Experience is the new workplace KPI

The organisations that start treating experience as a key performance indicator, rather than a nice-to-have, will be the ones that understand what their workplace is actually for, writes Robbie Robertson.

Here is a number that should trouble anyone responsible for a workplace. In Gensler’s 2026 Global Workplace Survey, a study of 16,459 office workers across 16 countries, 65 per cent said they use meeting rooms to do individual focus work because there is nowhere quiet to go; 64 per cent take calls in hallways, and 43 per cent have cancelled a meeting outright because no room was available. Two-thirds report "hacking" their workspace to compensate for its shortcomings, and one in four have resorted to do-it-yourself fixes for basics like ergonomics, temperature, or a little visual privacy.

That is not a facilities problem. It is a measurement problem.

For most of the last three decades, organisations measured the workplace the way they measured a warehouse: cost per square foot, desks per floor, utilisation rates, occupancy sensors counting heads. The logic was that space is expensive, so it should be efficient. Those metrics were never wrong, exactly. They were answering a question that no longer decides anything. When attendance was assumed, efficiency was the game. Now that people have a say in whether they come in at all, the only question that matters is whether the workplace is good enough to be worth choosing. That is not an efficient question. It is an experience.

The organisations I speak with across Asia Pacific and the Middle East are not asking how to fit more people into less space. They are asking a harder set of questions: How do we make sure our teams keep driving value? And underneath that, the sharper question: why do our people come in at all, and what do they get when they do?

Experience is a business metric, not a soft edge. For years, experience has been treated as the nice-to-have of workplace strategy: hard to measure, first to be cut. That framing is changing. A growing number of organisations are recognising that ignoring experience has become a liability in its own right. Experience is not the decoration around the real estate decision. It is the economic and social return on it. A workplace that people choose, rather than tolerate, does measurable work: it pulls talent through the door, it lifts the quality of collaboration, it shortens the distance between hiring someone and getting the best of them. Those are business outcomes, and they can be measured. The question is whether leaders are measuring them, or still counting desks.

Start with talent, because that is where the pressure is sharpest. Across our region, the competition for skilled people is intense and uneven. Singapore, the Gulf, India’s global capability centres and Australia’s major cities are all drawing from overlapping pools. People now weigh where they work as carefully as who they work for. A commute that buys them a bank of empty desks and a tired coffee machine is a commute they will not make twice. The workplace has become part of the employee value proposition, whether HR intended it to be or not. Experience is what decides whether that proposition reads as an asset or an apology.

Then there is the work itself. Engagement is not a mood. It is a discretionary effort: the difference between people who do the job and people who bring something to it. Environments shape that difference more than we like to admit. Whether someone can find a room to think, whether a team can gather without booking three days ahead, whether the technology in the space helps them or humiliates them: these are experience questions, and they show up in output.

Gensler’s Global Workplace research has consistently found that the highest-performing organisations are the ones whose spaces support a genuine variety of work, not a single default mode. Our 2026 survey found that the average employee’s week splits across at least five distinct modes: roughly 40 per cent working alone, 27 per cent collaborating in person, 13 per cent virtually, and the rest learning and connecting with others. No single mode is the default. A workplace built around one is mismatched to how people actually spend their time. Workers are more likely to rate their workplace effective for learning when specific design elements are present, including manageable noise levels, flexible furniture, up-to-date technology, and spaces that support both focused work and rest.

The real shift is in what we design around. For a long time, we designed around efficiency and left people to adapt. The better move is to design around human outcomes and let efficiency follow. That means starting with what we want people to be able to feel and do, then building the space and the technology to deliver it. And it means technology in service of the human experience, not surveillance of it. A sensor that tells you a floor is 40 per cent occupied tells you nothing about whether that 40 per cent had a good day. Experience design fills that gap.

Done properly, it also designs for everyone. A workplace measured by experience has to account for people who move through it differently, work differently and belong differently. Inclusion stops being a separate programme and becomes a property of a well-made place. That is not a compliance win. It is a performance one.

None of this means discarding the old metrics. Cost and utilisation still matter. But they are inputs, not outcomes. The outcome is whether a workplace makes an organisation more attractive, more productive and more human. For decades we could not measure that, so we measured what was easy instead. We can measure it now.

The organisations that start treating experience as a key performance indicator, rather than a nice-to-have, will be the ones that understand what their workplace is actually for. Culture, after all, does not have an algorithm. Neither does a workplace worth coming back to.

Robbie Robertson is the regional digital experience design practice area leader in Australia, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East at Gensler.

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