A recent Global Workplace & Occupancy study by CBRE – a worldwide commercial real estate services company – revealed that organizations are increasingly focusing on workplace experience as a main component of real estate success. They are now using effectiveness, rather than efficiency, as the preferred measure of that success.

But how do you measure something as abstract and ever-changing as workplace experience? How do you calculate the vibes in the office and how productive and energized people feel in the workplace?

Clearly, new metrics are required to capture this vital data. But it is not as easy as conducting an anonymous survey asking employees to rank their workplace experience on a scale of one to ten…

What is Workplace Experience (WEX)? 

Workplace experience is how employees internalize and interpret the interactions they have with their organization’s physical workplace, plus the context underlying those interactions. 

Although it falls under the overarching category of employee experience, workplace experience has different and more specific core components.

Workplace experience starts when people plan a day in the office and ends after they leave. Its core components include:

• Workplace design
  • Architecture 
  • Office layouts
  • Amenities like coffee stations and meditation rooms
• Workplace technology
  • Equipment like desk monitors and meeting room screens 
  • Communication apps like Slack and Teams 
  • Workplace scheduling 
• Workplace culture
  • Leadership communication styles 
  • Shared values and codes of conduct  
  • Psychological safety and openness

Why are workplace experience and employee experience different?

They are often used interchangeably, but they are not quite the same. Workplace experience is location-dependent, while employee experience is not.

While both are perceptions, workplace experience is a perception formed from interacting with a physical workplace. The same is true for employee experience, but it relates to the entire organization. 

For example: 

• Workplace experience: “I had three meetings today, and I couldn’t find a room with the right AV equipment for any of them.”
• Employee experience: “I showed up to my weekly one-on-one with my manager today and he cancelled five minutes before, for the third time this month.”

Workplace experience and employee experience do overlap. If one is bad, the other is likely to be awful too. But it is important to differentiate them because improving each one requires different steps and different teams.

Three things needed to measure workplace experience

Measuring workplace experience is massively challenging at worst and requires a completely new approach at best.

Because workplace experience is highly subjective and contextual—with metrics that are both qualitative and quantitative—workplace leaders will have to reshuffle some established office norms. Organizations have not previously tried to standardize methods of collecting this data. 

It is also difficult to correlate changing perceptions to measurable outcomes (such as productivity and retention) because there are many other variables that could be responsible. 

However, measuring workplace experience is valuable. The data gathered paints a picture of what is working and what is not. And now that the pressure is on for workplaces to be effective instead of just efficient, tying each space to a definitive outcome is fast becoming critical. 

Here are three prerequisites for measuring workplace experience:

1. Cross-departmental collaboration

One single team is not responsible for workplace experience. The multiple teams that are responsible have only started collaborating closely over the last few years. So it is no one’s fault that communication silos have cropped up. It is simply because different teams talk different ‘languages’ (CRE versus HR, for example). 

However, things need to change because the best data in the world is useless if the right people don’t see it. 

Real estate teams are increasingly reporting into the HR team rather than the COO or CFO. Workplace demand managers and heads of workplace experience are a given at many large organizations. So, although cross-functional teamwork is becoming the status quo, organizations should make a conscious effort to tear down silos—even the silos between the ‘facts’ people and the ‘feelings’ people. 

Workplace experience is made up of facts and feelings. 

2. Measuring workplace changes that need to be measured 

Many organizations get trapped in a cycle of measuring something for the sake of measuring. In other words, not having any workplace changes to correlate to the experience they provide. 

Workplace experience is about creating environments that boost team collaboration, productivity, and connection. Successfully measuring workplace experience lies in creating demand for the workplace, analyzing what happened, and adapting the organization’s strategy. 

Categorizing spaces into individual focus or collaborative areas is steadily becoming obsolete. Diverse space types provide better workplace experiences, but it is difficult to figure out which ones to keep and which ones to replace without measuring success. 

Global architecture firm Gensler found that high-performing employees have three times greater access to spaces for relaxing, focused concentration, and confidential conversations than average and poor performers. 

We already know that a great workplace experience drives great performance. But it is up to workplace leaders to experiment with changes that drive better experiences and measure the outcomes. 

3. The right workplace tech stack 

Measuring workplace experience brings together qualitative and quantitative data. So, while some tech is absolutely essential, a broader tech stack is ideal. 

It is also important to note that there are critical non-tech starting points for accurately measuring workplace experience—such as organizational transparency, open communication, and trust in leadership. No piece of tech will be able to help if an organization’s shared values are in the wrong place. 

With that in mind, here are five things to include in a workplace experience tech stack: 

• Space utilization sensors and software to measure how people are using the workplace. For example, HubStar’s space utilization software provides full coverage by combining data from sensors, Wi-Fi signals and badge swipes – no more data blind spots.
• Employee survey platforms to get both quantitative and qualitative data about how employees feel about the physical and digital workplace. Here’s a list of the top 30 options.
• Workplace experience software to help employees plan their day in the office and discover new spaces and amenities. HubStar Connect, for example, showcases events and amenities for employees and schedules everything people need for a productive day in the office.
• Meeting room technology to facilitate effective meetings, wherever participants are dialling in from. Nothing is more annoying than coming into the office for a meeting only to find you cannot share your screen properly. Here’s a list of options from Gartner.
• HR Systems to uncover talent attraction and retention trends. Here’s a list of the best 60 options.

Four Workplace Experience Metrics to Measure

1. Space utilization

Space utilization is a group of metrics that measures how effectively people are using a space. Measuring space utilization over time paints a picture of which spaces are providing a great workplace experience, and which are not. 

Some solid space utilization metrics to start tracking include: 

• Real-time occupancy rates: how effectively people are using spaces by the minute and hour.
• Collaboration space utilization rate: how people use spaces like meeting rooms and informal collaboration areas—plus data on meeting length, and how many attendees are physically and virtually present.
• Peak utilization rate: how close to capacity spaces are on peak days. For most hybrid organizations, this tends to be from Tuesdays to Thursdays. Spaces at full capacity are not likely to provide the optimal workplace experience.
• Weekly utilization patterns: how space usage increases and decreases over a standard week.
• Long-term utilization trends: how use of particular spaces increases or decreases over time (for example, spaces with recent renovations have a 30% higher utilization rate over six months).
• Neighborhood utilization rate: how effectively teams are using spaces assigned to them and whether there is a basis to allocate more space. 

Measuring space utilization helps workplace leaders visualize which spaces have the best workplace experiences and which ones need improvements. But data should always be interpreted in the context of other events, like changes in hybrid work policies, renovations, new amenities, and changes in portfolio size.

In this way, it is possible to correlate the cause (a change to the workplace) and effect (more or fewer people enjoying the experience the space provides).

2. Employee workplace survey scores

Surveys are a fantastic way to understand how workplace experience is performing and also obtain actionable feedback. Comparing the scores over time is one way of measuring workplace experience. 

However, it is not so simple. Several factors may come together to make such surveys completely ineffective before the survey questions are even drafted. These include: 

• Workplace culture: unless people feel that the organization’s culture welcomes constructive criticism, they may not give honest responses.
• Degree of trust in leadership: An organization’s leadership needs to have a history of acting on employee feedback and transparently explaining why certain feedback won’t be actioned on. If not, employees may see surveys as a box-ticking exercise and a total waste of time.
• Response bias: This is a commonly observed phenomenon where people give the answers they think the asker is looking for, instead of what they actually think. This will render the entire survey ineffective and may provide misleading data.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to fix any of the above, especially if culture and trust in leadership have been problematic for years. 

That’s why it is critical to analyze survey data in conjunction with other metrics, such as space utilization. For instance, if survey feedback overwhelmingly states employees want more meeting rooms, but meeting room utilization never goes over 50%, something else is going on. 

However, steps can be taken to nudge employees into giving honest feedback that helps to measure workplace experience. Here are a few: 

• Ask both open and close-ended questions 
• Be mindful of the wording of questions
• Pilot the survey with a small group of employees 
• Share previous workplace changes based on employee feedback with the entire organization.

3. Employee Net Promoter Scores (NPS) vs. Workplace Changes 

Employee NPS is measured through collecting responses to the question “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely would you be to recommend [the company] as a place to work?” 

Notice the inclusion of the word “place”. While employee NPS reflects overall employee experience rather than workplace experience specifically, there is a lot of overlap. People who would not recommend their company as a place to work probably aren’t having a great time in the office either. 

More likely than not, many organizations are already measuring this. Disengagement and attrition costs mid-sized organizations up to $355 million per year, with lack of workplace flexibility listed as a top disengagement driver. 

The standard way to calculate employee NPS is to subtract the percentage of detractors (who rank the company as 6 or less) from the percentage of promoters (who rank the company as 9 or 10). 

If an organization sends out NPS surveys once every six months, it should compare space utilization trends with changes in the score at the beginning and end of each six-month period. For example, if the NPS score jumps up a few points while utilization trends in meeting rooms increase by 30%, it indicates an improvement in workplace experience. 

Any kind of workplace changes should also be included in this comparison. If the score goes up after implementing quarterly all-hands events, for example, it will confirm a measurable improvement in workplace experience. This shouldn’t come as a surprise either—one Harvard paper found that quarterly in-person events increased employee communications by 113%.

4. Employee retention rate 

It has already been proven that workplace aesthetics drive job choice. Making the jump from that to workplace experience driving retention is not a big leap.

By comparing changes in workplace policies and/or design to retention rate, organizations can start to measure the impact of workplace experience on how long their staff decide to stick around. 

Retention rate is calculated by dividing the number of employees at the end of a set time period by the number of employees at the beginning of that time period, then multiplying that by 100. 

Changing or implementing hybrid work policies, renovating the office, or rolling out new layouts like team neighborhoods can improve (or completely ruin) how people feel about an organization—making them more or less likely to accept another job offer.

By comparing retention rates before and after workplace changes over longer periods of time, it is possible to gain an insight into how those changes are impacting workplace experience.

However, retention rates are not an airtight metric for workplace experience because they lag behind any changes that are made. Employees need time to discover and adapt to new spaces and policies. Plus, decisions to stay or go are often influenced by external factors like market trends or personal circumstances.

But with 54% of organizations surveyed by CBRE listing talent attraction and retention as a reason for supporting hybrid work, retention rate vs. workplace experience should definitely be measured. Even with a time lag and lots of other variables impacting measurement accuracy, it is still worth doing.

Like all the other metrics here, it is essential to look at retention rate alongside other workplace experience metrics, such as surveys and space utilization rates. If an organization sees a retention dip despite an office redesign—yet surveys show employees feel more engaged—the workplace changes might not be the issue at all … something else could be in play.