So you have made it. You bootstrapped or raised from friends and family. You scaled first in a home office or a coworking space with your co-founders, and you did it. You finally got investment in.
Now you are on your way to hire your first “real” employees. People who will work on a salary for you instead of chasing the same dream you had.
Most founders do not realize until it is too late that you cannot expect the same level of commitment from a salaried employee that you got from a co-founder. That person was running on equity, adrenaline, and shared obsession. Your new hire is running on a paycheck. That is not a criticism; it is just reality. The mistake is pretending it is not.
What you can do is build an office culture strong enough that people want to show up. Not because they have to. Because they actually want to.
The Difference Between a Founder Office and a Real Office
When it was just you and your co-founders, culture happened automatically. You shared the same goals, the same stress, the same bad coffee. No one needed to manufacture belonging; it was already there.
The moment you hire salaried employees, that automatic culture disappears. Now you have people who do not share your equity upside, who have lives and priorities outside of your company, and who are making a rational trade of their time for money. Nothing wrong with that. But it means culture is now something you have to build deliberately, not something that just happens.
Founders who ignore this end up with what Segev Hochberg, co-founder of Lunio, calls “a graveyard of desks, where people are just working and no one is allowed to laugh or speak.” That is not a culture. That is a room with chairs.
Why Your Office Space Is a Culture Decision, Not a Cost Decision
Most early-stage founders treat office space as a line item to minimize. Wrong move. The physical space you choose shapes the culture you build, and the culture you build determines whether your best people stay.
Lunio learned this firsthand. The Manchester-based ad-fraud prevention company, whose software eliminates invalid traffic and fake engagement from paid ad campaigns, was chasing unicorn status. Segev knew that getting there required more than a good product; it required a workplace where people chose to be.
When Lunio worked with Level Workspace, (Read the Lunio Case study here) to find their Manchester city centre office, Segev was specific about what he needed. Not just desks. Spaces built for collaboration. Room for social events. Flexibility for different working styles. A place where hybrid worked in practice, not just on paper.
His reasoning was direct: “Let’s be honest, people don’t think, ‘Oh, I’ll wake up in the morning and commute to the office. I’ll do all of that just because I like the chairs or the coffee in the office.’ People want to be in the office because of the environment and culture that’s been created.”
What Good Office Culture Actually Looks Like
Culture is not a ping-pong table. It is not free snacks. It is the set of behaviours your office makes easy and the set it makes hard.
Here is what Lunio built deliberately:
• Structured overlap days. All teams come in on Thursday, so cross-team socialising happens organically, not by accident. People who would never normally meet end up talking.
• Psychological permission to be human. The office is designed so people can laugh, move around, and work in ways that suit them. An environment where everyone sits silently in rows does not build bonds.
• An expectation without a mandate. Lunio contracts employees for two days a week in the office, but frames attendance around collaboration and connection rather than surveillance. The result: employees started coming in three and four days a week on their own.
That last point is the one founders should write on their wall. Segev put it plainly: “If you build the right culture, people will come to the office on their own.”
The 162% Test
After moving into the Hyphen building on Manchester’s Mosley Street in July 2023, Lunio saw office attendance rise 162%. Not through mandates. Through a space and culture that made coming in worth it.
The outcomes went further than attendance figures. Friendships formed across teams. Employees started hiking together, attending concerts together, even living together. That level of connection does not happen in a company where the office is a chore. It happens when the workplace gives people a genuine reason to be there.
Joe Averill, Managing Director at Level Workspace a Tenant only office advisory, put it this way: “Lunio is a scale-up that seems to instinctively get how to make hybrid working work.”
Instinct had nothing to do with it. Segev made deliberate choices about space, structure, and culture from day one.
What to Do Before You Sign Your First Office Lease
If you are about to hire your first salaried employees, do this before you pick a space:
1. Write down what behaviour you want your office to produce. Collaboration? Cross-team relationships? Deep-focus work? The space needs to match the answer.
2. Ask whether the space can host social events. If the answer is no, you are renting a room, not building a culture.
3. Set a clear attendance expectation, then give people a reason to exceed it. A mandate with no pull behind it creates resentment. A culture with genuine pull makes the mandate irrelevant.
4. Pick a location your employees will actually commute to. Lunio moved from Chorley to Manchester city centre specifically because it made attendance realistic for the team they wanted to build.
The biggest mistake you can make right now is treating the office as an afterthought. Your first salaried employees will form their impression of your company in the first 90 days. Give them something worth showing up for.