Office attendance rises, but quality challenges persist

Europe’s workplaces are experiencing a paradox: while office presence is increasing and the perceived productivity benefits of in-office work are widely recognised, persistent underlying challenges around workspace quality threaten to undermine these gains.

JLL’s Global Benchmarking Services team, which conducts the surveys for clients to determine the priorities of different job functions and demographic groups, has released its 2025 'Global HX Trends' report, based on a survey of over 14,000 employees. The research shows that global office presence nudged up to 3.2 days per week from 2.7 in 2024, signaling a clear return to the physical workplace. The report highlights a genuine improvement in how employees perceive the office as a collaborative and productive space – with 73% of respondents now agreeing the office enables them to work productively, compared to 70% the previous year. Globally, core drivers for office attendance include socialising (63%) and internal meetings (55%), underscoring the enduring need for face-to-face collaboration that employees across EMEA also seek.

However, a critical disconnect is emerging: while employees cite socialising and collaboration as primary reasons for office attendance, they spend approximately 70% of their time on individual tasks and virtual calls once there. This mismatch between intention and reality helps explain why, despite an overall increase in perceived productivity, the effectiveness of the office for focused work has declined from 66% to 64%. The gap between collaborative aspirations and actual work patterns also accounts for the deteriorating performance of essential workplace factors like acoustics and sound privacy. Commute time (48%) and commute cost (29%) remain the top two barriers to office attendance, highlighting the need for employers to design offices that support how people actually work, not just why they say they come.

“The office return is real, and the productivity narrative is improving," says Sue Asprey Price, EMEA CEO & Global Head of Portfolio Services, Work Dynamics, at JLL. "The real opportunity lies in transforming each local office into an exceptional, high-performance workspace. This means prioritising factors like quiet zones, functional meeting spaces, and quality amenities, and considering not just the types of spaces, but their layout and spatial design. Investing in improved acoustics, quality finishes, and effective change management for addressing office behaviour is critical for turning diverse attendance patterns into powerful engines of satisfaction and productivity, especially as workforce needs are increasingly complex, encompassing socialising, hybrid meetings, and focused work."

The lack of consistent office quality across the continent could be a key reason for Europe's experience issues. The research found that the EMEA region has the "worst experience" overall, with an HX (Human Experience) score of 88, which was lower than APAC, LATAM, and NORAM.

This indicates that for a significant portion of European employees, the office environment is falling short of expectations, particularly in supporting diverse work activities. Workspaces are widely perceived as "noisy and poorly supporting focused and private work," with 'sound privacy' and 'acoustics' ranking as the top two worst-performing factors for employee experience in 2025. Additionally, while office productivity perception is up, the perceived effectiveness of the office for focused work fell from 66% to 64%, highlighting a challenge in providing the right types of spaces for the varied activities of a workforce.

Employees also demand "better meeting rooms and equipment," as ‘meeting rooms' themselves rank seventh among the lowest-scoring factors. The report reveals a significant "meeting room crunch": demand for small meeting rooms (2–4 people) has risen from 39% to 43% of required space. Meanwhile, meeting rooms themselves rank seventh on the list of lowest-performing workplace factors, with employees citing issues from unreliable AV equipment to "camping" behaviours where individuals occupy rooms for the entire day for solo-focused work. The meeting room problem is, in many ways, a microcosm of the broader challenge: the office is being asked to do more, with infrastructure that hasn't kept pace.

“Many European workers are currently finding their offices noisy and ill-equipped for focused work, and these frustrations actively deter them from making the commute,” added Sue Asprey Price. “Addressing these fundamental shortcomings is not just about satisfaction; it's a strategic imperative to create offices worth travelling for. The organisations that will win the talent and performance game in 2026 are those who invest in the quality of the hour, not just the quantity of the days.”