What If Disney Ran Your Workplace?

Everyone is optimising something

In 2004, Fred Lee published If Disney Ran Your Hospital: 9½ Things You Would Do Differently. His provocative comparison was not about turning hospitals into theme parks. It challenged an industry that had become extremely good at managing processes, departments and operational efficiency, but did not always look at the organisation through the eyes of the person experiencing it.

A hospital could have excellent doctors, modern technology and high-quality facilities, yet still create an experience characterised by uncertainty, waiting and frustration.

The underlying principle was simple: people don’t experience the individual components of an organisation. They experience the whole. More than twenty years later, the workplace may be facing a remarkably similar challenge.

More than twenty years later, the workplace may be facing a remarkably similar challenge.

The modern workplace has become a sophisticated ecosystem.

Corporate Real Estate optimises portfolios and square metres. Facility Management improves services and efficiency. HR focuses on engagement, culture and new ways of working. IT provides increasingly powerful digital environments. Finance challenges costs and investments. Business leaders balance flexibility with the need for teams to connect and perform.

All are doing valuable work. The problem is that they are often optimising different parts of the same employee experience.

This fragmentation has become particularly visible with hybrid work. An organisation can have a beautifully designed office, excellent technology and a progressive hybrid policy, while employees still commute to find that the colleagues they need are not there. Meeting rooms can be full while large parts of the building remain underused. Management can simultaneously worry about low occupancy and declining collaboration.

These problems rarely sit within one function. They appear between the functions.

Design the experience backwards

Disney is often associated with what visitors see: the environment, service and attention to detail. The more interesting part is what visitors don’t see.

Behind a seemingly effortless experience sits a highly orchestrated system of people, technology, logistics, processes and data. Complexity is managed backstage so that it does not become the visitor’s problem frontstage.

There is a powerful workplace principle in that distinction.

Employees should not need to understand the complexity of HR policies, workplace technology, Facility Management, booking platforms or Real Estate strategies. These capabilities should work together to create an environment in which people intuitively know where, when and how they can do their best work.

Workplace management therefore becomes an exercise in orchestration: enabling the right people to work together, in the right environment, at the right moment and for the right purpose.

Presence is not a strategy

The return-to-office debate has made this need for orchestration even more visible.

Many organisations have spent considerable management energy defining whether employees should be present two, three or four days per week. Attendance has consequently become one of the dominant measures of hybrid work.

But occupancy and organisational performance are not the same thing.

Increasing office attendance can create more activity without necessarily creating more value. A team sitting in the same building does not automatically collaborate effectively.

The strategic question is whether the organisation creates the conditions in which coming together produces value.

The office has a very different role when it is considered an environment deliberately designed to accelerate collaboration, learning, decision-making and connection rather than simply a place employees are expected to attend.

Presence is not a strategy. Purpose is.

From individual productivity to Collective Performance

AI makes this shift even more relevant.

Technology is dramatically increasing the potential productivity of the individual knowledge worker. Research, analysis, writing, coding and administrative tasks can increasingly be accelerated by copilots and AI agents.

But organisations are not simply collections of individually productive people.

Competitive advantage depends on the ability to combine expertise, exchange knowledge, make decisions, develop trust and mobilise people around common objectives. Organisations need to convert individual capability into collective results.

At AREMIS, we describe this as Collective Performance: the ability of an organisation to orchestrate People, Place, Technology and Services so that individuals and teams can perform better together.

The workplace becomes part of the infrastructure enabling that performance.

This is broader than improving employee experience or increasing office utilisation. It connects workplace decisions directly to organisational outcomes.

Stop managing square metres. Start orchestrating performance.

For many years, workplace strategy started with the building: how much space is needed, how efficiently it is used and how the portfolio can be optimised.

Those questions remain relevant. But efficiency is only half of the equation.

A cheaper workplace that makes collaboration harder is not necessarily better. Equally, an inspiring workplace that employees rarely use for meaningful interaction is difficult to justify. The next generation of workplace strategy needs to connect efficiency and effectiveness.

Occupancy data, employee experience, collaboration patterns, organisational behaviour and workplace services should increasingly be viewed as parts of the same system.

The objective is no longer simply to prove that a workplace is being used, but to understand what value it helps the organisation create.

Experience is where the silos meet

Perhaps the most important lesson from Fred Lee’s analogy is ultimately about organisational design.

Patients do not experience a hospital as separate medical, administrative, technical and facility departments. Their experience is the combined result of all of them.

Employees experience their organisation in exactly the same way.

Their working experience is influenced simultaneously by leadership, team behaviour, technology, workplace design, services and culture. Yet responsibility for these elements is distributed across functions with different objectives and measures of success.

The employee experience is where the organisational silos meet.

This is why workplace strategy increasingly deserves a place at executive level.

The opportunity is not to create another workplace programme. It is to establish a common performance ambition across HR, Real Estate, IT, Facility Management and the business.

Fred Lee’s question remained influential because it forced healthcare leaders to look at a familiar organisation through a completely different lens.

The workplace deserves the same exercise. Look beyond occupancy, square metres, hybrid policies and individual technologies and consider the workplace as one integrated performance environment.

The discussion then becomes much more valuable than deciding how many days employees should spend in the office. It becomes a question of how deliberately an organisation creates the conditions in which its people can succeed together.

That is the shift we believe is now required: from managing workplaces to enabling Collective Performance.

And perhaps Fred Lee’s thought experiment deserves one final adaptation: