Technology is at the centre of the effort to understand what’s needed.

To make sure offices are redesigned to suit new, more agile ways of working, firms are starting to use advanced sensor technologies such as VergeSense, which can distinguish between people and objects, and AI platforms that help identify less obvious workflows to create models predicting what’s needed.

“It allows organizations to be more proactive rather than reactive, when it comes to managing their space,” says Toncheva.

Combining live occupancy – such as two people sitting on a sofa, with passive occupancy, like a handbag left on a desk – creates more sophisticated “occupancy intelligence.”

Lavers believes in the future it will become even more nuanced.

“The next step will be to pull in big data sources, analyzing how things like the weather, traffic, or the cafeteria special promotion impact occupancy and use,” he says.

Toncheva suggests that to capitalize on intelligence, firms should incorporate more flexibility into office designs. “Leases dictate that space is fixed, but demand fluctuates. Flexible solutions make it easier to quickly adapt layouts based on new insights,” she says.

While tech is key, data only provides half the picture. There are qualitative drivers like employee experience, satisfaction and individual work habits.

“We ask clients what they hope to achieve by getting employees into the office and then figure out what it will take to make that happen,” Toncheva says.

Take one JLL client, which felt their product innovation, creativity and speed to market was lacking due to remote work.

“We built a robust understanding of employee needs and preferences, mapped that against business requirements and team adjacencies, then created a series of personas,” says Toncheva. “It helped us redesign the space to support product workflows while also offering the comfort and experience that people craved.