# Companies Are Spending Millions to Make Offices Feel More Like Remote Work

Category: Workplace
Published: 2026-07-31
Description: Companies are redesigning offices with quiet rooms and low-stimulation spaces, spending millions to recreate the focus and control remote work already provides.
Original URL: https://www.businessinsider.com/introverts-hacks-rto-era-office-design-2026-7
Canonical URL: https://ro.am/rwn/companies-are-spending-millions-to-make-offices-feel-more-like-remote-work

According to [Business Insider](https://www.businessinsider.com/introverts-hacks-rto-era-office-design-2026-7), companies including KPMG, Superhuman, and Cisco are pouring real estate budgets into redesigning offices around introverts, who organizational psychologist Anique van der Putten estimates make up 40 to 50% of the workforce a population most open-plan, collaboration-first office design was never built for.

## The Office Is Being Re-Engineered for Quiet

Charles Broomfield, an engineering analyst at Google who goes into the office five days a week, described why he keeps his headphones on and eats lunch alone.

[Pull quote: “I like the quiet time and that space and that recharge.” — Charles Broomfield, Engineering Analyst at Google]

Cisco redesigned its London office with a soundproof, tech free wellness room specifically for employees who need a break from screens and stimulation. Data from Kastle shows the payoff: attendance runs nearly 20% higher in what it calls “A+ office buildings” newer spaces with modern design and premium amenities than in older ones.

## RWN’s Take

This isn’t really an office design trend. It’s companies admitting remote work solved a problem they’re now paying real estate budgets to solve again.

## The Proof Point Already Existed

Remote work spent five years showing that roughly half the workforce does its best thinking without noise, commute, and forced in person visibility. That wasn’t a hypothesis anymore by the time RTO mandates arrived it was observed behavior at scale. Every redesigned office is now being graded against a bar that remote work already solved.

## The Premium Is Going Toward Recreating What Remote Already Had

Soundproof rooms, quiet zones layouts this is capital being spent to manufacture focus, choice, and low stimulation environments. Those aren’t new amenities. They’re a rebuild of the conditions a home office or a distributed team already had by default, minus the commute.

## The Real Fix Was Never the Building

Here’s what’s easy to miss in all this redesign spend: none of it was actually necessary. If the goal is giving introverts control over noise, visibility, and interruption, going fully remote gets you there on day one, at a fraction of the cost of a soundproofed wellness room. The objection companies raise is usually connection they worry distributed teams lose the presence and spontaneity of being in the same room. But that’s a tooling problem, not a location problem. With the right virtual office, teams get that same sense of walking past a teammate’s desk, popping into a room for a quick question, feeling like people are actually there with you, minus the real estate line item. That’s the whole premise behind Roam: give distributed teams the in-office feel companies are now paying millions to manufacture, without asking anyone to come back to a building to get it.