A fuller office doesn't prove the fit-out paid off

Amenity space in offices has surged 120% since 2021, while individual workstations have shrunk 10% since 2023, according to CBRE's 2026 Global Workplace and Occupancy Insights. Employers are moving floor space away from individual desks and toward meeting rooms, lounges, cafés, and other spaces designed for people to work together.

At the same time, fixed-office attendance requirements are becoming more common. JLL's 2026 Global Occupancy Planning Benchmark finds 62% of organizations now require fixed in-office days, up from 28% in 2022.

Badge-swipe data can't tell finance whether the new space drove attendance, whether the mandate did, or whether the space improved the business outcome used to justify the investment. If occupancy isn't proof of ROI, what is?

The missing business case

Office fit-out construction costs averaged $149 per square foot across 59 Americas markets in 2026, up 5.5% from the year before, according to Cushman & Wakefield's 2026 Americas Office Fit Out Cost Guide, with US costs rising 5% and the Tri-state region recording the highest average at $193 per square foot.

The post-occupancy research is far less standardized. A 2024 scoping review in the Journal of Building Engineering examined 116 office studies and found no dominant evaluation protocol. Productivity or performance was assessed in only about one-third of the studies, primarily through self-reported questionnaires, and the researchers identified uncertainty around performance assessment and cost-benefit evaluation as major shortcomings.

The reasons companies maintain offices don’t always align with the activities employees rate as most important. In a 2025 poll by Leesman, 70% of corporate real estate leaders said their organizations maintain office space to foster collaboration and knowledge exchange, while only 27% cited enabling productivity. However, 89% of employees rate individual focused work at a desk as important, the highest of any activity since the firm began measuring workplaces.

Irving Chung, founder and CEO of FranGuidance, was advising the leadership of a roughly 120-person professional services firm when it approved eight enclosed phone booths as part of an office refresh in 2022. The booths became the project's biggest line item, costing between $80,000 and $100,000, and were treated as a capital expenditure.

“The original problem framing was around call privacy and focus work. That was the stated rationale,” Chung says. “But underneath it there was an assumption that a better office would make the return-to-office push feel more reasonable to employees. Nobody said it out loud in the approval meeting. It was implied.”

"There was no formal written ROI model tied to specific KPIs. The business case was more qualitative," he says. The CFO asked about cost and vendor options, but "nobody asked whether employees actually wanted enclosed spaces or whether commute friction was the real barrier to attendance," he says. "Those questions weren't on the table. Facilities owned the conversation, Real Estate validated the square footage logic, CFO signed off. HR was not in the room."

Chung says the firm assessed booth use informally after installation, with "no sensors, no booking system tied to reporting." Facilities staff observed the booths sitting mostly empty, while employee comments indicated people found them claustrophobic and calls continued from desks or from home.

"Turns out most people dislike feeling like they're in a box," he says. "We figured that out about six months too late." By then, he says, booth use was clearly low, but nobody formally quantified it because doing so "would have raised uncomfortable questions about the spend."

The attribution problem

Private offices are declining as phone booths, focus rooms, and small meeting rooms increase, and JLL says determining whether those investments work requires space-level utilization data rather than building-level badge counts. Building entry records an arrival without showing whether employees used a $100,000 booth investment for the work it was purchased to support.

At the firm Chung advised, the attendance mandate arrived as the refreshed office opened, and occupancy rose. Leadership credited both the mandate and the office improvements. "No one separated the two effects. I think that was deliberate," Chung says. "Isolating the variables would have forced an honest conversation about whether the space investment moved the needle at all, and that conversation had no upside for the people who approved the spend."

The benchmark itself can shift, too. JLL's broader benchmark shows how much can move underneath a single utilization figure. Global office utilization reached 56% in 2026, up from 54% a year earlier, while the gap between actual and target utilization narrowed from 25 percentage points to 18. Only two percentage points of that improvement came from higher actual utilization. The remaining five came from employers lowering their targets.

Most of the movement toward the target, in other words, came from changing the target rather than filling more seats. Occupancy can rise after a redesign, but if attendance policy and utilization targets change at the same time, the number can’t isolate what the office investment changed.

The office effect

The type of office redesign matters. Activity-based offices replace assigned desks with different zones employees can choose according to the work they are doing, such as quiet areas, meeting rooms, phone booths, and shared workspaces. A 2026 meta-analysis in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology covering 35 studies and 7,959 employees found activity-based offices were associated with more coworker contact and physical activity, lower work stress, and higher job demands. Effects on privacy, autonomy, and productivity remained uncertain. Outcomes were generally more favorable when activity-based offices were compared with open-plan offices.

Open-plan offices remove many of the physical barriers between employees without necessarily providing the same range of task-specific spaces. A study in the Royal Society journal Philosophical Transactions B measured what happened after two Fortune 500 headquarters converted from cubicles to open-plan offices. Researchers tracked face-to-face interaction with wearable sensors and pulled email and instant-message volume from company servers before the change and months afterward. At the first company, face-to-face interaction fell 72%, from roughly 5.8 hours per person per day to 1.7, while emails sent rose 56% and instant messages 67%. Executives told the researchers productivity, measured through the company's internal performance system, had declined.

Nikita Khandheria, founder and CEO of ERIA, uses the company's Marina hospitality venue as a regular workplace for a small group of employees and says proximity changes how quickly information moves between them. "A salesperson can turn around and ask an operations question instead of starting another email chain," Khandheria says. "Likewise, operators hear what clients are requesting in real time. That proximity creates a level of continuous communication that is difficult to manufacture remotely."

Because her team can work remotely, Khandheria treats voluntary use as one indication that the space is worthwhile. "My goal was to make being together sufficiently useful and enjoyable that the office earns the commute," she says. But ERIA hasn't measured utilization before and after the arrangement or attached a financial ROI figure to the workplace.

The measurement test

Ahmed Ameen, chief operating officer of ET Group, a Toronto-based workplace technology integrator whose services include workspace analytics, works with clients on workplace measurement. "If your goal was to design the floor around collaboration then I really don't care to see attendance numbers," Ameen says. "I want to know if those collaboration spaces are actually being used, and how often, and what type of work people are doing there."

Badge data, he says, "measures if people are showing up but not whether that investment actually improved anything. If people are just sitting there with their headphones on they could be doing that at home." Instead, Ameen says he would identify two or three outcomes the office was specifically supposed to improve and measure those.

That measurement has to start before the investment is made. If Chung were making the phone-booth decision again, he says he would require commute and location data on the actual workforce, utilization data on existing spaces, and direct employee input on what prevents attendance rather than what would merely improve the experience after arrival. “Those are very different questions,” he says, “and the company only asked the second one.”

Companies know what an office project will cost, but before spending the money, they should also know what it’s supposed to change and how they will measure whether it worked. A badge swipe can prove someone entered the building. It still can't prove what the building bought.