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.
For many years, workplace decisions largely sat within corporate real estate, facilities, or HR functions. The office itself was often viewed as a relatively fixed asset; something operational teams inherited rather than actively shaped.
That is changing rapidly.
Increasingly, the most forward-thinking COOs and CFOs are recognizing that workplace strategy has become deeply connected to operational effectiveness. It now influences productivity, collaboration, decision-making, knowledge sharing, employee experience, and ultimately organizational performance itself. Yet despite this shift, many organizations are still asking the wrong questions.
“How do we get people back into the office?”
“How many days should employees attend?”
“How much space can we reduce?”
These are understandable questions, particularly given the pressure many businesses face around real estate costs and utilization. But they are still secondary questions. The more important question is this:
What conditions enable people and teams to perform at their best?
Once you begin there, the conversation changes entirely.
Workplace Strategy Is No Longer Just a Real Estate Decision
The traditional office was largely designed around individual process work. It reflected an era dominated by paper-based systems, hierarchy, supervision, and fixed workstations. Efficiency was often measured through visibility and occupancy.
Most organizations now operate through collaboration, digital workflows, rapid communication, cross-functional interaction, and distributed teams. Many employees spend less time carrying out repetitive desk-based tasks and more time solving problems, coordinating activity, sharing knowledge, and making decisions.
And yet many workplaces still operate as though none of this has changed.
Today’s Work Requires a Different Workplace
This disconnect is where many workplace challenges begin.
Organizations often find themselves dealing with underutilized offices, fragmented collaboration, weaker onboarding experiences, reduced knowledge exchange, and employees who feel more productive elsewhere. In many cases, the issue is not attendance itself, but rather that the workplace has not evolved to support the type of work people are actually doing.
This is why workplace strategy has increasingly become an operational concern. For COOs especially, workplace decisions now directly influence how effectively the organization functions. They affect:
speed of execution,
quality of collaboration,
leadership visibility,
cultural alignment,
talent retention,
and organizational agility.
The companies navigating this most successfully are moving away from broad, generic workplace policies and instead developing evidence-based strategies built around work itself.
That means understanding:
which activities genuinely benefit from in-person interaction,
which tasks are more effectively completed remotely,
how teams collaborate across functions,
and what types of environments best support different forms of work.
Importantly, they also recognize that different teams operate differently.
An engineering function does not work the same way as legal. Finance teams have different rhythms and requirements from marketing or client-facing groups. Trying to apply a single workplace model across an entire organization often creates friction rather than consistency.
Occupancy Alone Does Not Create Workplace Value
One of the biggest mistakes businesses continue to make is assuming that occupancy alone creates value. It simply does not.
People generally come into the office for specific reasons: collaboration, learning, mentoring, relationship building, problem-solving, social connection, and access to colleagues. If the environment does not meaningfully support those activities, attendance quickly begins to feel performative rather than purposeful.
This is one reason many return-to-office strategies have struggled to gain the traction intended. The focus has often been placed on policies before experience.
In reality, successful workplace strategies usually require a broader operational shift. The organizations making this transition effectively are not simply redesigning offices; they are redesigning behaviors, management practices, team agreements, technology experiences, and workplace protocols alongside the physical environment itself.
That is where change management becomes critical.
Why Change Management Matters to Workplace Strategy
A move away from assigned desks and traditional workplace structures requires employees and leaders to adopt new habits, new expectations, and often new leadership styles. Without support, many people simply revert to old behaviors within new spaces. This is why the most successful workplace transformations tend to involve:
strong leadership alignment,
employee engagement,
clear communication,
team-level agreements,
and structured change support throughout the transition.
The Workplace as Operational Infrastructure
Ultimately, the office is no longer simply a place people attend. It has become part of the operational infrastructure of the business.
The organizations gaining the greatest advantage right now are not necessarily the ones with the most ambitious mandates or the most expensive offices. They are the ones creating environments that genuinely support how work happens today - while also strengthening culture, connection, innovation, and organizational performance.
For COOs and CFOs, that presents a significant opportunity. Because very few operational decisions influence people, performance, cost, culture, and agility as broadly as workplace strategy now does.
The companies that understand this earliest are likely to be the ones that outperform over the next decade.
If this resonates with you, reach out for a discovery conversation on what the next steps should be.
Purpose Over Presence
If you look closely at most organisations struggling with attendance right now, you’ll notice something quite consistent. The problem isn’t that people don’t want to come in. It’s that they don’t see the point of coming in. And that’s a very different challenge from the one many senior leaders think they’re dealing with.
There’s been an extraordinary amount of energy spent arguing about the “right number of days” in the office, as if the friction around hybrid working can be solved by adjusting a dial marked “attendance.” Three days. Two days. Anchor days. Mandated days. “At manager discretion.” “Flexible within teams.” Every variation has been tested somewhere, and yet the same underlying issue keeps surfacing: days alone are not a strategy. They never have been.
The real conversation isn’t about presence. It’s about purpose.
People are perfectly willing to commute when they know the day will be valuable. They resist it when the day is badly designed, unstructured, or—most common of all—no different from what they could have done better at home.
And that’s the leadership blind spot hybrid work keeps exposing: people aren’t resisting the office—they’re resisting a day without purpose.
We’ve entered a world where the office is no longer the default location for work. Its value is no longer assumed. It must be earned. And that shift calls for a much more honest conversation about how workplaces function, how teams behave, and what organisations are actually asking people to do when they make the effort to show up.
The Days Fixation: A Very Expensive Distraction
One of the most counterproductive trends of the last two years is the obsession with day-counting. Attendance has become something organisations try to measure like timesheets, rather than something they design like a product. And this is where so many companies go wrong. They tally bodies, rather than interrogate value.
A policy can force presence, but it cannot create engagement, momentum or connection. Numbers might go up temporarily under mandate, but they almost always fall again once the novelty (or the pressure) fades. That’s because people aren’t responding to the policy—they’re responding to the experience.
Whenever attendance dips, leaders often assume the fix is to adjust the rules. In reality, the rules were never the lever. The experience was.
The question companies should be asking is remarkably simple, yet rarely asked with sincerity: “If we’re asking people to come in, what are they coming in for?”
What Actually Brings People In
Across client projects, global surveys and WEX platform analytics, the patterns are consistent. People will enthusiastically come into a workplace when three things are true: they know who they’ll see, they know what they’ll achieve, and they trust that the space will support the work that actually benefits from being done together.
Collaboration is always the first driver—not the vague “we collaborate better in person,” but the specific types of work where being together changes the outcome: problem-solving, sprint planning, decision-making, design refinement, knowledge exchange, early project alignment, cross-functional sessions, mentoring conversations, and the kind of unstructured dialogue that simply cannot be replicated via video calls.
The second driver is relationships. Humans want to feel part of something. Belonging is not fluffy; it is a hard business advantage. People come in when they know their team, their peers, their “work friends,” and their leaders will be in the same space. That sense of rhythm and presence matters more than most organisations realise. When presence becomes a lottery, attendance collapses.
And the third driver is clarity. People need to know what the in-office day is for. They need structure, predictability, and a sense that the effort of commuting translates into value. When the purpose is clear, attendance becomes natural. When it is ambiguous, attendance becomes negotiable.
The Uncomfortable Truth: Most Offices Simply Don’t Work Anymore
If we’re honest, many offices still reflect a world where individual focus work dominated. The work has changed, but the workspace hasn’t. And this mismatch is at the heart of attendance challenges.
Rows of desks. Meeting rooms that are always full or always too big. Poor acoustics. Technology that works beautifully until six people join from home. Hybrid meetings where half the team can’t see the whiteboard. Neighbourhoods that don’t feel like neighbourhoods. Collaboration spaces that are either too few or poorly located. Focus spaces that are noisy. Social spaces that don’t feel social. It’s a familiar story.
Employees are not irrational—if the office makes their work harder, they’ll avoid it. If the office supports their work, they’ll use it.
Design and behaviour are inseparable. A workplace designed for yesterday’s work patterns will never achieve today’s expectations.
Why Activity-Based Working (ABW) Consistently Outperforms Traditional Models
One of the strongest conclusions from the last decade of workplace transformation is that ABW is not a trend; it is the most pragmatic response to the way work actually happens now. It recognises that different activities require different environments and that people perform best when they can choose the right setting for each task.
In organisations where ABW is implemented intentionally, we see measurable gains—higher attendance, stronger collaboration, greater satisfaction and a more efficient footprint. It works because it respects the reality of how modern teams operate: dynamically, socially, and across varied modes of work.
The most successful ABW environments aren’t flashy; they’re thoughtful. They are built around neighbourhoods that anchor teams, collaboration zones that feel truly shared, quiet spaces that protect focus, hybrid meeting rooms that support equity, and design principles that make movement through the space intuitive.
When the workplace feels purposeful, people treat it that way.
The Behavioural Anchor: The Role of Team Agreements
Even the best-designed workplace fails without behavioural alignment. This is the part of hybrid that trips up most organisations—not because people are resistant, but because they’re unsure.
When are we in? What do hybrid meetings look like? How do we protect focus time? What’s our availability rhythm? How do we support new joiners? Where does mentoring happen?What does “being present” actually mean?
Without answers, teams create their own interpretations. And this fragmentation is the silent killer of hybrid performance.
Team Agreements solve this by creating shared norms. They bring clarity to the very areas that hybrid work exposes: communication patterns, collaboration rhythms, in-person rituals, expectations around availability, mentoring commitments and how the space should be used. When teams agree on how they work, the workplace becomes predictable. And predictability creates trust—one of the most powerful drivers of attendance and performance.
A Practical, Honest Roadmap Forward
There is no shortcut here. Organisations that succeed with hybrid and workplace transformation follow a clear pattern—one rooted in evidence, not assumptions.
They begin by understanding the work at a granular level: the activities, the collaboration patterns, the high-value interactions, the barriers, the frustrations and the moments where proximity truly matters. They then design around those insights, not around hierarchy or legacy layouts. They create environments that support performance, not presenteeism. They engage their people early and build behavioural norms that reinforce the space rather than undermine it. And they test, refine and iterate, rather than leaping to a full overhaul without learning.
They treat the workplace as a system, not a building.
The Real Shift Leaders Need To Make
If hybrid has taught us anything, it’s this: attendance cannot be mandated into existence. It must be designed into existence. People are willing to come in—happily, consistently, enthusiastically—when the workplace helps them do better work, build better relationships, and feel more connected to something meaningful.
The organisations that embrace this truth are the ones seeing attendance stabilise, performance rise and culture strengthen. The ones still focused purely on enforcement are fighting a losing battle.
A workplace earns its occupancy. And when it earns it, it doesn’t need to chase it.