A Workplace Experience Capability Crisis

Why Listen to Practitioners Now?

We're living through a "post-pandemic drift" in workplace strategy.

Organizations are making billion-dollar real estate decisions based on executive intuition rather than practitioner intelligence. The cost of this disconnect is erosion of organizational capability.

The crisis-driven innovations of 2020-2021 have given way to a complex reality, where hybrid policies clash with RTO mandates, utilization data remains elusive, and the gap between executive vision and employee experience is widening.

Yet most workplace predictions still come from the top down. Or from companies with ulterior motives, e.g., to win your architecture business.

The C-suite outlines a vision, consultants present fancy frameworks, and brokers share market insights. But the leaders running our buildings are rarely heard at scale or outside of ​insular conferences​.

In partnership with AI social listening platform ​Natter​, I gathered insights from 138 one-on-one conversations between 50 workplace leaders, plus entry and exit surveys. The survey data may feel small (n=50), but the peer-to-peer chats likely generated 300k-400k words of dialogue. The quantitative results are directional; the qualitative analysis is more rich.

The participants represented a robust cross-section of sectors, geographies, and company sizes. Vendors were not allowed to participate, including me.

Building on McKinsey Foundations

To ground the analysis, I drew from a ​workplace capability​ framework I published (with the ​stock photo​) while I was working at McKinsey, and focused on the five weakest areas:

• Training managers to lead by results rather than presence
• Setting a clear “North Star” vision
• Assigning an accountable executive with budget influence
• Creating iterative test-and-learn processes
• Maintaining an up-to-date playbook of how work happens

I wanted to understand how those weaker capabilities had evolved and more importantly, hear directly from practitioners responsible for them.

The surveys also included practitioner sentiment questions and three critical free-response areas: missing workplace platforms, employee office attendance drivers, and messages for CEOs about real estate strategy.

The McKinsey and Natter respondents were different, but both groups included a diverse range of companies and perspectives. This is not a strict longitudinal comparison but a directional signal of evolving capabilities.

Next week, I'll share qualitative insights from the nearly 150 one-on-one conversations that reveal not just what's happening to workplace capabilities, but why. By separating the numbers from the narratives, we can establish the lens through which the discussions unfolded.

The Capability Crisis

The survey results paint a troubling picture of organizational regression in fundamental workplace capabilities. Comparing this 2025 Natter sample to the 2023 McKinsey baseline suggests deterioration across similar competencies. While the groups weren’t identical, the trend line points to real risk executives should not ignore.

Leadership Vision Meltdown

Positive responses dropped from 59% (McKinsey sample) to 35% (Natter sample). Different participants, same question—but the magnitude of decline signals a worrying loss of clarity in vision. The net level of agreement—positive minus negative responses—fell by 25 percentage points, suggesting organizations haven't just lost direction, they're actively confused about where they're headed.

Without a "North Star," you're not leading change—​you're just drifting​.

Testing Capabilities Crater

Here is another critical warning sign: iterative testing capabilities declined from 49% to 33% positive response, and it was the only capability that moved into negative net agreement territory.

More practitioners now disagree than agree that their organizations can effectively test and measure new work experience concepts. This is a failure for workplace-as-a-product thinking. Organizations can't iterate toward better experiences without the ability to test and learn.

The inability to pilot, test, fail, and scale can lead to ​big empty buildings.​

Presenteeism Creep

Training on managing by measurable results rather than physical presence dropped 10 percentage points, from 55% to 45%. Given ongoing hybrid work tensions, this suggests organizations are actively retreating from outcome-based management toward attendance theater.

Practitioners see this happening in real time. When asked why employees come to the office daily, one participant captured the contradiction:

I believe most employees come into the office primarily due to leadership expectations or mandates. While onsite, they enjoy the opportunity to engage with others either through casual conversations or formal/informal collaboration. That said, if given the choice, I think the majority would prefer fewer in-office requirements.

Managing by output (results) and not input (attendance) is a critical pillar of ​modern work​. Yet organizations are moving backward. For HR leaders, this means manager training has to evolve: coaching supervisors to measure outputs, not butts-in-seats.

The Stability Illusion

Executive accountability and playbook culture looked almost unchanged, ticking up just +3% and down −2% respectively. On the surface, this feels like stability. In reality, accountability is barely positive at ~47% agreement, and playbook culture is still net negative as it was in 2023.

Slight movement does not equal strength. These are still fragile foundations: responsibility without authority, and processes are ​undocumented​. In a system where other capabilities are sharply eroding, “stable” simply means “stuck.”

Industry Fragmentation: The Great Divergence

General declines also mask accelerating industry polarization, and it's evidence that workplace transformation has become a luxury good.

Creative sectors showed 100% agreement on multiple capabilities, while manufacturing, telecommunications, and food & beverage industries showed 100% disagreement on the same measures. For example, when it comes to iterative testing capabilities:

The middle is disappearing. Organizations are either building world-class workplace capabilities or giving up entirely. There's no longer a "good enough" middle ground.

Mid-Career Management Squeeze

The most consistent pattern across the survey is a type of mid-career malaise. Professionals with 6-20 years of experience consistently reported:

• Lowest access to tools, resources, and sponsorship
• Highest disagreement with organizational capability statements
• Greatest frustration with strategic direction

This group is a critical pressure point. They're experienced enough to recognize gaps between stated policies and operational reality, yet often tasked with implementing top-down mandates like return-to-office policies while managing hybrid teams. Their frustration likely reflects the disconnect between executive expectations and practical constraints.

This creates a dangerous dynamic: the people with enough experience to spot problems but not enough authority to solve them are becoming the most disengaged. They're the institutional knowledge that organizations can't afford to lose.

For both HR and IT leaders, please collaborate with middle managers in real estate side to ensure playbooks cut across policy, systems, and space.

No Data = Difficult Decisions

Free-response data revealed an infrastructure gap underlying many capability challenges. When asked what workplace platforms or data sources they wished they had, 20% of practitioners cited foundational space utilization and analytics.

Their comments showed just how uneven the baseline is: some organizations can only see site-level data, others can’t measure utilization at all, and many are still cobbling together badge data and manual headcount. Several wished for ​AI-driven tools​ that remain out of reach.

One participant summed it up:

Right now, we rely on fragmented tools, badge data here, survey results there, manual head counts elsewhere. Having a single, integrated view that combines qualitative and quantitative inputs would elevate our ability to right-size proactively, personalize the workplace experience, and demonstrate ROI to the business. It’s the missing layer that would truly close the loop between design intent and real-world usage.

Without this foundation, organizations can’t test and learn, can’t manage by results, and can’t maintain playbooks. Capability isn’t declining due to lack of will; it’s failing because the measurement layer is broken.

For HR and IT leaders, the message is clear: the bottleneck isn’t more sensors, it’s integration. Help real estate create a single view that blends badge, bookings, HRIS data and feedback into one trusted source.

The CEO Communication Gap

When asked what they wished their CEOs knew about real estate strategy, only 5% mentioned cost savings—the ​traditional lens​ through which CRE teams are viewed.

Instead, practitioners wanted the CEO to know about:

• Workplace experience and culture
• Space utilization and flexibility
• Talent attraction and retention
• Employee satisfaction and well-being

One participant shared a wake-up call for their colleagues in HR:

The real estate footprint cannot be a separate strategy from the talent and people management strategy. They are intertwined and co-dependent. We can save substantially more money and have better work performance if we start by improving people leadership.

This misalignment between practitioner strategic thinking (value creation) and executive framing (cost management) may help explain the 24% decline in north star vision clarity. When CEOs see cost centers and practitioners see strategic levers, no amount of ​change management​ can turn the frowns upside down.

Optimism Beyond Frustration

Despite organizational capability challenges, individual practitioner sentiment remains remarkably strong. Seventy-eight percent believe their teams have direct, positive, and recognized impact on their companies. Not a single respondent would actively discourage students from entering the real estate and facilities field.

Here's a paradox for execs: the most capable workplace professionals remain confident in their own impact while watching organizational capabilities deteriorate around them.

The real estate industry offers significant career opportunities if we can avoid further disenchantment of its current leaders.

The Path Forward

Industry fragmentation means one-size-fits-all approaches won't work, but the results broadly suggest three critical intervention points:

Infrastructure first: basic measurement before advanced strategyWhen was the last time you presented a clear, site-by-site (or at least site type-by-type) accounting of what can and cannot be automatically measured and analyzed for your leadership?

Mid-career support: the 6-20 year group stuck between execs and realityHow many middle- and senior-managers from the real estate function have been included in broader leadership development programs? Or have had direct exposure to business and people leadership?

Leadership alignment: bridging the CEO communication gapHow can you engage executive leadership to define or revise your “North Star” vision for the real estate portfolio and workplace experience?

Beyond the Numbers

The above analysis represents only the quantitative foundation of what practitioners revealed. The real insights came from the 138 one-on-one conversations (300k-400k words!) addressing critical questions about workplace challenges, successful strategies, and future priorities.

Those conversational insights—captured through Natter’s AI-powered analysis of live video discussions—paint an even richer picture of where workplace experience succeeds, fails, and might be headed. They reveal not just what practitioners think about current capabilities, but why those capabilities are struggling and what might actually work to rebuild them.

The workplace experience field stands at a critical inflection point. We have confident, capable practitioners working within systems that are actively deteriorating. We have clear examples of success in some sectors and obvious failure patterns in others. We have the measurement tools to understand what's happening and the talent to address it.

We have the talent to fix these problems. The question is whether organizations will listen to them before it’s too late.