Opinion: The debate over working from home has focused on productivity and flexibility. Clinibase CEO Pam Ramali believes the bigger issue is one that’s much harder to measure.
There are two murals on the walls of Clinibase’s Melbourne headquarters. David “Meggs” Hooke, a Collingwood artist who has spent years capturing the character and texture of this city and its neighbourhoods from the inside, painted the murals.
His work on our walls isn’t decorative. It reflects something real about where we are. It’s one of the first things people see when they walk in, five days a week, because that’s how frequently our team is here.
I want to start with that detail because it highlights something many leaders overlook. The physical workspace isn’t neutral. It shapes how people think, collaborate, and connect. It’s an active ingredient in how people relate to each other and to the organisation.
What it looks like, how it’s laid out, and who’s actually in it day to day all shape culture. Whether anyone designs it that way or not.
Where do you work best?
When leaders think about what kind of company they want to build, the conversation that usually dominates is about systems. Org design, perhaps, or performance frameworks and getting the right HR infrastructure in place. Get the architecture right, the thinking goes, and the culture follows.
I don’t think that’s the only place culture comes from. Culture isn’t architected. People experience it most strongly in the small, daily, often invisible moments of how they work together.
That’s why, although we have grown from ten people to over a hundred, our team is in the office five days a week. I’m aware that goes against the grain of much of today’s workplace thinking, particularly in Victoria, where new working-from-home laws have intensified the debate around office attendance.
The work-from-home debate has collapsed into a binary – in office or remote – and that misses the more important question: what does your work, performance and culture require to function at its best?
For us in clinical trial recruitment, where our work is precise, fast-moving, and deeply human, proximity is a necessity. Our recruitment teams, software developers, trial success officers, and leadership sit together. Not on the same Slack channel but in the same room. This means that an observation from a participant’s conversation can become an operating model fix by the end of the day.
A recruiter flags a pattern, and a developer is already sketching a solution before the meeting that would have been scheduled to discuss it. We receive feedback from our global biotech and pharma clients that they appreciate how we solve problems in real-time.
That kind of speed, adaptability, and responsiveness is very hard to manufacture remotely, and impossible to mandate through process. It has to be built into how a place works, every day.
The missing social piece
A 2026 Colliers report on Asia-Pacific workplaces found that social connection rather than policy is the primary driver of office attendance. That’s been my experience exactly and a big part of the reason for commissioning the artwork.
In 2025 we moved into our current warehouse-style office in Collingwood. It’s a few kilometres from the Melbourne Biomedical Precinct, the largest biomedical research cluster in the southern hemisphere.
World-class science sits right alongside a neighbourhood that’s creative and unapologetically itself. Meggs’ mural is part of what makes our office feel like it belongs to that neighbourhood, rather than existing in spite of it.
Do your people belong?
When people see their community reflected in where they work, something shifts. There’s a shared reference point, a reason to feel connected not just to the work but to each other. Harvard Business Review research found that a strong sense of belonging at work increases productivity by 56 per cent.
I think about this when I talk to other leaders navigating the same pressures: hybrid complexity, talent scarcity, the constant demand to do more with less.
The instinct is usually to look for a better system. I’d argue the more useful question is a simpler one: do your people feel like they belong somewhere real?
The answer, I’ve found, isn’t in another framework. It’s in creating a workplace that genuinely reflects the community around it — one where people feel they belong from the moment they walk through the door.
Place shapes culture. Culture shapes belonging. And belonging, more than any system or structure, is what allows people to do their best work.
Pam Ramali is the CEO of Clinibase, Australia’s largest and fastest-growing full-service patient recruitment and clinical trial technology company.
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