People come in for each other
Asked why it matters to be in the office, employees put other people first. Collaborating with colleagues is rated very important by 68% — and very or somewhat important by 93%. In-person meetings follow at 58%, then team building and social interaction at 49%.
What ranks low is telling. Only 17% say the office is very important for focus and concentration; more than half (52%) say it is not important. Setting a boundary between work and home scores lower still.
In other words, the office does not win by being a better place to concentrate than a spare room at home. It wins by being the only place the team is in one room.
Amenities help. They don't decide.
Amenities matter, but not in the way the pitch decks suggest. They are enablers rather than reasons: they make a day in the office better once you are there, and they rarely get you in the car.
What ranks highest is ordinary convenience. Cafés and restaurants lead by a wide margin, followed by free parking and a simple pantry or kitchenette. Meanwhile the more expensive gestures are cooling: multi-purpose space (14%) and wellness facilities (13%) both slipped from 16% the year before.
The floorplate is being rebalanced
The space itself is moving in step. Individual desk space — “me” space — has fallen from 56% of the floorplate in 2021 to 35% in 2025. Amenity space has more than doubled, from 10% to 22%.
Support space has quietly grown too, from 20% to 24%: print and mail rooms, IT and comms cupboards, storage for events, the machinery a hybrid office needs to run. Collaboration space, at 19%, dipped for the first time in five years.
Put together, the global average now sits close to the activity-based model — a mix of settings for different kinds of work rather than one assigned desk each. That is no longer a fringe view: 47% believe activity-based design will best describe their offices in future, and preference for it has jumped from 17% to 40% in a year while focus-based design fell from 71% to 42%.
Who gets what space
One thing has not moved. Desks are increasingly allocated by how someone works — workstyle is the top criterion for workstations (53%). Private offices are still allocated by rank: job title (45%) and band level (42%) dominate, and 87% of private offices go to leaders of leaders.
The awkward part is that senior people travel most and sit in meetings most, so the offices assigned by seniority are often the emptiest rooms on the floor. It is worth asking whether that space would do more work if it were shared.
- Programme for “we” before “me”. Collaboration outranks focus four to one as a reason to travel in.
- Spend the amenity budget on the everyday. Food, coffee and parking beat wellness suites in the data.
- Individual desks are down to a third of the floorplate. The space freed is going to amenity, not to more meeting rooms.
- Audit private offices against real utilisation. Space allocated by rank is often the least used.
Based on CBRE's 2026 Global Workplace & Occupancy Insights, Part 2, by Susan Wasmund, Jess Ultreras and Emily Botello. The study draws on five years of benchmarking and sentiment surveys covering 28 million m² of client portfolios.