It’s time to think seriously about workplace experience management.
Flexible, ever-changing, and frankly chaotic workplaces are now the status quo. Depending on the reports you check, up to 87 percent of companies in the UK alone support some kind of hybrid work. Others are trying (with great difficulty) to convince employees to step back into the office.
The biggest issue is businesses failing to deliver the experience employees actually need. Global employee engagement is still struggling. Gallup reports that only 32 percent of US employees are engaged, and worldwide engagement sits at 21 percent, translating to roughly $438 billion in lost productivity in 2024 alone. Sometimes, employees are physically clocking in, but they’re mentally clocking out.
That’s why the right approach to workplace experience management is so important. Aligning physical space, digital systems, leadership, and feedback can counteract attrition, eliminate resource waste, and reimagine what the workplace actually is, now, and in the future.
What is Workplace Experience Management?
The workplace has always been more than desks and whiteboards. But now, the cracks are really showing. Half of your employees don’t want to be there at all. The other half isn’t sure why they came in. That’s what makes workplace experience management so crucial.
It’s a way of designing a work environment that makes people want to show up, and not just because they’re told to.
So what are we really talking about?
At its core, workplace experience management is the discipline of shaping your physical space, your tech stack, your cultural signals, and your feedback loops, all in service of improving work for your people.
Here’s how the thinking has evolved:
- First, it was logistics. Room bookings. Desk layouts. Floor plans.
- Then came culture. Tools to capture engagement, sentiment, and even well-being.
- Now we’re in the intelligence phase. Real-time dashboards. Predictive tools. Adaptive environments that shift with usage patterns.
It’s not only one department’s job anymore. HR, IT, Real Estate, and Facilities are all involved now, and when they’re not aligned, it shows.
The Pillars Things That Matter
Workforce experience management (or WXM), encompasses every aspect of an employee’s experience within an organization. That breaks down into a few key pillars:
- Space: Not “how many seats do we have,” but how those seats feel. Are there places to focus? Places to gather? Can people move between modes of work without friction or awkwardness?
- Technology: If your desk booking system makes people want to give up, it’s failing. The same goes for signage, apps, wayfinding, and even Wi-Fi. The best digital workplace experience tools disappear; they work so cleanly that no one notices them.
- Culture: This is the hard one. Culture affects whether people feel safe speaking up, whether hybrid rules are actually enforced fairly, and whether managers walk the walk. That’s part of workplace experience management, too.
- Wellbeing and Engagement: Are people actually invested in their work? How do you know? Are they healthy, comfortable, confident, and connected? Are they overwhelmed by stress and uncertainty?
- Feedback: Forget the once-a-year survey. You need real-time signals from usage data, sentiment checks, and even Slack channel sentiment. When you get that data, you have to do something with it.
The Technology Stack For Workplace Experience Management
Building a strong workplace experience takes a lot more than comfy furniture these days. No matter your intent, workplace experience management lives or dies on the tools you choose to track, align, and manage everything efficiently. Today, the WXM software stack includes:
1. Smart Booking Tools (Desk + Room)
The booking system is your first line of user friction, or delight. If it takes more than a few clicks, people will stop using it. That’s why mobile-first tools, calendar integration, and clear availability feedback are mandatory.
Take Deskbird or Robin, for instance. These platforms let employees reserve desks or rooms via mobile or desktop. Some companies, like Microsoft, are totally reshaping how team members book spaces. Microsoft Places, with Copilot, actually suggests the best bookings for employees based on their tasks, schedule, and the colleagues that might be nearby.
Tools like this make it easier to allocate resources and avoid double-booking, but they also guide staff through making the most of what’s available to them.
2. IoT Sensors & Workplace Analytics
If your facilities team looks confused about why a floor is crowded on Tuesdays or empty on Fridays, you know you’re missing something.
Sensors installed in rooms and common areas collect occupancy, CO₂, noise, and temperature data. Add analytics tools, and you begin to understand patterns: which zones need more cleaning? Where do people cluster? When is lighting being wasted?
Smart sensors are feed points for automation. Used right, energy systems can adapt in real time, and tech can shut down when it’s not in use. You save money, give employees what they need, and meet sustainability goals.
3. Unified Workplace Experience Platforms
WXM platforms are where booking, signage, analytics, and communication merge. Platforms like Appspace and OfficeSpace Communities let you manage multiple features from a shared hub.
Costco used Appspace to improve signage and announcements across locations. That drove consistency and reduced errors from mixed messages. Meanwhile, OfficeSpace helped Quantum Health enforce shift-based access, reduce crowding, and improve handover efficiency.
Unified tools also tie into scheduling systems or HR databases, so you can define who can book what, when, and where.
4. AI-Enhanced Tools & Smart Automation
This is the future, but it’s also practical today.
AI-driven HVAC systems respond to presence sensors. Coaching bots can check in with teams or managers about well-being. Chat-based assistants can answer questions like “Where is my meeting room?” or “What’s today’s RSVP?”
If implemented tightly, these tools don’t pierce the experience; they enhance it. They become part of the environment that knows what people need before they ask.
5. UC Monitoring & Support Tools
All that tech is only useful if meetings actually happen. When Zoom glitches or Teams slows down, value dissolves. Reliable unified communications, voice, meetings, and messaging are also part of the digital workplace experience.
Platforms like VOSS offer real-time monitoring for Teams and Zoom performance. IT teams can then fix issues before users chatter about slowness. That reliability builds trust in the systems and trust in the experience.
Challenges in Workplace Experience Management
We all know it. Running a hybrid workplace is hard.
You want to know why so many “return-to-office” strategies fell flat? Because they treated attendance as the goal, not experience. Workplace experience management is what bridges that gap, but doing it right means tackling a few problems head-on.
1. Empty Desks, Full Costs
If you’re paying to heat, clean, and maintain a floor that’s half-used on a Tuesday, you’re wasting money. A lot of companies are sitting on underutilized real estate and don’t even know it. Others are too nervous to touch the space in case people suddenly come back. They won’t. At least not the way they used to.
Yet many still lack the tools to make data-led decisions. If you’re not tracking workplace utilization daily, how do you know what you really need?
2. Tech That Gets in the Way
If your digital workplace experience depends on a login that breaks twice a week or signage that confuses more than it clarifies, you’re setting yourself up to fail.
Too many companies install tech for tech’s sake. But real workplace tools need to work in the background; desk booking that syncs with calendars, sensors that don’t feel invasive, signage that doesn’t need an instruction manual.
3. Cultural Whiplash
One day, it’s “work from anywhere.” The next, it’s three days in the office, two days out. Then leadership disappears to work remotely themselves. This inconsistency? It’s killing trust.
Workplace experience management is as much about policy follow-through as it is about layout. If managers don’t model the behavior they ask for, employees notice. And resent it.
4. Measuring What Actually Matters
A yearly engagement survey gives you very little. If the only data you’re collecting is “how satisfied are you at work?” you’re ten steps behind.
You need real-time inputs:
- Desk and room usage
- Environmental conditions
- Sentiment signals (even Slack activity can tell you something)
- Manager check-ins that go beyond HR checkboxes
And even when you have all that? You need someone responsible for acting on it.
Benefits of Effective Workplace Experience Management
Done well, workplace experience management delivers in occupancy, productivity, retention, and real estate efficiency. When you stop managing space like pins on a board and start managing it like a living system, the results stack up fast.
1. Better Space Utilization (And Fewer Empty Chairs)
Real estate is expensive. In London or New York, you’re looking at upwards of £1,200/$1,500 per square metre per year. Yet, most companies still operate below 50 percent desk usage on hybrid days.
The fix? Live data. Smart booking. And fewer assumptions.
Toyota Connected EU, for example, deployed Skedda to implement a flexible desk and room booking model. That move alone helped them ditch static seating plans and reclaim unused zones, without overwhelming admin teams. Staff could find what they needed when they needed it, and floor plans adjusted dynamically based on demand.
2. Operational Cost Savings: Energy, Space, and Time
You can’t fix what you can’t see. When Facilities and IT teams fly blind, wasted heating, lighting, and cooling costs become the norm.
Occupancy sensors and IoT-driven systems can cut building energy consumption by up to 30 percent, especially when paired with AI-powered HVAC or lighting systems that respond in real-time to usage patterns.
Quantum Health saved $13.5 million in renovations with OfficeSpace, just by getting deeper insights into the kind of spaces they actually needed. They also reduced energy demand and improved the flow of the workspace for clinical staff.
3. Smoother Onboarding and Collaboration
First impressions count, especially in a hybrid world where people don’t know where to sit, who’s in today, or how to book a room without starting a Slack thread.
Iterable used Envoy to overhaul their new-joiner onboarding experience. With automated booking, digital wayfinding, and pre-scheduled “welcome days,” they took the guesswork out of the first-week experience. That reduced onboarding confusion and gave managers more face time with new team members, without the chaos.
Once people are “embedded in the workplace,” better workplace experience management helps keep them connected and efficient. One study found 40 percent of employees in the office waste half an hour a day looking for a meeting space. Booking tools fix that.
4. Clearer Communication at Scale
Keeping the workforce connected and aligned is hard enough in general. It’s even harder when everyone is moving between different spaces, jumping between in-office and remote work.
Costco tackled the age-old “nobody told me” problem by rolling out Appspace to connect frontline and office teams through digital signage and announcements. The impact? Faster cascade of information across sites, better message consistency, and stronger frontline alignment.
It’s not glamorous, but when employees aren’t left guessing, they make fewer mistakes and feel more connected to the business.
5. Higher Retention, Better Morale
There’s no “engagement button,” but there is a difference between teams that feel considered and those that feel like an afterthought.
At Indiana University, the rollout of Deskbird brought measurable change to how students and staff used space. Bookings went up. Complaints went down. Shared zones saw higher throughput and fewer conflicts.
It’s simple: if people can find a space to do what they came in to do, and that space feels actually made for them, they’ll keep coming back.
6. Better Insights to Drive Real Decisions
Some dashboards look good. Some talk to you. The difference? One is decoration. The other empowers action.
At athenahealth, Robinpowered wasn’t just a desk booking tool. Early in their rollout, they combined badge-based check-ins (covering one-quarter of all desk usage) with app-based bookings. That gave them rich, real-time visibility into actual occupancy across teams, not hypothetical templates or headcounts.
That insight unlocked smarter space planning and decisions driven by real usage patterns. Insights like these also give you ROI ammunition. Want to scale back space? Add hybrid zones? Present clear metrics showing who’s using what and why.
Best Practices for High-Impact Workplace Experience Management
There’s no template for this. Every office is different, and every company has its own blend of politics, legacy tech, and space quirks. But some patterns do emerge.
The best workplace experience management strategies don’t start with technology. They’re built on clarity into how people work, move, and collaborate.
1. Don’t Go It Alone: Align HR, CRE, IT, and Facilities Early
If IT buys the platform, HR writes the policy, and Facilities is left guessing, you’re already off course. This is a cross-functional project, and misalignment shows up fast. Desk booking gets botched. Managers ignore the process. Teams revert to spreadsheets or Slack messages.
Set up a working group at the start, and don’t just give them visibility, give them shared ownership. Ask for their feedback, and use it actually to make decisions.
2. Pilot First. Fix Fast. Then Scale.
Start with one floor, one building, or one team. See how people use the tools. Track what breaks. Look for friction in real-world workflows, not theoretical edge cases.
Do people feel anxious about sensors in their office space, or happy that you’re tracking their wellbeing? Do your employees love getting AI-powered suggestions on when they should come into the office, or do they see it as micromanaging? Find out before you continue the rollout.
3. Make Everything Mobile First
People don’t book desks from a laptop in the kitchen. They do it while commuting. Or as they’re walking into the building. Or while grabbing coffee.
Any booking system, signage platform, or feedback tool that doesn’t have a clean mobile experience will be ignored. If you really want to boost your chances of adoption, don’t underestimate integrations either. Direct integration between desk booking tools, WEM applications, and even collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams makes a big difference.
4. Listen Continuously and Act on It
One of the biggest failures in workplace experience management is gathering feedback and then doing nothing with it. A monthly email asking “how was your experience today?” isn’t enough. Build in feedback mechanisms at key moments: after a meeting, after a desk booking, after a visit to the office. Use check-in data, space analytics, and even ticketing systems to surface patterns.
Then show your teams that changes are being made based on what they said. Otherwise, they’ll stop talking. In other words, listen, but also close the loop.
5. Support the Managers, They Make or Break the System
Managers are the real distribution layer for culture. They answer questions like “Do I have to come in today?” and “Why is this system so complicated?”
If they’re confused or disengaged, adoption disappears
Train managers early. Arm them with clarity. Give them real data so they can help their teams adjust. A good system supports managers, not just top-down policy owners.
Choosing the Right Tools for Workplace Experience Management
Most of the platforms in this space look pretty similar in a demo. Everyone promises better space usage, stronger collaboration, and smarter analytics. But when the rollout hits real workflows—when bookings overlap, Teams lags, or nobody checks the signage—the differences show.
Here’s how to choose tools that work:
- Define outcomes first: Start with the problems. Is the goal to reduce square footage? Improve space utilisation? Fix the “what’s the policy today?” confusion? Raise in-office attendance? Lower attrition? Decide on KPIs that tie to real impact, like employee satisfaction rates, desk/room utilization, or attendance trends.
- Prioritize integrations: Always choose systems that connect to the tools you already use – scheduling and staffing solutions, calendar apps, collaboration tools, meeting systems, signage, visitor management, etc.
- Test with real users: Pilots should mimic real usage, not ideal conditions. Let employees book desks, cancel meetings, miss their check-ins, and forget to follow policy. That’s where the friction shows up. Watch how quickly help desk tickets spike. Pay attention to no-shows. Track how many manual overrides Facilities ends up doing.
Also, ask: Who owns success? Will they offer onboarding help? A success manager? Templates? Integration support? If the answer is “we have a help centre,” be honest about whether that’s enough for your team.
Trends in Workplace Experience Management
Workplace strategy used to change slowly. Every five years, you’d talk about knocking down a wall or installing better lights. Now? It changes every five months.
Hybrid work, AI tools, sustainability targets, shifting employee expectations, it’s all converging. The organizations leading in workplace experience management aren’t guessing where the future is headed. They’re already adapting to it.
Get ready for:
- Smarter Sensors + AI: Occupancy sensors have been around for a while. What’s changing now is what you can do with that data. AI-powered systems are learning when floors are busiest, when HVAC use can be throttled back, and how to adapt atmospheres for employee well-being.
- Digital twins: Digital twins, virtual models of your physical workspace, are starting to show up in corporate real estate teams. These models simulate usage, stress-test design changes, and help teams plan reconfigurations before any physical changes are made.
- Workplace-as-a-Service (WaaS): We’re starting to see IT’s service desk model migrate to the office itself. Think: plug-and-play meeting rooms, space usage billed per team, and real-time provisioning of AV support or furniture setups.
- AI “Colleagues” and Digital Nudges: AI isn’t behind the scenes anymore. It’s showing up in Teams as nudges: “Looks like your team is in today. Do you want to book a pod together?” Or surfacing trends like: “Team engagement dips after long desk days. Suggest a hybrid day next week?”
- Experience Meets ESG: Employee experience used to be separate from ESG goals. That’s changing. Air quality, light exposure, mental well-being, and energy usage are now all part of the same conversation. If your workplace experience strategy isn’t tied to your sustainability metrics yet, it probably will be by the end of the year.
Convergence between teams is happening, too. The most advanced orgs aren’t running three separate strategies for workplace tech, space, and people. They’re building unified teams, budgets, and success metrics.
Workplace Experience Management: Experience is Strategy
The workplace used to be an address. Now it’s an ecosystem of space, software, systems, and people. Like any ecosystem, it thrives when the parts work together.
That’s what workplace experience management is really about: creating an environment where people do their best work, wherever they happen to be.
When the desks are easy to book, the room AV just works, and managers model clarity instead of confusion, that’s when people thrive. When spaces are data-driven, automated, and continuously improved, the business benefits follow. Better utilization, lower attrition, faster onboarding, and fewer service tickets.
You’re missing the bigger picture if you’re still seeing workplace experience as a Facilities problem or an HR project. This is the future of work – done right.
