In 2025, the workplace world experienced a noticeable shift. The conversations that once centered around “how do we get people back into the office?” evolved into a far more important question: “how do we make the office worth coming back to?”. It was a year when organizations finally moved away from leaning on assumptions and began basing their decisions on data and insights.
As workplace strategies matured, the emphasis shifted from enforcing rigid rules to building an ongoing understanding of how work truly happens. Heading into 2026, one thing is clear. The next wave of transformation is going to be defined by the employee experience.
This theme came to life in a recent episode of the InnPact Podcast, where workplace strategist Kevin Sauer and InnerSpace’s Director of Client Services Brennan Stang reflected on what 2025 taught us. Kevin summed up the year with a single sentence that captured the mood across the industry: “Workplace strategy finally graduated from guesswork into operational intelligence.” Organizations stopped relying on a single data set like badge swipes, and instead began blending insights from combined workplace data streams.
Together, these data streams revealed how employees actually move, interact, gather, focus, and collaborate throughout the day. The shift unlocked a deeper understanding of what people need from the office and why certain spaces succeed while others fall flat.
Brennan saw another defining pattern emerge throughout the year - constant, almost relentless tweaking of return to office expectations. For many organizations, RTO was not a fixed policy, it was a moving target that underwent multiple rounds of revisions as leaders attempted to figure out what would truly matter to employees. His vantage point showed that the companies who made the most meaningful progress were not the ones enforcing attendance. They were the ones improving experience. They looked closely at what made days in the office feel worthwhile and used those insights to build spaces and rhythms that supported productive, human centered work.
This evolution was shaped in part by a major shift away from traditional metrics like badge swipes. In 2025, leaders began recognizing that presence alone could not explain how well a workplace was functioning. Real workplace intelligence requires understanding behavior. Kevin and Brennan both pointed to how teams began studying where people moved, where they stayed, how they naturally clustered, and when collaboration spiked. These patterns provided the context that badge data simply never could, allowing organizations to design spaces that matched the real, everyday rhythms of work.
As companies embraced richer data, it became clear that one time studies no longer met the needs of modern work. The old model of running a time utilization project every few years could not keep up with the pace of change. Teams are shifting monthly, projects cycle in and out, and AI continues to reshape job roles in real time. Brennan emphasized that leaders now need continuous visibility rather than static snapshots. Understanding the workplace has become an ongoing practice, not a one time exercise.
All of this momentum is setting the stage for what is coming next. If 2025 was about recalibrating physical space, 2026 will be about elevating the experience inside it. Kevin described a future shaped by AI supported orchestration, predictive space planning, and digital twin style modeling that allows teams to explore potential changes before making them real. Workplaces will become more fluid and adaptable, shaped by the natural rituals and rhythms of teams rather than by static layouts.
At the same time, Brennan noted that once organizations answer their core real estate questions, the conversation naturally shifts toward people. Employee experience becomes the differentiator. Satisfaction becomes an indicator of performance. And for many leaders, engagement becomes the closest practical proxy we have for measuring productivity. Both Kevin and Brennan agreed that this focus on people is where the most meaningful progress will happen next year.
Perhaps the most powerful moment of the conversation came near the end, when Kevin offered a piece of advice that perfectly captures the mindset shift required for 2026: “Stop trying to solve hybrid. Solve for human performance and everything else will follow.” Hybrid work is not a problem to fix. It is a condition to design within. When leaders focus on outcomes, the workplace becomes a tool rather than a mandate, a resource rather than an obligation. Teams become the lens. Data becomes the guide. And the office becomes a place that earns its relevance every day.
What happened in 2025 did more than reshape workplace strategy. It reshaped our understanding of work itself. In the year ahead, the organizations that thrive will be the ones that treat workplaces as living systems, the ones that use data as a full and nuanced story rather than a single metric, and the ones that build environments people genuinely want to use rather than feel required to use. The office is no longer about presence. It is about purpose. And for any leader planning for 2026, this conversation is the right place to begin.