Work Isn't Working: Why Most Companies Get Workplace Technology Wrong (And the 5-Step Fix)

By Chris Gore, Founder of SPOR Group | 5 min read

Nobody plans to screw up an office move.

Nobody sits in a boardroom and says, "Right team, let's waste half a million pounds, annoy every employee, and spend the next two years apologising for meeting rooms that don't work."

And yet. It happens. All the time.

I've been brought into office moves where companies are six weeks from go-live and suddenly realise the meeting rooms don't support hybrid working, the boardroom screen isn't big enough, the CEO can't be seen or heard, and the AV budget has quietly doubled. Everyone involved was competent, intelligent, and well-intentioned.

So what went wrong?

That's the question at the heart of my book, Work Isn't Working: Why Most Companies Get Workplace Technology Wrong — And the 5-Step Fix. It's a field guide for the people who actually have to deliver an office move without it becoming a career-defining disaster.

Workplace Technology Doesn't Kill Office Moves. Late Decisions Do.

Here's something most workplace consultants won't say out loud: it doesn't actually matter which workplace strategy your company chooses.

Fully remote. Hybrid. Everyone back in. Hot-desking. Anchor days. Whatever.

None of it works without the right technology in place. None of it.

I've seen it play out hundreds of times across hundreds of organisations. The strategy is sound, leadership is bought in, the culture is right, and then someone walks into a meeting room, the screen doesn't work, and the whole thing quietly starts to fall apart.

Because when the technology lets you down, people stop trusting the strategy. And when they stop trusting the strategy, they stop showing up. In every sense of the word.

Most businesses treat technology as an afterthought. Something you bolt on at the end. Tick a box, buy some screens, job done.

It isn't. It never was.

The Hybrid Trap Nobody Talks About

Hybrid working sounds like the sensible middle ground. Come in for collaboration, work from home for focus. Best of both worlds.

Here's the problem: hybrid working is, technically speaking, the hardest model to execute. Harder than fully remote. Harder than fully in-person. Because it requires your technology to do something genuinely difficult. It has to make everyone equal, regardless of where they are.

When everyone's in the room, the technology doesn't need to work that hard. When everyone's remote, the playing field is level. But hybrid? Half the people are sat around a table reading body language and having side conversations. The other half are a small rectangle in the corner of the room, struggling to find a gap in the conversation.

If your technology isn't specifically designed to bridge that gap, hybrid working doesn't create inclusion. It creates a two-tier system.

I've spoken to employees who dread being the remote person in a hybrid meeting. Not because they don't want to contribute. Because the experience is so consistently frustrating that they've learned to stay quiet and just read the notes afterwards.

That's a hybrid working policy failing in real time. And nine times out of ten, the policy itself is fine. The technology is the problem.

The Hidden Cost: Decision Velocity

Here's a concept I want you to sit with for a moment.

Decision velocity is, simply put, how fast your organisation can make good decisions. In a competitive market, this matters enormously. The businesses that can get the right people in a room, have a proper conversation, and come out with a clear decision — those businesses move faster. They have an advantage.

Now think about what bad meeting room technology does to that.

The meeting starts ten minutes late because nobody could get the call to connect. Five minutes are spent establishing who can hear what. The person with the most important thing to say keeps cutting out. The shared screen is frozen. By the time you've had the conversation you came to have, you're out of time. You agree to pick it up next week.

Next week. A decision that needed to be made today has been pushed by seven days because the technology got in the way.

I worked with a fund manager whose investment committee met weekly in their boardroom. Their AV failed often enough that decisions regularly got pushed by a week. One decision — a market position that needed the full committee present and the right data on screen — got deferred three times in a row. By the time the meeting finally connected properly and the decision was made, the window had closed.

Their CFO estimated the cost of that delay at over £2 million. The AV system that failed them had cost £60,000 to install. Nobody had ever connected those two numbers before.

Everyone Owns It. So No One Does.

One of the most consistent things I see when I walk into a failing AV project is that everyone involved genuinely believed someone else was handling it.

Not passing the buck. Not negligence. They just each had a reasonable understanding of where their responsibility ended. And somewhere in the gaps between those boundaries, the thing that actually needed to happen fell through.

Real estate gets the space. The project manager manages the construction. IT owns the network. Facilities inherits whatever they're handed on move-in day.

Nobody owns the user experience.

That gap — between the building going up and the people who use it every day actually having a seamless experience — is where most office moves quietly die. The issue isn't competence. It's structure.

Enter DITAM: The 5-Step Fix

After working across 1,500+ meeting rooms and watching the same mistakes repeat in almost every organisation we've worked with, we built a model to fix this properly.

It's called DITAM. It stands for Design, Integrate, Train, Asset Manage, and Monitor. It's not a product catalogue. It's a way of thinking about workplace technology as a lifecycle, not a one-off install.

Design — This is where most projects go wrong. AV design needs to happen at the same time as architectural design — not after the walls go up. Where does the screen go in relation to the windows? What are the acoustic implications of the materials chosen? What use cases does this room actually need to serve? These questions need answers before the electricians get on site.

Integrate — Technology doesn't exist in isolation. AV needs to interoperate with IT networks, security systems, room booking platforms, and the devices people actually bring into the room. Integration done properly means systems that fail gracefully. When something goes wrong, it's contained. It doesn't take the whole room with it.

Train — Training doesn't equal adoption. This is one of the most overlooked parts of any AV deployment. You can have the best technology in the world and still have people avoiding a room because they're not confident they can make it work. Training needs to address behaviour, not just button-pressing.

Asset Manage — You can't manage what you can't see. Asset management gives you visibility of every device across your estate — what it is, how old it is, when it needs replacing, and what's at risk. Budget confidence comes from knowing what's coming before it hits.

Monitor — Reactive support means fixing things after they've broken. Proactive monitoring means catching problems before anyone in a meeting ever knows they existed. This is the difference between a room people trust and a room people dread.

What Getting This Right Actually Looks Like

When you apply the DITAM model properly, something shifts.

Meetings start on time. Remote participants feel like they're actually in the room. Decisions get made. Things move. Budget surprises stop happening because you've got visibility of what's coming. Escalations to IT drop. Your facilities team stops spending half their day triaging complaints about broken rooms.

People trust the technology. And when people trust the technology, they trust the strategy it was built to support.

In the book, I break this down into four measurable outcomes: predictable cost, rooms people actually trust, operational calm, and the ability to scale without pain.

None of it is complicated. All of it is avoidable if you know what to look for, and when to look.

What You'll Get From the Book

Work Isn't Working isn't a product catalogue. There's no vendor pitch. No shopping list. No theory for its own sake.

It's a practical field guide for the people who actually have to make this stuff work. COOs, CFOs, Heads of IT, Heads of Facilities, Project Sponsors, anyone who's been handed ownership of a workplace technology programme alongside their actual day job and doesn't want to look stupid in front of the board.

You'll get: the DITAM framework in full detail, the red flags to spot before they become problems, the right questions to ask at the right stage of a project, real examples from real projects (including some things I got wrong personally), and a maturity assessment so you can see exactly where your organisation sits right now.

Be First to Know When the Book Launches

Work Isn't Working is releasing soon. If what you've read here resonates, join the waitlist. Waitlist members will be the first to know when the book goes live, with early access and launch offers before it opens to the public.

Join the waitlist here

A final thought.

Office moves don't fail because people are incompetent. They fail because responsibility is fragmented and timing is wrong. The most expensive sentence in an office move is "we'll sort it later."

Later rarely comes. But it doesn't have to be this way.