What if Work was Better?
nATALIE KAPOULAS, SHRM-CP
This question has shaped my entire career.
My path into workplace strategy wasn’t linear—it started with a simple question: what if work could be better?
Early in my career, I found myself drawn to the intersection of design and psychology and how the environments we create shape behavior, experience, and culture. That discovery ultimately led me to workplace strategy, and to a deeper belief that how work feels matters.
At one point, I came across a statistic that stopped me: on average, we spend 90,000 hours of our lives working. It forced me to think differently. Not just about how work functions, but about how it feels, and how many of those hours people spend disengaged, disconnected, or simply going through the motions. That realization shifted everything for me.
The reality is, we spend far more time working than we do with friends, family, or doing the things we love. That time should be meaningful.
Over the course of my career, that belief has taken shape through experiences at organizations like OPX, CBRE, and Gensler where I learned how work is designed, delivered, and where it tends to fall short. Across industries, teams, and environments, I kept seeing the same pattern: work wasn’t working as well as it could.
In 2017, alongside OPX, I created Work Better Day as a way to explore that idea more intentionally. What started as a moment in time became a catalyst that continued to push me to think more deeply about how people experience work, and what it would take to make those experiences more human and more aligned with life.
My background in organizational development and behavioral psychology and HR continues to shape how I approach that work. I don’t just look at a space, I look at behavior, systems, and the way people move through their work and lives every day.
I’ve worked with organizations across industries and with people from a wide range of backgrounds. That perspective has reinforced a simple truth: there is no one way work should look, but there is almost always a way to make it better.
Today, through Work Better Consulting, I help organizations understand how work is really experienced and how to make it better.