We know the workplace matters, but how do we quantify its impact?
Businesses increasingly expect the workplace to support wider organisational goals, but measuring its contribution remains challenging. New approaches to workplace measurement can help connect investment with outcomes.
The office is typically one of the largest investments businesses make, after their people. Costs associated with the workplace account for 8.4% of revenue and 12.5% of operating costs on average, according to our analysis of 50 publicly listed multinational companies. These figures highlight the importance of accurately evaluating – as well as enhancing - the value of workplace strategies.
This challenge is more relevant than ever as expectations of the office evolve, influenced by both hybrid working and the growing impact of AI. Today, organisations are placing greater emphasis on bringing people together to build human relationships, share knowledge, learn from one another and generate new ideas.
Business leaders increasingly recognise the wider role the workplace plays. The Savills and CoreNet Global ‘Measuring the Value of the Evolving Workplace Survey 2026’ drew responses from more than 240 corporate real estate and workplace professionals worldwide. Almost two-thirds said their executive business leadership teams primarily view the workplace as either a driver of culture and collaboration or a source of competitive advantage. Only 13% said it is seen by business leaders as principally an operational cost to manage.
But confidence in the strategic role of the office is accompanied by demand for stronger evidence. A further 16% said their leadership teams support investment but want a clearer demonstration of its value. This presents corporate real estate teams with an important opportunity: to demonstrate clearly what workplace investment delivers for the wider organisation.
The workplace benefits many organisations struggle to measure
The survey also reveals a tension: organisations have a clear sense of what they want the workplace to achieve, but are less confident in their ability to measure those outcomes.
The vast majority of respondents saw the office as contributing to culture, teamwork, mentoring, client experience and innovation. Yet these are among the areas organisations find hardest to quantify. Almost all respondents (99%) said the office creates value by supporting culture and collaboration, but only 38% on average said this contribution is highly measurable.
Innovation presents an even wider gap: while 99% said the office adds value to innovation and idea generation, only one-third regarded that impact as clearly quantifiable.
The limits of traditional workplace metrics
Today, corporate real estate teams mainly rely on established measures to assess portfolio performance, while metrics that connect the workplace to wider business outcomes remain less common. Businesses may, therefore, have a good sense of how people experience the office or how frequently they use it, but less evidence of what happens as a result.
Employee engagement surveys are used by 73% of respondents, and workplace utilisation or occupancy data by 65%. By comparison, only half use financial or business performance measures, while just 33% track employee retention, 22% examine links to productivity or performance, and 13% assess collaboration or innovation.
Measures that are used less often can still provide significant value. We also asked respondents how confident they were in the ability of their assessment methods to demonstrate workplace value. Two-thirds (66%) of those using employee engagement surveys expressed high or very high confidence. Among the much smaller group using collaboration or innovation metrics, 56% were similarly confident that these measures provide a reliable indication of the office’s value.
This points to an opportunity to broaden the measurement toolkit. Rather than relying on one measure, organisations can triangulate across different sources of evidence - looking at what people do, how they experience the workplace and what the business achieves as a result. Together, these can provide a more complete picture of workplace performance and its wider impact.
For example, respondents cited combining utilisation and sentiment data with measures of professional networks, mentoring participation and business performance - such as revenue, billable hours, project delivery times, error rates or client retention. One approach is to test whether more frequent face-to-face client interactions are associated with stronger client relationships, or whether greater cross-team interaction coincides with faster project delivery.
Ultimately, organisations that combine a greater mix of data will be better able to demonstrate how changes to workplace strategy correlate with changes in wider outcomes. This creates a stronger feedback loop between workplace strategy, investment and outcomes.
The hybrid debate moves on
Employees spend 3.6 days a week in the office, as a global average, with little change compared to a year ago. Minimum attendance expectations also remain broadly stable, typically at three to four days a week across major markets.
As hybrid models become more established, organisations are shifting their focus from setting attendance policies to making the most of the time employees spend together. This means creating workplaces that support collaboration, as well as innovation and culture, while enabling people to work seamlessly across physical and virtual environments.
If you would like to read our Impacts article that explores this topic further and unpacks a framework for measuring workplace value, you can view it here: It’s not just attendance: measuring the value of today’s offices | Savills Impacts
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