead of towering corporate headquarters in city centers, companies would operate from house-like suites scattered across communities.
Employees could walk to work, bring their children or pets along, and enjoy flexible hours without the grind of daily commuting.
Walls would be lined with immersive video screens, allowing teams across the country to collaborate as if they were in the same room.
This model could save trillions in transportation costs, road construction and pollution while offering workers a healthier and more affordable lifestyle.
By eliminating the need for massive skyscrapers, corporations would redirect capital into smaller, interconnected hubs that foster community integration.
The environmental benefits are equally striking: fewer cars on the road, reduced emissions, and less strain on public infrastructure.
• Michael Lowery, Colorado Springs, Colo.
One size doesn’t fit all
I’d like to see a focus on the actual employees.
Why aren’t employers asking them what spaces they need to do the most productive work?
What environments are most conducive to enjoying the work they do? Private offices aren’t the answer for everyone but most workers need more than a traditional cubicle.
Same with artwork and furnishings. One size or style isn’t appealing to everyone.
• Nancy Sanders, Phoenix
Quiet, please
I want an actual functioning cone of silence at work. This would be used so workers that are on conference calls for many hours every day don’t disturb their co-workers with all of their talking.
At many firms, offices with hard walls and doors are only assigned to managers with a minimum number of direct reports.
I think they should be assigned instead based on how many hours a day the person is on conference calls.
And that’s not for the benefit of the projects they manage but for everyone else who otherwise has to listen to one side of a conversation for four to six hours a day.
I know many companies are enthusiastic about open-office plans, but I don’t know any engineers who like them, so many have no choice but to wear headphones and play music to drown out the distractions, which leads to isolation even in a well-populated office.
• Paul Egan, Milwaukee
Private time
I’m gobsmacked that there is no mention of bathrooms in these stories about future office design. If you want to get employees back to an office, offer more privacy there.
• Lisa Hale, Los Angeles
Double down on fitness
Standing desks are passé if not accompanied by an under desk treadmill.
• Taylor Archibald, Provo, Utah
Bring back the cubicle
I’d like to see a return to cubicles or small alcove-style workspaces and a step away from the fully open-office concept.
Open layouts were meant to spark collaboration, but in practice they often create constant noise, distractions and a sense of being “on display.”
Most knowledge work requires periods of sustained focus, and people do their best thinking when they have a bit of privacy and control over their environment.
Cubicles and alcoves don’t eliminate teamwork, but simply give employees a dedicated space to concentrate, recharge and hold quiet conversations without disrupting others.
When combined with designated collaboration zones, these semiprivate spaces create a healthy balance between focus and teamwork.
In a hybrid-work world, the office should be a place that enhances productivity and restoring a sense of personal space would help achieve that.
• James Wright, Grand Rapids, Mich.
A little colour
I’d love to see the addition of some colour. Any colour at all besides gray and beige. I’ve worked in offices for most of my life, and the “grayge” neutrals are suffocating.
I would also like to have more powered standing desks in the office. The hand-operated ones are too complicated or too fragile to allow for regular lifting and lowering. Every one I’ve had has broken.
• Tony Holmes, Prince William County, Va.
Keep us moving
I wish we had more flex space.
That would be where office designers create a variety of workspaces: standing desks, treadmill desks, quiet rooms, lounge areas, etc., so the team can move through different ergonomic worksites throughout the day and keep their bodies and minds flexible and active.
• Sam McNulty, Cleveland
Help us want to be there
I believe that companies should focus on how to make the workplace more comfortable, even homey.
We spend more of our time at the office than we do awake at home. The office therefore should be a place that one looks forward to going to.
This could be achieved with upholstery that shows the company cares that you’re there.
Comfortable chairs and desks, up-to-date technology, a subsidized kitchen and a dining room that invites collaboration and connection between co-workers.
• Andre Mora, Miami
Restorative options
We need nap areas, like pods or mini-bedrooms as well as gym and shower areas.
• Sara Jones, Hillsborough, N.C.
Let it shine
Get the private offices with doors away from the perimeter windows! Move those offices to the interior of the floor plates so more light can flood the workspace and everyone can look out the windows!
Our office was reworked this way and our copy/print/supply area ended up along a perimeter window.
Everyone looks outside while they wait for the print jobs to finish.
We also used low-rise desks so it’s possible to look out the perimeter windows from the private offices.
Our private offices are glass-doored and glass-walled, so there’s a lot of visibility throughout our offices.
• Andrew Skotdal, Everett, Wash.
The ultimate perk
I’m hoping for a coffee-delivery drone robot that lets me stay on a two-hour call without a BRB (Be Right Back) coffee break.
• John Dabbar, Oyster Bay, N.Y.
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
By
Thu, Sep 3, 2026 5 min
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
