Blog 19 min read

Hybrid Work Data: Stop Guessing at Your Office

By Founder & CEO

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HybridHero started in 2018, two years before COVID forced the whole world to rethink the office. On the 10x Your Team podcast with Cam and Otis, I put it bluntly: most of us are making up our hybrid work policy as we go. That is fair enough. Nobody can see across a whole building day to day, so we fill the gap with guesswork.

What you’ll learn
  • What our own platform data shows about the real-estate cost of running an office on guesswork, and what two clients in the same London building got wrong.
  • Why a blanket Tuesday and Thursday rule is the most expensive policy on the table, and what independent occupancy benchmarks say about the empty days.
  • The gap between how full occupiers think their buildings are and how full they actually are, measured across hundreds of millions of square feet.
  • What the peer-reviewed evidence says about mandating office days, including a randomised trial on quit rates and a field study on open-plan offices.
  • Which numbers to track first, in what order, so the next property decision is evidence rather than a hunch.

My full conversation on the 10x Your Team podcast.

Calling that guesswork is not a criticism. HybridHero runs in around 40 countries and 15 languages, and the same gap shows up almost everywhere. Ask a firm which desks got used last Tuesday, or which floor it could give up, and few can answer. Without that hybrid work data the call gets made blind, and the office bill arrives either way.

The numbers that matter

First, what we see in our own platform data

These are figures from HybridHero deployments rather than from a survey. They are the numbers I trust most, because they come from badge check-ins and bookings rather than from asking people what they think they did last week.

~18%real-estate cost cut by our clients once occupancy is clear
1 floorof four dropped by a central-London insurance client
40 · 15countries and languages HybridHero runs in

Then, what the independent research shows

Every figure below was taken from the publisher’s own report, not from a statistics round-up. Where a number is a vendor’s own survey rather than a measured portfolio, it says so.

56% Global office utilisation reached 56 percent, and the gap between what occupiers target and what they actually achieve narrowed from 25 to 18 percentage points.

What it means: even the organisations actively planning their space are 18 points off their own target. That gap is not a people problem, it is a measurement problem. You cannot close a gap you cannot see.

JLL, Global Occupancy Planning Benchmark Report 2026
53% Building utilisation across 303 million square feet of benchmarked office portfolios rose to 53 percent in 2025, up from 38 percent in 2024 and 35 percent in 2023.

What it means: attendance is climbing fast, but roughly half the building is still unused on an average day. Firms that hold space for the busiest hour of the busiest day pay for that hour all year.

CBRE, 2026 Global Workplace & Occupancy Insights
10% to 50% Hybrid work commonly offers space optimisation opportunities that can yield between 10 and 50 percent space savings. In the same research, collaboration spaces were used 64 percent more through the day than desks.

What it means: the saving is real but the range is enormous, and where you land depends entirely on whether you have measured your own pattern. It also says the desk is not the unit to optimise. Meeting and collaboration space works harder than desks do.

CBRE, The Math Behind the Hybrid Workplace
28% More than a quarter of working adults in Great Britain hybrid worked between January and March 2025. Almost half (45 percent) of workers earning £50,000 or more hybrid worked, compared with only 8 percent of those earning under £20,000.

What it means: hybrid is not evenly spread across your workforce, so a single company-wide rule lands very differently on different teams. Any policy set from a headline average will be wrong for most of the building.

Office for National Statistics, Who has access to hybrid working in Great Britain?
65% 65 percent of UK organisations now require employees to be in the workplace a minimum number of days per week or month. 74 percent say they have hybrid working in place, down from 84 percent in 2023.

What it means: mandates are becoming the norm and hybrid is quietly narrowing. That makes it more important, not less, to know whether your required days match the days your people would have come in anyway.

CIPD, Flexible and hybrid working practices in 2025 (July 2025)
One third In a six-month randomised controlled trial of 1,612 employees, hybrid working improved job satisfaction and reduced quit rates by one third. Performance grades and promotions over the next two years showed no difference.

What it means: this is the strongest evidence available that hybrid is not a productivity concession. If you are trading retention for an assumed performance gain, the trial says you are trading something real for something that did not show up.

Bloom, Han & Liang, Nature (2024)

The guessing problem

Two of our clients sit in the same London building and run the exact opposite policy. One wants everyone home unless they request to come in. The other wants everyone in unless they request to stay home. Same building, same city, opposite conclusions.

Neither team is careless. Each made a reasonable call with the information it had. At least one of them is wrong, and without the data neither can tell which. After people, property is the second biggest cost most firms carry, yet few have a clear view of how that space gets used. Without it, even a careful decision is a hunch.

The national picture says the same thing. The ONS found that 28 percent of GB working adults hybrid worked in early 2025, but that headline hides a spread from 45 percent of higher earners down to 8 percent of the lowest paid. Meanwhile CIPD found 65 percent of UK organisations now set a minimum number of office days. Most of those minimums were set without occupancy data behind them.

Why the average lies

The most common fix is a blanket rule. Everyone in on Tuesday and Thursday. It feels tidy. It is also the most expensive option on the table.

If the whole company crowds in on two days, the building sits empty on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. You pay for desks nobody sits at for most of the week, and you carry real estate you do not need.

The benchmark data backs the shape of that curve. JLL puts global office utilisation at 56 percent, still 18 percentage points below what occupiers themselves are targeting, even though 70 percent of employees are now in three to five days a week. CBRE, measuring 303 million square feet of client portfolios, has utilisation at 53 percent. More people are coming in, and the building is still half empty. That only makes sense if attendance is bunched.

Stagger instead. Put accounting in early week and IT mid to late week, so the building works harder across more days. With real numbers behind it, our clients cut around 18 percent of their real-estate cost. CBRE’s own modelling puts the available range at 10 to 50 percent, which is a wide enough spread that guessing where you sit in it is not a strategy.

An American insurance client in premium central London sat on four floors. Their usage data showed they did not need one of them. They dropped it. That decision only happens when you can see occupancy, not when you are guessing.

The water cooler effect, and what you lose remotely

Data is only half the story. Some things never show up in a spreadsheet, and the office still matters for them.

The water cooler effect is real and hard to replicate online. The quick corridor question. The overheard conversation that changes your mind. One of our clients, a US law firm, scheduled its partners and juniors to come in on different days, and sat them on separate floors. Juniors got almost no contact time with partners, and the mentoring stopped.

But here is the part that should give any mandate pause. Putting people in the same building does not automatically produce those conversations. In two field studies at Fortune 500 firms, Bernstein and Turban found that moving to an open-plan office cut face-to-face interaction by roughly 70 percent, while email and instant messaging went up. People sat closer together and talked to each other less.

The same applies to the day itself. Microsoft’s telemetry across its own user base found employees are interrupted every two minutes during core hours, 275 times a day, and that half of all meetings land between 9 to 11am and 1 to 3pm, straight through the best focus hours of the day.

“If you haven’t got the data, you’re guessing.”

Chris Burke, founder of HybridHero

More office days for the sake of it is not the answer. Be deliberate about which days. Deep-focus work like coding or legal reading suits home. Workshopping and new ideas suit the same room. If your schedule keeps the right people apart, you lose the one thing the office is good for.

The cost of getting that wrong is measurable. In a randomised controlled trial of 1,612 employees published in Nature, hybrid working cut quit rates by a third, with no difference in performance grades or promotions over the following two years. Gallup’s tracking points the same way: six in ten remote-capable employees want hybrid, and six in ten of those working exclusively remotely say they are extremely likely to look for a new job if that flexibility is taken away.

How you actually fix it

The fix is one source of truth. Instead of scattered spreadsheets and gut feel, you want occupancy and utilisation in a single system where you can see it.

That is what I built HybridHero to do. Each person can have their own work-from-home policy. Desk booking takes seconds on mobile. People check in and out with a badge, so attendance is tracked rather than assumed. A colour-coded floor plan shows who is in and where they are sitting. You can view by team or by location, set permissions so the right desks go to the right people, and even link attendance to performance so you can see them side by side. That is real workplace analytics, not another guess.

It goes further than desks. HybridHero handles safety cases, like reporting whether a first-aider or fire warden is present on each floor given who has checked in. It covers visitor management too, so the people coming through your building are logged, not a mystery. There is even a new AI module where a manager can say they want their team in on Wednesday and Thursday, and it books everyone in and assigns the desks.

None of this is about forcing people back. Firms are landing on hybrid and nudging required days up, from two to three, then three to four. That is where most teams settle. Make the call with evidence, then adjust as you learn.

What the evidence adds up to

On how full your building actually is

  • Global office utilisation sits at 56 percent, 18 percentage points below what occupiers are targeting themselves (JLL, 2026).
  • Across 303 million square feet of benchmarked portfolios, utilisation reached 53 percent in 2025, up from 38 percent in 2024 (CBRE, 2026).
  • 70 percent of employees are now in the office three to five days a week, yet utilisation is still around half (JLL, 2026).

On what that costs

  • Right-sizing on real utilisation data yields between 10 and 50 percent space savings (CBRE).
  • Collaboration spaces are used 64 percent more through the day than desks, so desk count is the wrong thing to optimise first (CBRE).
  • Our own clients cut around 18 percent of real-estate cost once occupancy is visible, and one dropped a whole floor of four.

On policy and who hybrid actually reaches

  • 28 percent of GB working adults hybrid worked in early 2025, ranging from 45 percent of those earning £50,000 or more down to 8 percent of those earning under £20,000 (ONS).
  • 65 percent of UK organisations require a minimum number of office days, and hybrid provision has fallen from 84 percent of organisations in 2023 to 74 percent in 2025 (CIPD).
  • Among remote-capable employees, 52 percent work hybrid, 26 percent work exclusively remotely and 22 percent are on-site (Gallup).

On whether mandating days works

  • A randomised trial of 1,612 employees found hybrid cut quit rates by a third with no effect on performance grades or promotions (Nature, 2024).
  • Six in ten exclusively remote employees say they are extremely likely to job-hunt if flexibility is removed (Gallup).
  • Moving to open plan cut face-to-face interaction by roughly 70 percent while electronic messaging rose, so proximity alone does not create collaboration (Bernstein & Turban, 2018).
  • Employees are interrupted every two minutes in core hours, and half of all meetings fall in the two best focus windows of the day (Microsoft, 2025).

Get the hybrid work data, make the decision

The empty desks. The floor you could drop. None of it shows until you measure it, and once you can see it the decisions get easy.

If you haven’t got the data, you’re guessing. Get the hybrid work data, make the call, and adjust as you go.

Hybrid work data: common questions

What is hybrid work data?

It is the record of how your workplace gets used. Occupancy and utilisation, who checks in and when, which desks and floors get used, and how attendance lines up with teams and performance. It turns your office policy from a hunch into a decision you can defend.

How much office space can hybrid work data save?

Our clients cut around 18 percent of their real-estate cost once they can see occupancy. One of ours, an insurance firm on four floors in central London, dropped a whole floor because the data showed they did not need it. CBRE’s own modelling puts the available range at 10 to 50 percent, which is why measuring your own pattern matters more than copying someone else’s number.

What hybrid work data should you actually track?

Start with occupancy and desk utilisation by day, then check-in and check-out data so attendance is measured rather than assumed, then a floor-plan view of who sits where. From there, link attendance to teams and performance so you can see them side by side. Track collaboration space separately from desks, because CBRE found it is used 64 percent more through the day.

Does forcing everyone in on the same days help?

Usually not. A fixed Tuesday and Thursday pattern leaves the building empty the rest of the week, so you pay for space nobody uses. It is also worth knowing that a randomised trial of 1,612 employees published in Nature found hybrid cut quit rates by a third with no loss of performance, so the productivity case for a blanket mandate is weaker than most people assume. Staggering teams across more days, guided by the data, works the building harder and protects the in-person time that matters.

How many days a week are people actually in the office?

JLL reports that 70 percent of employees are now in three to five days a week, while global utilisation still sits at 56 percent. In the UK, 28 percent of working adults hybrid worked in early 2025 according to the ONS, and 65 percent of organisations set a minimum number of office days according to CIPD. The averages vary widely by earnings and by role, which is exactly why your own numbers beat any benchmark.

Sources and further reading

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