The office is getting better. Home is still winning.

What the research found

The Leesman Index, which measures how well a workplace supports the activities people actually do there, rose from 64.3 in 2019 to 69.5 in 2024. That is real progress after a difficult few years.

The home working score sits at 79.5. A ten point gap, in favour of the kitchen table.

Underneath the headline, the detail is specific. Eighty nine percent of employees rate individual focused work as important to their role, 74 percent planned meetings and 52 percent informal unplanned meetings. Yet only 35 percent are satisfied with noise levels, 33 percent with people moving past their workstation, and 40 percent with the quiet rooms available to them.

What we see happening

The gap is not really about the office versus the home. It is about focus.

Look at what employees say matters most: individual focused work, at 89 percent, ahead of every form of collaboration. Then look at what the office scores worst on: noise, interruption and the availability of somewhere quiet. The office is losing on the activity people rate highest, and it is losing it to a spare bedroom.

This is the quiet contradiction inside most return to office programmes. The stated purpose is collaboration. The practical effect is asking people to do their concentrated work in the least suitable place available to them. Employees are not resisting the office. They are protecting their ability to think.

The industry response is visible in the space types being added everywhere: phone booths, focus rooms and small meeting rooms are the fastest growing categories in corporate portfolios. That is the right instinct. What is usually missing is the evidence to size it. Most organisations are converting space based on a request queue and a hunch, which is how you end up with six phone booths on the floor that did not need them.

We expect the successful workplaces of the next few years to be defined less by how much collaboration space they offer and more by how credibly they protect focus. Getting that right is a measurement problem before it is a design problem.

The trend line is encouraging and should not be dismissed. Moving the index from 64.3 to 69.5 in five years represents a great deal of genuine work by workplace teams across the industry. But the home score has stayed high, and that is the comparison employees make every morning when they decide whether the journey is worth it. Closing a ten point gap does not require the office to be pleasant. It requires the office to be better than the alternative at something specific.

Our reading is that the something specific is not the coffee, the design or the events programme. It is the ability to switch, within the same building and the same hour, between concentrated work and unplanned contact with colleagues. Home does the first perfectly and the second not at all. That is the only structural advantage an office has left, and it is squandered whenever there is nowhere quiet to go.

What this means for how you run a workplace

The question to answer is not whether people want quiet space. Leesman has answered that. The question is where, how much, and at which hours.

Room sensors and people count sensors feeding iotspot Insights show what actually happens inside a space rather than what was reserved: how many people, for how long, and whether your eight person room is hosting two person calls. That is the evidence for converting rooms rather than adding them.

iotspot Room Booking then makes the resulting space findable, with availability visible on lobby screens and displays outside each room, filtering by capacity and type, and automatic release when a booking goes unused so a forgotten meeting does not hold a focus room for an hour.

And because noise and air are experienced together, iotspot Smart Climate gives each of those spaces a measurable condition score, so a quiet room that nobody uses can be diagnosed rather than guessed at.

The honest caveat

Leesman's dataset is large and long running, which is its strength, but the figures quoted here come from published summaries that do not state a sample size for each individual statistic. It is also self-reported satisfaction rather than measured behaviour. Read it as an accurate account of how the workplace feels to the people in it, and pair it with occupancy measurement before you move a wall.