Shifting Expectations: How Employee Experience is Shaping the Modern Workplace

As hybrid working gives way to the return to office, employees are increasingly defining what a “successful” workplace looks and feels like. SPS experts Nicole Mangarella, Claire Ward and Dr. Chesley Black explore how organisations can respond and unlock the productivity leaders want to regain.

Originally published in the Corporate Real Estate Journal, they highlight how today’s employees expect more from the workplace than a desk and a commute. After several years of remote and hybrid working, people are used to flexibility, intuitive tools, and fewer admin-heavy moments in the working day. When the office experience falls short – limited spaces for focused work, unreliable meeting room tech or fragmented digital tools for example – the workplace becomes a barrier rather than a catalyst for performance.

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Workplace Experience

A modern workplace needs to support different work modes and preferences across a multi-generational workforce. That means creating a flexible workplace architecture: a hospitable welcome, a range of environments (collaboration zones, quiet focus areas, social space), and work settings that help people choose how they work on any given day.

The report also highlights the gap many organizations face between being “data rich” and “insight poor”. When organisations combine building data with lived experience and respond visibly to what they learn, they can create workplaces that feel purposeful, inclusive and worth commuting for.

Business Enablement

Even the best-designed office can disappoint if everyday services are slow, confusing, or disjointed. Employees expect meeting rooms to work, bookings to be accurate, technology to be reliable, and support to be easy to access. Our experts argue that many organisations struggle not because services are outdated, but because they’re fragmented.

It also points to a major shift in responsibility: as correspondence becomes digital, employees are increasingly left to manage growing volumes of messages and tasks that dilute focus. A better approach reframes enablement services as a strategic lever – consolidating support, designing around the user journey, and using on-site and off-site specialist delivery models where they make the most sense.

Technology

Finally, technology underpins both experience and enablement, but only when it’s applied with governance, integration and strict change management. Technology should be introduced to remove friction and return time to employees, not to add complexity. AI in particular can accelerate feedback collection and insights, but adoption works best when employees have clarity, safe tools, and a degree of agency in how AI supports their work.