What Is Spaces by Bureau?

Inside Our New Editorial Home

Spaces by Bureau is our editorial home for the bigger conversation about how humans do their best work. At its core is a monthly newsletter. It’s supported by a podcast, and you can explore the whole catalog at withbureau.com/spaces.

We build soundproof booths, so we think a lot about what happens when someone closes the door. But the questions that interest us most go well past the booth. What makes an office worth the commute? When does collaboration help, and when does it just interrupt? Why can a beautiful office still feel impossible to think in?

Spaces is where we get to chase those questions out loud.

Key Takeaways

• Spaces by Bureau is a monthly newsletter about how people do their best work, supported by a podcast and an online hub.
• The newsletter is the heart of it: one email a month, about 7 minutes to read.
• The podcast goes deeper with one guest each month, on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
• Every issue and episode lives at withbureau.com/spaces.
• It’s made by Bureau, the soundproof workspace company, and I host the podcast.

Why we called it Spaces

The name holds more than it first suggests. Bureau booths are physical spaces, but the conditions for good work reach much further than four walls.

There’s the mental space you need to think something through. The social space where a team actually connects. The digital space that fills every gap in the day, whether we want it to or not. Spaces is about all of them, which is how a vending-machine cafe in Tokyo and a study on AI coworkers ended up in the same issue.

The newsletter: where Spaces starts

Once a month, we send a short email about how people focus, create, connect and do good work. It takes about seven minutes to read. That was more or less the whole brief.

Issue 02 opened with a story from 2024, when Wells Fargo fired more than a dozen people in its wealth management unit. Reports pointed to mouse jigglers, cheap gadgets that keep a cursor twitching so monitoring software thinks you’re busy. The company was measuring motion, so people faked motion. That’s the kind of thing we’re after: real stories about how work actually works, and what they tell us.

Every issue is built from the same handful of sections:

• Listen: the big idea from this month’s podcast.
• In the Wild: a real workplace story worth talking about.
• Worth Knowing: new research in plain language, and what to do with it.
• Read: a longer piece from the Bureau blog.
• Big Picture: quick hits from the wider world of work and design.
• One Number: one statistic, and why it’s worth remembering.

And yes, we make booths, so now and then we’ll mention them. When we do, it’s clearly labelled. You’ll always know what’s editorial and what’s us.

The podcast: the longer conversation

Some ideas need more room than a newsletter can give them. That’s what the podcast is for. Each month I sit down with one guest, usually an author, researcher or workplace leader, and we spend an hour on a single question about the conditions behind good work. The newsletter carries the big idea. The episode gives you the whole conversation.

Episodes so far:

1. Can You Design Human Connection? with Jess Janz, writer, community facilitator and author of The Table Where We Meet: Lessons Learned From Dinner With 1000 Strangers. We talked about why a job title can change the feel of a room, how to get past small talk, and what seating, sound, food and hierarchy say about the spaces we share.
2. The Collaboration Trap with social psychologist Ron Friedman, author of Superteams. Ron surveyed more than 6,000 workers and looked closely at the teams that performed best. What set them apart wasn’t constant togetherness. They gave people time to think on their own before bringing ideas to the group. ABBA, as it happens, wrote songs the same way.

Coming up: Ryan Cantal, who has helped organizations through hybrid work and office moves and leads the PlaceOps community, and Dr. Libby Sander, who researches how workplaces affect the way we work and live.

Listen on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Catch up on past content

Newsletters get buried in inboxes. Podcast episodes scroll away in an app. We wanted somewhere the work could stay put.

The content from the newsletter lives at  withbureau.com/spaces. It’s meant to feel more like a magazine than a product page. Our long-form guides still live on the Bureau blog.

Why a booth company is doing this

Fair question. Focus is getting harder to find at work, and we’d rather help people understand why than simply sell them a quiet room. The questions Spaces asks are the same ones our customers wrestle with long before they ever look at a booth.

There’s a simpler reason too. Our website has a clear job: show what we make and help people buy it. Spaces gives the bigger ideas somewhere to live, through real conversations with people who have thought hard about this stuff.

Who it’s for

If you shape how work happens, Spaces is for you. That includes workplace and real estate leaders, architects and designers, people and culture teams, founders, and anyone who has ever wondered why their office works the way it does.

We hope every issue leaves you with at least one idea worth taking back to your own team.

Start with the newsletter

The simplest way in is to subscribe. You’ll get one email a month with the newest issue and the latest podcast episode.

Subscribe to Spaces by Bureau

Curious about the spaces we build? Explore Bureau office booths and pods.

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