RESEARCH SERIES: EVIDENCE BEFORE DESIGN
Looking Beyond Generational Assumptions
There has been a lot written about what younger employees supposedly want from work. Depending on what you read, they are either digital natives who are perfectly happy working from anywhere and have little attachment to the office, or they are the group that needs the workplace most because they want social interaction, mentoring, learning and a stronger sense of belonging.
I have always been a little uncomfortable with either conclusion because both feel too neat.
Over the past six years, we have accumulated a significant amount of employee workplace data through our work at CRUX, so rather than starting with an assumption about Gen Z, we decided to go back to the data and ask a much simpler question: what do people in the early stages of their careers actually want from the workplace?
We reviewed almost 5,000 completed employee responses from U.S.-based organizations across several sectors, with the research stretching from the early days of the pandemic through to 2026. Where the data allowed, we focused on employees aged 24 and under.
What emerged was not a single, clean trend, and I actually think that is one of the more interesting aspects of the research.
What the Research Reveals About Office Attendance
In one large global technology study from 2021, employees aged 24 and under preferred to spend around 35% of their working time in their primary office, compared with approximately 24% for older employees. In a technology and entertainment study undertaken in 2024, we saw a similar, although smaller, difference, with the younger cohort preferring around 29% office time compared with 22% among other employees.
But that pattern did not repeat everywhere. In a corporate headquarters study from 2022 there was virtually no difference between the youngest employees and everybody else, and the more recent semiconductor technology and nonprofit studies also showed much smaller gaps.
So while there are clearly workplaces where younger employees show more appetite for office attendance, age on its own does not seem to tell us very much about how often someone wants to come in. The environment they are working in, the role they perform, the expectations around attendance and the value they get from the workplace all seem to matter.
The part of the research that I found more interesting was what younger employees were actually doing during the working day.
How Early-Career Employees Spend Their Working Day
Across several of the studies, early-career employees were spending proportionately more time on individual focus and process work and less time in formal meetings and some forms of collaborative activity than their more established colleagues. In one study, the younger group spent around 41.5% of its core activity time collaborating, compared with just over 50% for everybody else. In another, the figures were approximately 33% and 40%.
When you think about it, that probably should not surprise us. People entering the workforce are more likely to be individual contributors, with roles involving defined tasks, analysis, production or process work. As careers develop, jobs tend to become more managerial, client-facing and coordination-heavy, which naturally brings more meetings, decisions and collaborative activity.
Why Social Connection Matters Beyond Collaboration
For me, that is where the research starts to get more interesting, because although younger employees are often doing more individual work, many of them still appear to place considerable value on being around other people while they do it.
In the technology and entertainment sector study, approximately 86% of younger respondents identified social interaction with colleagues as a reason for coming into the office, compared with around 74% of the wider workforce. We saw the same directional pattern in the nonprofit study, albeit with a smaller sample.
That starts to suggest that collaboration and connection are not quite the same thing.
You can spend several hours working independently and still value being in a workplace where other people are around you. You might have a conversation while making coffee, ask somebody a quick question, hear what another team is working on, or simply feel more connected to the organization because you are physically part of it for some of the week.
For people early in their careers, that may be particularly important. More experienced employees often already have established networks, relationships and organizational knowledge. Younger employees are still building those things, and some of that happens informally rather than through structured meetings or scheduled mentoring.
That has a direct implication for workplace design.
Designing Workplaces for Focus and Connection
If younger employees are spending a significant amount of time on focused individual work, then simply adding more collaboration space is unlikely to be the answer. They still need good places to work individually, with quiet settings, acoustic privacy, comfortable workstations, monitors and reliable technology.
At the same time, the workplace needs to create opportunities for social interaction to happen naturally during the day. Informal breakout areas, lounge settings, café-style environments, touchdown spaces and other alternative work settings can all help create that kind of environment.
Social interaction does not only happen because it is lunchtime, somebody has organized a team event or a meeting has appeared in the calendar.
A good workplace gives people reasons and opportunities to connect as part of the normal rhythm of the day.
Workplace Experience: More Than Just Amenities
The wider workplace experience matters too. Across the more recent studies, younger employees showed interest in greenery, outdoor space, wellness, fresh air, food and informal settings. But I would be careful not to read that as evidence that younger employees simply want more amenities.
Their responses consistently brought us back to the basics as well: somewhere comfortable to work, the right technology, quiet when they need it and access to other people when they want it.
How Workplace Preferences Have Evolved Since 2020
There is also an interesting historical angle to all of this.
Our data stretches back to 2020 and 2021, when large-scale remote work was still new. Even then, the youngest employees were not overwhelmingly asking to work remotely five days a week. In the 2020 research, three remote days was the most common preference, and by 2021 the youngest employees in the global technology study were actually asking for more office time than their older colleagues.
What seems to have changed since then is less about a dramatic swing from remote work back to the office and more about our understanding of what makes each location valuable.
After several years of hybrid working, asking “How many days should people come in?” increasingly feels like the wrong place to start. A better question is what people are coming in to do, who they need to be around, and what the workplace needs to provide when they get there.
Evidence Before Assumptions
That brings me back to the original question.
What do early-career employees want from the workplace?
There is no single answer, and perhaps that is the most useful finding of all. They appear to value flexibility. Some want more office time than their older colleagues and some do not. Many spend a significant amount of time working independently while still valuing social connection. They want workplaces that allow them to concentrate, but they also value environments where relationships and informal interaction can develop naturally.
Age and career stage clearly matter, but so do role, activity, team structure, organizational culture and the quality of the workplace itself.
Which is why the best place to start is still with evidence rather than assumptions.
The key to success therefore is collecting and analyzing the right evidence - data, ask us how.
We have pulled the fuller findings, methodology and workplace implications together into a new CRUX Workplace research paper, What Do Early-Career Employees Want From the Workplace? Available on our website.
The biggest workplace decisions are often made too early, before there is enough evidence about how people actually work.
Usually there is a perfectly valid trigger. A lease is approaching its end, the existing office feels too large or too small, the business is growing, attendance has changed, or leadership wants more people back in the office.
The problem comes when that trigger immediately becomes a design exercise. Before the organization has properly understood the work the space needs to support, people are already talking about square footage, desk-sharing ratios and meeting room numbers.
An architect may be producing test fits. Leadership may be debating whether people should attend two, three or four days each week. Decisions are starting to be made about what the next workplace should contain, and then somebody asks, ‘How many desks do you need?’ At that point, the weaknesses in the process can start to show.
But one fairly fundamental question can get missed along the way.
How does the organization actually work?
For me, that should come before almost everything else.
Space should be the consequence of understanding work
Historically, workplace planning was relatively straightforward. If an organization employed 1,000 predominantly office-based people, the starting assumption was broadly that it needed somewhere around 1,000 places for them to sit. Add meeting rooms, support space and amenities and you had the foundations of a space program.
That relationship between headcount and space has become much less reliable.
People now perform their work across different locations, at different times and in very different ways. Even within the same organization, two departments with similar headcounts may place completely different demands on the workplace.
One team might spend much of its week doing concentrated individual work, with relatively infrequent reasons to come together. Another might depend heavily on project collaboration, mentoring, informal conversations, client meetings and frequent interaction across several other departments.
Giving those teams identical allocations simply because they each contain 50 people misses something fairly important. It is the nature of the work, rather than just the number of workers, that ultimately creates demand for space.
That changes the questions we should be asking.
Instead of beginning with how many desks a team needs, I want to understand what people actually do during a typical week. Which activities benefit from being undertaken together? Which are more effectively performed independently? How much collaboration takes place, with whom, how often and in groups of what size? Where does knowledge exchange happen? What brings people into the office in the first place?
Once those things become clearer, the workplace requirement starts to emerge from the evidence rather than from assumptions.
We have more workplace data than ever, but not necessarily more understanding
There is another interesting contradiction in today's workplace industry. Organizations have access to enormous amounts of data about their offices. Badge systems can tell us when people enter the building. Sensors can tell us whether spaces are occupied. Wi-Fi, booking systems and other technologies can provide increasingly sophisticated pictures of utilization.
All of that information has value - but there is an important distinction between measuring what people are doing in the workplace today and understanding what the organization will need from its workplace tomorrow.
Knowing that 400 people entered a building on Tuesday does not tell me why they came in. It doesn't tell me what they were trying to accomplish, whether they found the spaces they needed, who they wanted to interact with, or whether the workplace helped or hindered them.
Most importantly, it doesn't necessarily tell me whether those same people would behave differently if the workplace itself were different. This is why I have always been cautious about designing a future workplace solely around utilization of the existing one. You risk becoming very good at measuring yesterday.
The more interesting question is what work people need to undertake in the future and what environment will allow them to undertake it most effectively.
A hybrid workplace isn't simply an office with fewer desks
This distinction has become particularly important as organizations have adapted to hybrid working. If employees are spending fewer days in the office, there is an understandable temptation to conclude that the organization simply needs fewer desks. In some cases that may be true, but reducing the number of desks in a traditional office doesn't suddenly turn it into a high-performing hybrid workplace.
We need to think about what has changed.
If people can successfully undertake a large proportion of their individual focus work elsewhere, the reason for coming to the office often shifts. Being with colleagues, collaborating, learning, mentoring, exchanging knowledge and maintaining relationships become more important components of the workplace experience. Yet many offices still devote the overwhelming majority of their space to individual desks and then wonder why employees do not see a compelling reason to travel there.
That doesn't mean every organization should replace desks with collaboration spaces. There is no universal formula. Some roles require considerably more individual workplace provision than others, and even highly mobile employees still need appropriate spaces for focus when they are in the office. The point is that the mix should be determined by the work.
A workplace might ultimately need fewer conventional workstations and more project areas, small meeting settings, quiet rooms, team spaces, social areas or other activity-based settings. Another organization might reach a completely different conclusion.
Both can be correct if they reflect how those particular organizations operate.
The same principle applies before you start drawing
I see a similar issue when organizations begin evaluating potential buildings or commissioning test fits. A test fit is an extremely useful tool, but only if the assumptions behind it are sound.
It is quite possible to give a design team a headcount, an assumed attendance level, a desk-sharing ratio and a required number of meeting rooms and ask them to fit everything into a building. They will almost certainly be able to produce a plan.
What that plan cannot tell you is whether the original assumptions were right.
A much stronger brief begins with a deeper understanding of the organization itself. We can start to explain not just how many people there are, but how attendance varies, what people will be doing when they arrive, which teams need to interact, what types of interaction take place and what range of settings those activities require. At that point, the test fit stops being an exercise in fitting furniture into a floor plate and becomes a genuine test of the workplace strategy.
That is a subtle difference, but an important one.
Understanding the work doesn't slow the project down
There can sometimes be a concern that undertaking this kind of discovery adds another stage to an already busy real estate or design program. My experience has generally been the opposite.
The time spent understanding the organization at the beginning is usually considerably less than the time lost later redesigning layouts, revisiting desk ratios, changing furniture quantities or discovering that important operational requirements were never included in the original brief. It also changes the quality of the conversation with senior leadership.
Instead of recommending a particular amount of space because it seems reasonable, we can explain the relationship between the business, its people, their activities, their interactions and the workplace required to support them.
The square footage then becomes an outcome of the strategy rather than the strategy itself. That is a much stronger basis on which to make a long-term real estate decision.
Perhaps we're starting with the wrong question
Workplace projects inevitably need to answer questions about space. How much do we need? How many desks should we provide? What should the office contain? How should teams be organized? What sort of workplace should we design? Those are all important questions.
I just don't think they should be the first ones.
Before deciding how much space you need, where people should work or how your next workplace should be designed, spend some time understanding the organization underneath it. Understand the work people actually do, the activities that bring them together, the relationships that matter and the conditions that allow them to perform at their best.
Once you understand that, decisions about the workplace become considerably easier.
And perhaps more importantly, you have a much better chance of designing a workplace around the organization you are becoming, rather than simply recreating the one you already have.
If you'd like to understand more about your organization, how everyone works, and how that will influence your future real estate and workplace needs, do reach out.
Turning Workplace Strategy into an Enterprise Design Guide
For enterprise organizations managing dozens of offices and hundreds or thousands of employees, a standard design guide can be an invaluable tool. It helps internal teams move faster, align nationally, and retain a sense of brand cohesion across sites.
But if the foundation of that guide is a default layout or a dated idea of seniority, it risks falling short of what modern work actually requires.
The best approach starts not with precedent, but with evidence. And we’ve found that the most successful design guides are those that are strategically standardized and locally adaptable, informed by how people need to work, not just where they sit.
Why Enterprise Workplace Design Guides Matter
Our enterprise clients often request design guides for good reason. These tools help internal ownership by enabling in-house design, project and FM teams to act autonomously within a defined framework.
They support scalability, allowing for rollouts across regions and business units to move more quickly. They offer clarity for vendors, landlords, and architects and ensure consistency in experience and compliance across a portfolio.
Activity-Based Working: Designing for Needs, Not Titles
While some organizations still ask us to include layouts that reflect leadership seniority, and we accommodate this where appropriate, we approach it as a design tweak, not the underlying framework.
The core of our methodology is Activity-Based Working: matching worksettings to workstyles, activities and interactions - not titles.
That means private spaces are available not just for executives, but for anyone who needs deep focus, confidentiality, or specialist functionality.
Leadership needs such as acoustic privacy and high-stakes meetings are real and valid, but they don’t dictate the core of the workplace model. Instead, they are thoughtfully integrated where and when they are truly needed.
Building an Evidence-Based Workplace Design Guide
Our enterprise design guides are not templates. They’re evidence-based playbooks that begin with deep engagement:
Workplace Experience Platform: Captures data about tasks, locations, collaboration needs, and builds personas and activity profiles.
Space Budget Module: Translates that data into a spatial recipe – how many seats, rooms, booths, hubs, and informal settings each team actually needs.
Concept Zoning & Neighborhood Planning: Zoned spaces around team needs and adjacencies, supporting both structured and serendipitous interaction.
Creating a Flexible Toolkit of Workplace Settings
Our worksetting taxonomy is wide-ranging and fully illustrated, ready to slot into any guide:
Focus Settings: Quiet Booths, Study Pods, Phone/VC Pods -
Individual Work: Open Plan Desks, Touchdowns, Perches
Collaboration Spaces: Informal Lounges, Media VC Rooms, Huddle and Project Spaces
Leadership-Ready: Private Offices, Boardrooms, Training Zones
Support & Amenity: Resource Hubs, Wellness Rooms, Tea Points, Storage, Reception
Each setting is matched with purpose and use case, acoustic and visual privacy levels, tech integrations, and planning examples. This enables procurement teams to select furniture and tech with confidence.
Translating Workplace Strategy into Interior Design
Once we’ve defined the spatial framework and functional requirements, we bring in interior design collaborators to add depth and character. This stage translates the strategy into spaces that reflect brand, inspire creativity, and elevate the user experience.
We focus on materiality, ambiance, and sensory design — elements that help people feel both supported and energized in the space. Approved vendor products are integrated at this point to streamline specification and procurement, while ensuring consistency across projects.
Balancing Workplace Standardization and Local Flexibility
What results is not a static document, but a flexible toolkit — one that brings structure without rigidity. These guides allow internal teams to design with confidence while adapting to local constraints, cultural nuances, or lease conditions. They’re detailed enough to offer guardrails, yet open enough to foster creativity and responsiveness.
The outcome?
Workplace experiences that are aligned to business goals, yet still tailored to teams.
Spaces that scale with purpose, not just preference.
Getting Started with an Enterprise Workplace Design Guide
If your business is considering a workplace design guide, or your current one feels out of step with how your teams actually work, we’d love to help. Our Workplace Experience platform, space budgeting, and layout planning tools create a ready-made foundation for any workplace playbook.
And when paired with the right design partner, it becomes a powerful blueprint for the future of work — wherever you work.
Let's turn your insights into action.