Inside 138 Practitioner Conversations on Workplace Experience

Theme 1: The Request Trap

When Employees Can Only Ask for More

When practitioners described common employee requests in the office, the limitation was clear: most employees articulate spatial needs, not experiential ones.

We receive requests for spaces ranging from small team meetings around a whiteboard to large presentations. There is a demand for modular rooms with flexible furniture, allowing for a variety of team activities.

Several similar quotes illustrated the constraint of spatial thinking for employee preferences. It's easier for workers to ask for new conference rooms, not better meeting flows. They imagine that modular furniture will help more than optimized collaboration journeys. They've been trained to see workplace problems as space problems, when most are actually experience, management, and service design challenges.

Employees ask for more space because we've never taught them to think about how their work journeys could change instead. Or they are being told to be somewhere specific no matter what. The technology to make journeys more dynamic is also still relatively new.

Why Booking Systems Keep Failing

Spatial thinking shows up most clearly in how we manage space. Many participants said desk booking systems are underused. Employees prefer to just grab a spot rather than reserve one.

We keep building systems nobody wants, then wonder why adoption lags, or why selfish and precautionary booking behaviors emerge. The deeper problem? We’re optimizing for control, not experience. Booking assumes people know when and where they’ll want to work.

In reality, work is far more ​fluid and contextual​.

Workplace AI Today vs. Tomorrow

The conversations revealed significant gaps between AI aspirations and current reality. When asked about AI collaboration, most responses focused on building automation rather than team productivity. Some 84% of participants said they would "like to see more AI in facilities management, like monitoring HVAC systems to preempt issues."

Others identified an interesting barrier to ​AI adoption​ for facility and hospitality teams:

We're the human side of the office. As a workplace person, using too much AI can make you lose touch.

Still, the missed opportunity is enormous. One visionary participant captured the potential:

Aspirationally, I'd like AI to plan our workdays based on our communication patterns, coordinating team schedules efficiently.

Using generative AI to help workers find the right space, at the right time, with the right people should beat modular furniture every time in an environment with diverse, well-designed options.

But most real estate teams aren't empowered to think this way while stuck responding to space requests, and most leaders still consider​ workplace mobility​ and desk sharing as burdensome.

Theme 2: The Territorial Tax

When Finance and HR Clash

The conversations revealed how ​territorial battles​ directly sabotage workplace experience. One practitioner described the painful dynamic:

There's a territorialism in our organization where the CFO is reluctant to allow HR to handle large expenses, viewing them as too carefree with money. Conversely, the people organization is hesitant to ask finance about employee experience, knowing they want zero-cost improvements.

This organizational friction is a structural barrier to coherent workplace strategy. When finance and HR functions distrust each other's competence, real estate gets caught in the middle, unable to advance initiatives that require both CAPEX and people listening.

The result is predictable:

Budgets and travel expenses have been reduced, affecting new builds and forcing us to reuse old furniture. Innovation is limited to basic layouts, with minimal retrofitting.

Shut Out of Strategy

Border battles create a vicious cycle, reinforcing CRE's order-taker status:

We don't have access to senior leaders when planning client experiences. Instead, we hear from lower-level leaders, which provides some vision, but it's not as effective as hearing it directly from top executives.

This explains why ​Part 1's​ data showed such a dramatic decline (-24%) in ​“North Star” vision​ clarity. The organizations themselves may have solid corporate strategy, but the people designing and maintaining the workplace are not always included in strategic conversations.

What It Takes to Break Silos

Multiple practitioners echoed my belief that a ​unified executive​ is required to make headway on a better experience at work:

Changes in workplace equations impact portfolio optimization and experience, highlighting how crucial cross-function conversations are to avoid duplicative decisions and ensure cohesive workplace strategies.

But recognizing the need doesn't automatically create the authority structure to address it. The territorial tax isn't just inefficient, it's capability destruction. When silos prevent strategic collaboration, individual competence can't translate into organizational effectiveness.

Theme 3: The Purpose Paradox

Being Alone, Together

The most counterintuitive conversational insight was how office mandates accidentally recreate the worst aspects of remote work:

In my company, employees frequently request more meeting spaces and phone booths. We have a hybrid work culture and employees are on calls throughout the day. Calls are rarely taken at desks to avoid disturbing others doing focused work, so there's a consistent demand for more spaces.

This is the purpose paradox in action, and it’s a pre-pandemic condition made worse by presenteeism culture. Leaders mandate office attendance to increase collaboration, so workers request enclosed spaces because they're required to focus or make calls in places not optimized for it.

The policy defeats its own purpose and perpetuates spatial inefficiency.

More Space, Less Collaboration

The purpose paradox also creates impossible mathematics:

With a significant portion of our workforce operating remotely, we continue to struggle to secure approval for office-related expenditures.

RTO mandates fuel demand for private spaces. That means more square footage for fewer people, many of whom are commuting to do work better suited for their home. The outcome: higher costs, lower collaboration. Exactly the opposite of what leaders intended.

Refusing to Choose

Multiple conversations revealed the challenge where organizations refuse to make hard choices between competing priorities:

Employees at our operations center are asking for ‘more space.’ They are crammed together with minimal community areas. We could adopt the Activity-Based Work strategies from our HQ, but the costs aren't a priority for the organization managing the budget…which is not real estate.

The implication is clear: offices need narrower, more ​authentic purposes​, not broader mandates that create conflicting requirements.

But that requires executives to say what the office won't try to be, not just what it will be, and then investing accordingly. If real estate leaders are expected to manage and evaluate the performance of the workplace like a product, they should have the appropriate budget authority to do so.

The Flywheel of Decline

These three themes explain why workplace capabilities are declining despite strong individual competence:

• The request trap keeps real estate teams responding to spatial demands rather than designing experiential solutions.
• This prolongs order-taker culture, making them vulnerable to territorial battles that exclude CRE from strategic planning.
• Without strategic authority, they can't address the purpose paradox driving contradictory space demands.

Together, these patterns form another negative flywheel: spatial requests reinforce service-provider status, which enables territorial exclusion, which creates unclear purpose, which generates more spatial requests.

Breaking the Cycle

The conversations revealed that many capability-building efforts fail because they address symptoms rather than structural barriers. Real progress requires a different approach.

​Part 1’s​ data revealed that iterative testing capabilities collapsed; it was the only question that moved into negative net agreement. Organizations can’t improve what they won’t experiment with. The three patterns below explain why testing has become impossible and what to do instead.

• Start with goals, not rooms. When workers request more meeting rooms, ask about their collaboration goals. What meetings need dedicated spaces? How might scheduling changes, IT upgrades, or work redesign address the need without adding square footage?
• Stop turf wars before they start. Cross-functional collaboration is a prerequisite for workplace change. Real estate strategies that don't align with HR policies and IT capabilities will fail. This means either changing executive authority (see ​Chief of Work​) or improve decision-making frameworks.
• Refine the purpose of the office. It’s very hard to solve for individual and group needs in one, spatially-efficient workplace. Leadership must limit and prioritize ​the outcomes​ they want derived from the office, design and activate it accordingly, and measure related outcomes obsessively.

Time to Listen Differently

The Natter experiment showed the workplace doesn’t have a data problem; it has a listening problem. Peer-to-peer dialogue surfaced the behaviors behind statistical trends, the contradictions driving inefficiency, and the frustrations practitioners rarely voice.

The opportunity is clear:

• Don't ask what spaces teams want in the next budget cycle; ask what slows them down.
• Don't survey for preferences; ask how teams would decide where to work with ​fewer constraints​.
• Don't treat workplace experts as order-takers; involve them in designing the experience.

The future of workplace intelligence isn’t bigger surveys. It’s a systematic way for practitioners and employees to gather and share insights with each other, and for leadership to act on what emerges.

If you’re in HR, IT, or CRE, here’s my challenge: before your next strategy review, convene a cross-functional “listening lab.” Ten minutes of candid dialogue between practitioners will reveal more than another PowerPoint.