Metrigy’s recently published Employee Engagement Optimization: 2025 global study of 400 organizations showed that work location is in a state of flux and that hybrid work strategies are driving significant changes to office space allocation and management and challenges in determining success.
The majority of participants now require knowledge workers to be in the office at least some days per week, with 23.3% requiring full-time in-office, and 36.8% requiring some in-office days (three days per week, on average). Just 20.5% leave it up to employees to choose where they want to work. But this point-in-time snapshot is likely to undergo significant change as companies evaluate the success of their approaches and make future adjustments.
Looking ahead to 2025, almost 32% say that they will allow more remote work next year, while 25% plan to require more days in the office. Companies are likely to spend a lot of time in the next year looking at how return to office affects key performance indicators including sales, costs, productivity, and turnover.
Those bringing people back to the office are largely driven by a belief that doing so helps the company achieve better informal collaboration and an improved company culture. More than 42% say that return to office policies are primarily driven by management mandates, often with no identified metrics guiding the decision.
Meanwhile, those who support hybrid, flexible, and fully remote work largely say that company policies are driven by the belief that these approaches provide a superior employee quality of life and happiness. Almost 43% say that their hybrid and flexible work policies enable better recruiting.
As return to the office accelerates, we’re seeing a change in both total office space and how that space is being allocated. In our 2023 study, about 14% said they expected a decrease in office space while 20.3% said they expected an increase in office space. This year, just 13.1% expect office space to decline while 34.4% expect it to increase. These increases are driven both by return to office as well as by organic company growth.
Within offices, space allocated for meetings is gradually increasing from 30.2% of all space now to an expected 33.5% by the end of 2025. This reflects the reality that in many organizations, return to the office is driven by a perception that in-person provides a better meeting experience.
We’re also seeing an increase in hot-desking to support hybrid work models. Today, almost 60% of our research participants have at least some of their individual workspace allocated for hot-desking, with almost 12% exclusively using hot-desking. The overall percentage of workspace assigned to individuals will drop from 60.6% now, to just over 53% by the end of 2025.
It’s worth noting that hot-desking isn’t popular and isn’t equated with measurable business improvements. Research participants in our success group (defined as those with the highest ROI for their collaboration spend, including measured cost savings, revenue gains, and productivity improvement) are 13.5% more likely to have only assigned, dedicated desks. This implies that employees are more productive when they can customize their workspace to their liking or that hot-desking setups aren’t yet conducive to high productivity.
In our research we found that the majority of companies (64.8%) say that executive management drives workspace allocation policy. Just 22.1% say collaboration teams are involved in these decisions. However, about 40% of our success group have collaboration team involvement in setting workspace policies. This correlation demonstrates that those responsible for workspace policy establishment should obtain input from those responsible for provisioning applications and devices to support in-office work.
About 60% of our research participants are using or planning to deploy workspace management software to enable employees to easily reserve desks, meeting rooms, or even additional company resources. Adoption is more than 40% higher in our success group, meaning that the use of management and reservation software correlates with high ROI for collaboration spend. Reservation software reduces the time it takes to find a meeting space, allows individuals to find desks near their coworkers, and provides managers with insights into workspace utilization.
Hybrid work strategies are not fixed in time but rather will continue to evolve as companies evaluate success and learn what works best for them. Hybrid work strategies will also continue to drive changes in the office, including space allocations. Be aware of the impact of hot-desking on employee productivity and consider workspace management software to optimize space allocation and reporting.
About Metrigy: Metrigy is an innovative research and advisory firm focusing on the rapidly changing areas of workplace collaboration, digital workplace, digital transformation, customer experience and employee experience—along with several related technologies. Metrigy delivers strategic guidance and informative content, backed by primary research metrics and analysis, for technology providers and enterprise organizations
