The office has one job left, and it takes up a quarter of the week

What the research found

Gensler's Global Workplace Survey 2026 is built on responses from 16,459 full-time office workers across 16 countries and 10 industries, all in organisations of 100 people or more.

Employees spend 39 percent of their working week working alone and 27 percent collaborating with others in person. The week itself splits 55 percent in the office, 18 percent at home and 26 percent in third places such as coworking spaces, client sites and travel.

The survey also found that 67 percent of employees hack their workspace in some way to compensate for something the building is not providing, and a quarter resort to do it yourself fixes for ergonomic or environmental problems.

What we see happening

Twenty seven percent is a small number that carries an enormous amount of weight, because it is the only part of the week that a building does better than a kitchen table.

The uncomfortable implication is that most office policy is aimed at the wrong 73 percent. Mandating attendance raises the amount of solo work performed on site. It does very little for the quarter of the week that justifies the commute, because being in the building on the same day as your colleagues is a coordination problem, not a compliance problem.

We see workplace teams starting to measure the right thing. Not attendance, but overlap. Not how many people came in, but whether the people who needed each other were in on the same day. Those are different questions and they produce different policies. An organisation optimising for attendance will fill Tuesdays. An organisation optimising for overlap will make sure the project team, the new joiner and the manager are in together, which is a smaller ask and a much bigger outcome.

The workspace hacking figure deserves attention too. When two thirds of your people are improvising around the building, they are giving you a live list of what the workplace is not delivering. Most organisations never collect it, because the feedback arrives as a cushion on a chair or a coat over a vent rather than as a ticket.

There is a third finding that gets less attention than it deserves. Only 55 percent of the week is spent in the office, 18 percent at home and 26 percent somewhere else entirely: a client site, a coworking desk, a train. The office is not competing with the kitchen table any more. It is competing with everywhere, and a quarter of the working week is already being spent in places the organisation neither owns nor plans for.

That reframes the question workplace teams are usually asked. It is not how do we get people back, because a third place is not a rebellion, it is often the closest desk to the client. The better question is which activities genuinely benefit from the office, and how reliably can we deliver them on the days people are there. An office that fails to deliver on the 27 percent is not competing with home. It is losing to a hotel lobby with better coffee.

What this means for how you run a workplace

If the office earns its keep in that 27 percent, the workplace system should be built around making it easy to plan.

iotspot Team and Co-working turns intention into a shared day. Employees see who from their team is coming in, teams set recurring office days, claim a zone so they sit together, and invite each other for specific dates. Desk, room and parking bookings follow from that plan instead of being made in isolation.

iotspot Insights then closes the loop by showing whether it worked. Which teams actually co-locate, which days genuinely fill, and where crowding pushes people away. Anonymised and aggregated, so the conversation stays about space rather than about individuals.

The honest caveat

This is self-reported data. It tells you how work feels to 16,459 people, not what was measured in their buildings. Studies that measure attendance with sensors consistently find lower numbers than employees report, so treat the 55 percent office figure as perception rather than occupancy. The value here is in the split between solo and collaborative work, which people are well placed to describe.