Hola amigos,

Que tal !..Como estas!!

When Ricardo Chacon talks about office space, he doesn’t mention square footage first. He talks about the Energy. About the low vibe of an empty floor. About what happens when companies overspend on real estate and still fail their people.

Ricardo’s path from Costa Rica to Singapore reads like a case study in cross-cultural workplace evolution. Trained as a civil engineer, he’s worked through the full stack of corporate real estate: from construction materials supplier to global portfolio strategist at Standard Chartered and HP. Today, he runs Common Blue, a consultancy focused on making workplaces work better with less.

“Even if you spend all that money, you have more space than you need. That also harms the employee experience. Not because the office is too crowded, not because it’s too noisy, but because the office is too empty.”

We recorded this conversation over morning coffee, Ricardo’s daily ritual, a non-negotiable inherited from Costa Rica’s coffee culture. What emerged was a clear-eyed view of what companies get wrong about workplace strategy, and what they’ll need to fix.

The Goldilocks Problem

Ricardo recently published an article on what he calls “the Goldilocks office.” The premise challenges the dominant narrative around return-to-office mandates. Everyone worries about overcrowding. Almost no one considers the opposite risk.

When HSBC announced a £200 million spend to accommodate everyone back in the office, Ricardo saw it differently. If utilization remains low, that investment creates ghost towns: floors with energy so depleted that collaboration becomes forced, serendipity vanishes, and the cross-pollination of ideas stalls out.

The measurements we use don’t capture this. You can’t quantify the absence of energy. But people feel it immediately.

𝗟𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗻 🎧𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗽𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁𝘀 and show your love by clicking the subscribe button, like, comment & ask your friends also to listen to this freshly brewed season of ‘’FIKA Friday At the Office’’.

You can connect with us on LinkedIn:

* Ricardo Chacon : https://www.linkedin.com/in/richveg/

* Ram Puranam : https://www.linkedin.com/in/puranamram/

Muchas Gracias, Ram

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