Motivation Is the Metric, Not Just Presence

The return-to-office debate has quietly moved on. Attendance is climbing again and by the end of 2025, U.S. office occupancy reached its highest sustained levels since the pandemic began, with badge data showing that midweek days now regularly fill a majority of desks. For the workplace leaders who spent three years fighting to get people back through the doors, that looks like a win.

But simply being present in the office doesn’t tell the whole story. While you may know a desk was occupied, presence alone tells you nothing about the effectiveness of the workday. And increasingly, the organizations getting the most out of their space are the ones that have stopped treating a full building as the goal and started asking a harder question: why did each of these people choose to come in today?

The Same Office, Experienced Four Different Ways

Our research across nearly 11,000 employees in 15 countries points to a clear finding. People no longer come into the workplace for the same reasons, and designing for an "average" employee creates friction for everyone. Two colleagues of the same age, in the same role, on the same team can experience an identical office in completely different ways. What separates them is not who they are on paper, but rather what they came in to do.

Based on our findings, four motivations or personas stand out in terms of how they prefer to use the workplace:

• The anchored routine-seeker comes in on set days and treats the office as a stable base for productivity and familiar social contact. Reliability matters more than variety, and uncertainty about whether a desk or a preferred zone will be available is what breaks their day.

• The purposeful visitor comes in selectively for collaboration, learning and connection. Presence is a deliberate choice, and the experience has to justify the commute. An empty floor or a poorly run meeting tells them the trip was not worth it.

• The focused escape-seeker comes in to concentrate, often to escape distractions at home. They need quiet, defined focus areas, acoustic control and easy access to food and services. Noise, crowding and long lines at peak times undo the reason they came.

• The values-driven aligner evaluates the workplace through the lens of purpose. Inclusion, sustainability and authenticity shape whether they trust the organization. Performative commitments and one-size-fits-all experiences erode that trust quickly.

Why Leaders Are Embracing This Way of Thinking

The reason for this framing is quite practical. Workplace leaders are finding that persona-based thinking helps them drive real engagement, and their organizations are backing the effort because they genuinely believe engagement is a priority worth investing in.

In practice, that means getting more creative with the same footprint. Leaders are curating programming, often anchored by food services, that gives people a reason to be in the office on a given day. They are building more variety into where people can sit, from lounge and common areas to cafe seating that doubles as informal meeting space. And they are layering in supporting tools like light-level management and ambient sound systems, letting a single floor deliver focus and energy at once.

None of that comes from a major redesign, but from understanding which moments matter to which people and adjusting the experience accordingly.

Measure the Way, Not Just the Who

Workplace leaders may know the feeling of not quite getting it right in terms of effective space use. Persona-based thinking will not make that problem disappear, but it gives leaders a sharper way to improvise. Instead of balancing square footage against a single idea of the "average" user, they can weigh competing needs across business units and make deliberate trade-offs, protecting focus for one group without draining the energy another group comes in for.

Contrast, not consensus, is what a diverse workforce actually demands.

Most occupancy programs measure demographics and badge swipes: who came in, how often, from which team. That data is easy to collect and can be quietly misleading, because the frictions that decide whether a day succeeds rarely show up in a turnstile count.

The leaders pulling ahead are measuring reasons for presence instead. When you understand why people come in, you can refine your personas office by office, because the mix in a downtown headquarters is not the mix in a suburban campus. A growing number of organizations are prioritizing exactly this kind of insight over badge data, and using it to make evolving decisions about how to optimize their space over time rather than resetting the whole model every couple of years.

This is not about assigning each employee a single, fixed persona. The same person may be a focused escape-seeker one week when a deadline demands deep concentration, and a purposeful visitor the next when a project shifts into a collaborative phase. Motivations move with people’s workloads, the projects they take on and the roles they play on those projects. Measuring the reasons for presence accounts for that fluidity, and it keeps the focus on understanding what people need to succeed on any given day.

The opportunity is not to design for the average. By enabling choice, clarity and consistency across a shared workplace journey, every persona can thrive without fragmenting the experience for anyone else.

A New Mandate

While getting people back into the building was the prior challenge, workplace leaders must now make the experience justify the annoyances of a commute. That means moving beyond operating spaces and toward orchestrating experiences that people actively choose to be part of.

Perhaps the most critical current question for workplace occupancy is, “Have you been able to accomplish what you need to do today? Why or why not?”

Keep Reading 

What a Great Hotel Knows that Most Workplaces Are Still Learning

Closing the Performance Gap: Our Outlook on Facilities Management

Re-thinking FM: Why Hospitality Is a Critical Differentiator