As more offices sit unoccupied, many corporate leaders still haven’t quite figured out how to deal with their empty workspaces.

Four in five companies have seen office utilisation rates dip below 50%, compared to just one in five pre-pandemic, data from JLL’s Occupancy Benchmarking Report shows.

While the numbers paint a bleak picture, there has to be a simple explanation as to why employees are choosing not to return to the office. Nailing the ‘why’ will almost certainly facilitate a seamless workplace transition in the hybrid era.

Consider the notion of ‘Know Your Customer (KYC)’, a process commonly used in the financial services industry. By employing a similar approach in the real estate sector, it would involve understanding the people working in a building, their needs and wants, and factors that would incentivise them to return to the office.

For companies, these “customers” are their employees. Truly knowing them entails understanding their daily work routines, from how they work and collaborate in teams to what they need or enjoy in the office and beyond.

This deeper knowledge of employee’s workplace preferences and attitudes has become increasingly critical, especially at a time when office utilisation has been on the wane.

Yet, instead of asking the right questions, leaders in many companies have been preoccupied with the problem at face value — the empty office.

Discussions typically revolve around costs and the return of investment, leading many to jump the gun to permanently reduce their office footprint, or push through sweeping return-to-office mandates as a short-term solution.

Such decisions are in part due to the misalignment between the corporate real estate team and the business functions within companies.

For instance, the real estate team may set a 90% office occupancy target without consulting different functions on the potential impact that it may or may not have on business outcomes.

To compound the problem, workplace metrics that have been set pre-COVID may have also lost their relevance in today’s new ways of working. But the lack of communication means any changes could have been lost in translation, or simply not considered at all.

Any chance of fixing this begins with leaders who need to align and set a clear direction, create certainty, and clearly communicate to employees on what they stand to gain from an office return.

More importantly, as hybrid becomes widely adopted, companies must ensure that the employee experience they aim for extends beyond the workplace, and even into their homes or ‘third places’.

Crafting an effective workplace strategy requires a collaborative top-down, bottom-up approach, integrating input from both top-level leadership and employees at all levels.

Leaders, in particular, need to recognise the importance of feeding purpose and values into workplace strategy and aligning it to business objectives to strengthen performance.

The fundamental lesson to learn from the empty office phenomenon is that people should always be part of the strategy. People experience matters. It’s about what goals the business is trying to achieve with its people, as opposed to what its real estate is trying to achieve.

Data may point you to what you have to focus on, but acting on the valuable insights and observations from people within the organisation is key to getting your strategy off on the right foot, and ultimately convincing employees back to the office.

Get in touch for a chat on how to shape your workplace strategy and elevate the office experience for your people.