Office occupancy 2025: Why your office feels empty (and what to do about it)
- Morgan Bush
- 19 hours ago
- 2 min read
Even after three years of hybrid working, most offices still feel quiet. Office occupancy 2025 data shows there are the same desks, the same lights, the same smell of coffee - but fewer people.
Occupancy rates are slowly climbing, yet the energy isn’t. The question for most leaders isn’t “How do we get people back?” It’s “Why would they want to come?”
The real problem isn’t hybrid work. It’s disconnection.
Hybrid isn’t going anywhere. It’s not the enemy of culture, it’s the new reality of it. People still want to be together - they just don’t want to waste their time being together for no reason.
When the office offers nothing different from home, it becomes a commute without a cause. But when the space helps people think better, connect faster, or feel part of something, they’ll choose it again.
Mid-week is the only time the office feels alive.
Data from Remit Consulting shows average office occupancy across the UK at around 38%. On Tuesdays, it’s busier. On Fridays, it’s almost empty.
That pattern tells you everything: the office isn’t a constant anymore, it’s an event. The companies who understand this design around it - treating the office as a moment worth showing up for, not a mandate.
The office is now competing for attention.
The real competitor isn’t another employer - it’s the sofa, the café, the co-working space with better coffee and no broken HDMI cable.
If you want people back, your office has to earn their attention. That doesn’t mean slides or beanbags. It means daylight, acoustics, warmth, and technology that simply works. It means an experience that makes people feel better after a day there than when they arrived.
Measure what matters.
Counting heads doesn’t tell you if your space is working. The real measure is what happens when people are in it. Do teams make faster decisions? Do people feel connected? Do new ideas actually surface?
That’s what a workplace is supposed to enable. When you focus on outcomes instead of attendance, design becomes a strategic investment - not an overhead.
A 2024 Gensler survey found that employees in high-performing workplaces are 2.5× more likely to describe their organisation as innovative. That’s the real impact of better space design.
The goal isn’t full rooms. It’s full energy.
An office that people choose is one that reflects how they actually work today: focused, flexible, and social in bursts. It’s not about filling space. It’s about creating flow—places to think deeply, meet freely, or pause between moments.
When you design for how work feels, not just how it looks, people stop needing to be told to come in. They simply want to. Read our Work guide to see how design drives that shift.
Make work feel better.
At Zentura, we believe a great office doesn’t pull people in—it draws them together. If your space feels half-alive, it’s probably not because people stopped caring. It’s because the office stopped earning their time.
We help clients change that.
