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Seven Shifts Reshaping Workplace Performance
Insights from the 2026 SPS Connected Workplace Experience
Sep 9, 2026
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Seven Shifts Reshaping Workplace Performance
Connected Workplace Outlook 2026
Insight from the 2026 SPS Connected Workplace Experience
The workplace is entering a new phase. Conversations about office design, hybrid work, amenities, and occupancy still matter. But the defining question is changing: How does the workplace help the business perform?
At the 2026 SPS Connected Workplace Experience, leaders across workplace, operations, technology, human resources, real estate, and business transformation gathered with SPS and AWS to explore how AI, data, automation, culture, and experience design are reshaping workplace performance.
Five conclusions stood out:
- AI is moving from assistance to action, with the greatest value coming from targeted applications tied to real workflows.
- Employee experience and operational performance are becoming inseparable because friction affects productivity, service, adoption, and trust. Workplace investments are increasingly expected to demonstrate measurable business value, not simply satisfaction or utilization.
- The overlooked work behind the scenes—logistics, document flows, service requests, frontline enablement, and approvals—is a major source of value and risk.
- Together, these shifts point to a broader conclusion: the workplace is becoming a connected business platform, not simply a place where work happens. This outlook captures the most useful ideas from the day and translates them into questions and actions workplace leaders can apply within their own organizations.
- Connected data gives leaders a clearer view of what is happening, why it is happening, and what action to take next.
- The overlooked work behind the scenes—logistics, document flows, service requests, frontline enablement, and approvals—is a major source of value and risk.
Together, these shifts point to a broader conclusion: the workplace is becoming a connected business platform, not simply a place where work happens. This outlook captures the most useful ideas from the day and translates them into questions and actions workplace leaders can apply within their own organizations.
THE CENTRAL IDEA
A connected workplace aligns people, place, process, technology, data, and service around the outcomes the organization is trying to achieve.
A New Conversation About The Workplace
For years, workplace conversations centered on offices, amenities, hybrid policies, employee expectations, and occupancy. Those topics remain relevant, but the conversation has evolved.
Today’s Workplace Leaders are being asked different questions:
- How does the workplace improve productivity, collaboration, and decision-making?
- Where is friction slowing employees, guests, and service teams down?
- How can AI simplify work rather than add another layer of complexity?
- What data helps leaders make better operational and investment decisions?
- How do workplace investments contribute to measurable business performance?
Market Research
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The State of the Workplace 2026
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Those questions framed the discussions at the SPS Connected Workplace Experience, hosted with AWS in New York City. Across the sessions, one message emerged consistently: the workplace is becoming a business performance platform.
That platform includes the physical environment, but it also includes the services, technologies, workflows, data, and behaviors that shape how work gets done. When those elements are connected, the workplace helps people focus, collaborate, serve, and adapt. When they are disconnected, even a well-designed office can feel difficult to navigate and expensive to operate.
The Leadership Shift Move From Managing Space And Isolated Services To Orchestrating A Connected Operating Model.
Seven Shifts Reshaping The Connected Workplace
Across the day’s discussions, a clear pattern emerged: workplace transformation is no longer being driven by a single technology, policy, or design trend. It is being shaped by several interconnected shifts in how organizations use AI, reduce friction, strengthen culture, enable employees, connect operations, and turn data into better decisions.
Together, these shifts reflect a broader change in the role of the workplace—from a collection of spaces and services to an integrated operating model that supports people and improves business performance.
The following seven shifts capture the ideas leaders should consider as they plan what comes next.
Shift 1: AI Moves From Conversation To Execution
AI is beginning to do more than generate content or answer questions. The next phase is about systems that can reason, plan, and take action within defined boundaries.
Sudipt Kapadia of AWS described agentic AI as an emerging digital teammate. For workplace leaders, the opportunity is practical: AI can triage service requests, summarize information, support compliance, optimize space, improve visitor workflows, automate manual handoffs, and create a more intuitive concierge layer across the employee and guest experience.
The most valuable applications begin with a specific problem, not a general desire to “use AI.” Slow processes, disconnected systems, underused resources, inconsistent service experiences, and delayed decisions are better starting points than the technology itself.
Governance must develop alongside experimentation. Reliable data, clear ownership, appropriate human oversight, and measurable success criteria are what turn a promising pilot into a trusted capability.
What Leaders should do now
- Choose one high-friction workflow with a clear owner and measurable outcome.
- Confirm that the required data is available, reliable, and appropriately governed.
- Pilot in a controlled setting, evaluate the impact, and scale only what works.
Leadership Question
Where could AI materially improve speed, service quality, risk management, or cost without weakening trust or accountability?
Philip Ross, WORKTECH Academy
Shift 2: Great Workplaces Remove Friction and Create Connection
Employees rarely experience workplace strategy as a strategy. They experience it as moments: waiting, searching, repeating information, navigating disconnected tools, or struggling to find the people and resources they need.
Philip Ross of WORKTECH Academy and Claire Ward of SPS highlighted the performance gap that emerges when organizations invest heavily in the workplace but leave those daily points of friction unresolved.
Their most memorable question was simple: Was today worth the commute? The question shifts the focus from attendance to value. When employees invest time and energy to be together, the workplace should make collaboration easier, strengthen connection, and enable work that is more effective in person.
Friction should be treated as an operational signal. Repeated complaints, workarounds, delays, and low adoption often reveal where the employee journey and the operating model are out of sync.
What Leaders should do now
- Map the end-to-end employee and guest journey, including the transitions between systems and service teams.
- Prioritize recurring friction that affects many people or creates disproportionate delay and frustration.
- Design the in-person experience around connection, collaboration, learning, and access to services that create distinct value.
Leadership Question:
Which recurring moments make the workplace harder to use than it should be—and what would change if those moments disappeared?
Shift 3: Culture Determines Whether Strategy Succeeds
A workplace strategy only matters when people behave differently.
Dr. Jessica Kriegel challenged leaders to look beyond perks, policies, and slogans and focus on the beliefs and behaviors that produce results. Organizations can redesign offices, introduce technology, or announce new expectations, but those actions do not automatically change how people collaborate, serve, lead, or make decisions.
Culture becomes more useful when it is treated as observable and actionable. What do people believe about the office, change, accountability, service, technology, and leadership? Which of those beliefs support the desired future, and which quietly preserve the current state?
Leadership, in this context, is the work of creating movement. That requires clarity about the destination, consistent reinforcement, visible accountability, and the trust to confront beliefs that are preventing progress.
Jessica Kriegel at the SPS Connected Workplace Experience in June 2026 at New York City.
What Leaders should do now
- Define the few behaviors that must change for the workplace strategy to succeed.
- Identify the beliefs and incentives that currently reinforce the opposite behavior.
- Align leadership messages, systems, recognition, and accountability around the desired behavior.
Leadership Question
What belief inside the organization is most likely to prevent the next workplace change from taking hold?
Shift 4: Experience and Technology Must Be Designed Together
Workplace experience and technology transformation are often managed as separate workstreams. The discussion led by Dr. Chesley Black and Nicole Mangarella of SPS showed why they need to be designed together.
A clear experience strategy should come first: What should employees, guests, and service teams be able to do? What should the journey feel like? What business outcome should improve? Technology can then be selected and configured to support that model.
Adding a new tool to a fragmented journey may improve one step while leaving the broader experience broken. That is why HR, IT, corporate real estate, security, audiovisual, operations, and service providers need to be involved early enough to design the full system rather than connect it after the fact.
The right measures also need to be defined before deployment. Adoption, service speed, employee effort, operational consistency, utilization, and decision quality often reveal more than a simple implementation milestone.
What Leaders should do now
- Start with the experience and business outcome, then define the technology requirement.
- Bring the cross-functional owners of the journey into the design process early.
- Measure adoption and value after launch, not just delivery against the project plan.
Leadership Question:
Are we implementing technology to solve a defined experience problem, or are we asking employees to adapt to a tool that has not been designed around their work?
Shift 5: The Biggest Opportunities Often Live Behind the Scenes
Employees rarely think about mailrooms, package logistics, document routing, chain-of-custody, workflow approvals, or service notifications—until something goes wrong.
The operational intelligence panel with Pamela Tom of SPS, Brian Kingsbury of FacilityOS, and Anthony Murphy of Ondox brought those invisible processes into view. These workflows quietly shape the employee and client experience every day, while also influencing cost, risk, speed, and compliance.
The opportunity is to turn invisible work into visible intelligence. Digital tracking can create a reliable record of items moving through service environments. AI document processing can classify incoming information, route work, and trigger the next action. Integrated dashboards can help teams see exceptions, backlogs, and performance across locations.
These improvements also build confidence: leaders know work is being handled consistently, employees know requests will not disappear, clients know sensitive information is being managed carefully, and service teams can see and improve the work they own.
What Leaders should do now
- Identify the behind-the-scenes workflows that create the most manual effort, delay, or risk.
- Create visibility into volume, status, ownership, exceptions, and handoffs.
- Automate predictable steps while preserving human oversight for complex or sensitive decisions.
Leadership Question
Which invisible workflow would create the greatest business value if leaders could see and manage it in real time?
Shift 6: Technology Should Elevate People, Not Replace Them
One of the day’s most memorable moments was Spot, the robotic dog.
The demonstration made a broader point: automation can support inspection, monitoring, safety, logistics, and repetitive work so people can focus on judgment, service, problem-solving, and human interaction.
Spot, the robotic dog, at the SPS Connected Workplace Experience
The panel featuring Matt George of SPS, Dragos Badea of YAROOMS, and Matt Spriegel of Atiom extended that idea across workplace management and frontline enablement. AI can make services easier to access. Gamification and bite-sized learning can reinforce training and build habits. Workplace platforms can simplify access to rooms, desks, resources, and visitor processes.
The business case should include hard measures such as time, cost, utilization, and productivity. It should also account for service readiness, consistency, confidence, adoption, and the quality of the experience people deliver.
What Leaders should do now
- Automate repetitive tasks that consume time without requiring distinctly human judgment.
- Give frontline teams tools, training, feedback, and recognition that improve performance at the point of service.
- Measure whether technology improves the human interaction, not just whether the technology is used.
Leadership Question
Where could technology remove low-value effort and give employees more time to solve problems, serve people, or make better decisions?
Shift 7: Connected Data Creates Better Decisions
Many workplace organizations have an abundance of data but struggle to connect and interpret it.
Nicole Mangarella of SPS and Michal Kolodziej of AWS emphasized that one data source often needs another to answer the question leaders are actually asking. Room utilization may show that a space is empty, but employee feedback can explain why. Service tickets may increase, but occupancy, staffing, or event data can reveal the cause. Print volume may decline internally while cost, risk, or brand inconsistency appears elsewhere.
Connected data turns isolated measures into context. That context enables leaders to distinguish symptoms from root causes, prioritize investment, and move from reporting what happened to recommending what should happen next.
Connected data should lead to better decisions
What Leaders Should do Now
- Begin with the business question, not the data source.
- Connect experience, operations, space, service, and financial data where it creates useful context.
- Establish governance and definitions so leaders trust the result.
- Translate insight into a decision, recommendation, or automated action.
Leadership Question
What important workplace decision are we still making with incomplete context because the relevant data sits in separate systems?
Five Questions Every Workplace Leader Should Ask
A useful leadership conversation can begin with five questions:
- Which workplace experiences create the most employee, guest, or service-team friction?
- Where do disconnected systems or handoffs slow decisions and service delivery?
- What operational data are we collecting but not using to improve performance?
- Which AI opportunities solve a real business problem and have a responsible path to adoption?
- How are we measuring workplace success beyond occupancy and satisfaction?
EVENT CONTEXT AND RECOGNITION
The 2026 SPS Connected Workplace Experience was held in New York City on June 4 and hosted by SPS in partnership with AWS. It brought together senior leaders across workplace experience, real estate, operations, technology, human resources, and business transformation for thought leadership, peer discussion, technology exploration, and practical problem-solving.