Workplace leaders across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa face a challenge that cannot be solved by simply deciding how many days employees should spend in the office.
Organizations are trying to create workplaces people want to use while improving the performance of expensive real estate portfolios. At the same time, leaders must navigate different employment practices, regulatory environments, cultural expectations, and economic pressures across markets.
That makes workplace strategy in EMEA fundamentally a balancing act.
Employees increasingly expect flexibility and a workplace experience that justifies the commute. Corporate real estate (CRE) and facilities teams need to control costs and make better use of space. Business leaders want collaboration, productivity, and stronger organizational culture. HR teams must consider employee expectations and local employment requirements. IT needs to support all of it securely and at scale.
The tension between employer expectations and actual workplace behavior illustrates the challenge ‘s. 2025 European Office Occupier Sentiment Survey found that 54% of surveyed companies wanted employees in the office three or more days per week, but only 42% were achieving that attendance level.
The answer is unlikely to be one universal workplace policy. Instead, organizations need a strategy that establishes consistent goals while giving individual markets enough flexibility to respond to local realities.
Key takeaways
- EMEA workplace strategy requires regional consistency with local flexibility. Organizations need shared goals for employee experience, performance, governance, and portfolio efficiency while allowing individual markets to respond to local regulations and working cultures
- Office attendance alone is not a measure of workplace performance. Leaders need to understand how, when, and why employees use workplaces, including demand by location, day, and space type
- Connected workplace data supports better decisions. Bringing together utilization, reservations, facilities, asset, and real estate data can reveal opportunities to improve space mix, services, employee experience, and portfolio performance
- Governance should be built into workplace strategy from the start. As organizations use more workplace data and AI, CRE, facilities, HR, IT, security, legal, and data protection teams need a shared approach to privacy, compliance, and responsible data use
- Workplace strategy should continuously evolve. Employee expectations, regulations, business priorities, technology, and portfolio requirements change, making ongoing measurement and adjustment more effective than relying on a fixed workplace model
A regional workplace strategy has to account for local differences
EMEA may be treated as one business region, but from a workplace perspective, it is anything but uniform.
An organization’s offices in London, Paris, Dubai, Berlin, Johannesburg, and Madrid can face very different working patterns and employee expectations. They may also operate under different regulatory frameworks, lease structures, commuting patterns, labor markets, and cultural attitudes toward office attendance.
Even within the European Union, there are significant differences in how organizations support distributed work. It was reported that 52.9% of EU enterprises with at least 10 employees conducted remote meetings in 2024, but the figure ranged from 84.5% in Finland and 79.1% in Sweden to 32.4% in Bulgaria and 34.9% in Romania.
Those differences make rigid mandates difficult to implement consistently.
Even something as straightforward as requiring employees to work from an office a certain number of days each week can have different implications from one market to another. Employees with long metropolitan commutes may experience attendance requirements differently from employees living close to a regional hub. A headquarters building designed around collaboration can perform very differently from a satellite office where employees struggle to find the colleagues they came to see.
For workplace leaders, the objective therefore shifts from standardizing attendance to standardizing outcomes.
An organization can establish common objectives around collaboration, employee experience, space efficiency, compliance, and cost while allowing teams and locations to determine how those objectives are best achieved.
That creates a more resilient regional strategy than attempting to make every EMEA workplace operate in exactly the same way.
Employee expectations have changed the value proposition of the office
The office now competes with other places where employees know they can work effectively.
That changes what employees expect when they make the trip.
Access to a desk is no longer enough. Employees need confidence that the workplace will help them accomplish something they could not achieve as easily elsewhere. That might mean meeting with a project team, collaborating informally with colleagues, accessing specialist facilities, mentoring new employees, or simply working in an environment better suited to a particular task.
Collaboration remains a particularly important part of that value proposition. In its 2026 Global Workplace & Occupancy Insights, reports that collaborating with colleagues is the most important reason employees come into the office, cited by 68% of respondents.
The workplace experience begins before an employee arrives.
Can they determine when their colleagues will be there? Can they reserve the right type of workspace? Will they know where to go when they arrive? Is there enough appropriate space for collaborative and focused work? Can they quickly report an issue if something is not working?
When these basic interactions create friction, employees begin questioning the value of the commute.
That creates an important distinction for workplace leaders; attendance is not the same as engagement.
A busy office does not necessarily mean an effective workplace. Employees can technically comply with an attendance policy while spending much of the day in virtual meetings or struggling to find appropriate space.
The more useful question is whether the workplace creates measurable value when employees are there.
Regulation adds another layer of complexity
Workplace strategy also sits within a changing regulatory environment.
Across EMEA, organizations must consider national employment laws alongside regional rules governing areas such as employee privacy, data protection, health and safety, accessibility, sustainability, and emerging technologies.
That matters as workplaces become more data-driven.
Organizations can now collect information from room and desk bookings, access systems, sensors, maintenance platforms, employee applications, and other workplace technologies. Combined appropriately, those data sources can provide a much clearer picture of how buildings operate.
But collecting data because it is technically possible is different from collecting it because there is a clear business need.
Under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, organizations have responsibilities governing how personal data is processed. guidance emphasizes requirements around the collection, storage, and management of personal data, including the roles organizations play as data controllers and processors.
The implications become particularly relevant when workplace technology begins to resemble employee monitoring notes that increasingly systematic and detailed monitoring can create greater risks to privacy and data protection rights, including challenges involving the GDPR principles of data minimization and transparency. [eurofound.europa.eu]
Workplace leaders need to understand what information is being collected, why it is required, how long it is retained, who can access it, and how it contributes to workplace decisions.
The same consideration becomes increasingly important as organizations introduce AI into workplace and business processes.
Rather than treating compliance as a final checkpoint after a workplace program has been designed, organizations can incorporate governance into their strategy from the beginning.
That means bringing CRE, facilities, HR, IT, security, legal, and data protection stakeholders into the conversation early enough to shape how workplace technology and policies are implemented.
Performance requires more than measuring office attendance
The pressure to demonstrate workplace performance has also increased.
Real estate remains a significant organizational investment, and leadership teams understandably want to know whether offices are being used effectively.
But looking at a single utilization metric provides an incomplete picture.
Consider an office that appears busy three days each week but is comparatively empty on Monday and Friday. An average utilization figure may hide significant peaks and troughs.
The same is true at a more granular level.
A building might appear underutilized overall while certain meeting rooms remain consistently unavailable. One floor may be overcrowded while another sits largely empty. Employees may reserve desks they never use, or large conference rooms may repeatedly host only two or three people.
Each scenario requires a different response.
Instead of asking only “How full is the building?”, CRE and workplace teams can ask:
- Which spaces are employees actually using?
- When does demand peak?
- Which workspace types are consistently oversubscribed?
- Where is capacity going unused?
- How accurately do bookings correspond with actual use?
- How does utilization compare with the cost of operating the space?
- Are employees able to find the spaces and people they need?
Taken together, these signals create a much richer picture of workplace performance.
They also give leaders better evidence for decisions about redesigning space, consolidating floors, renegotiating leases, changing service levels, or investing in new workplace experiences.
Better workplace decisions depend on connected data
The difficulty is that organizations often already have the relevant data, but it lives in different systems.
CRE teams may manage portfolio and lease information in one platform. Facilities teams have work orders and asset records somewhere else. Workplace teams manage reservations separately, while sensors and access systems provide another view of occupancy.
Individually, each dataset answers a narrow question.
Connected, they can answer strategic ones.
For example, knowing that a building operates at 45% utilization is useful. Understanding its utilization alongside lease costs, maintenance requirements, employee demand, available capacity, and upcoming lease events is far more actionable.
The same principle applies within individual offices.
If employees consistently struggle to find meeting rooms even though overall utilization remains low, the organization may not have a capacity problem at all. It may have a space-mix problem.
That insight could lead to converting underused individual workstations into collaboration areas rather than acquiring additional space.
This is where workplace data moves beyond reporting and becomes a strategic resource.
Instead of describing what happened last quarter, it helps CRE and workplace teams decide what should happen next.
Regional consistency does not require identical workplaces
For multinational organizations, one of the hardest questions is how much control should sit centrally and how much should remain local.
Too much centralization can create policies that do not reflect individual markets. Too little can produce fragmented systems, inconsistent employee experiences, and limited visibility across the portfolio.
A more practical model creates common standards while allowing controlled local variation.
At the regional or global level
Organizations can establish common principles for:
- Workplace technology and system architecture
- Data governance and privacy
- Space and utilization measurement
- Employee experience
- Portfolio reporting
- Sustainability objectives
- Security and access
- Performance benchmarks
At the local level
Individual markets can adapt:
- Office attendance patterns
- Space configurations
- Amenities and services
- Working hours
- Local communications
- Policies affected by national regulations
- Workplace programs based on cultural expectations
This model gives leadership comparable information across the portfolio without assuming every location should behave identically.
It also makes workplace strategy easier to evolve. Rather than rewriting an entire regional model when conditions change in one country, organizations can adjust local practices while retaining their broader operating framework.
Workplace technology has to support flexibility without creating complexity
Technology plays an important role in making this model possible, but adding more tools is not necessarily the answer.
In fact, fragmented workplace technology can create another layer of complexity.
If employees need separate applications to reserve a desk, find a colleague, book a room, enter a building, report a facilities issue, and receive workplace communications, the digital experience can become as frustrating as the physical one.
For workplace and IT leaders, the goal should be reducing friction.
Employees should be able to answer basic questions easily:
Where should I work?
Who will be there?
Can I find the right space?
How do I navigate the building?
What do I do if something goes wrong?
Behind that employee experience, workplace teams need something different: reliable information.
They need visibility into demand, utilization, assets, maintenance, space, and portfolio performance so that employee interactions generate insights that can improve future decisions.
When those two sides work together, workplace technology does more than facilitate reservations. It creates a feedback loop between employee behavior and workplace strategy.
Flexibility and portfolio efficiency can support each other
Hybrid work is sometimes framed as a conflict between flexibility and real estate efficiency.
It does not have to be.
Greater flexibility can actually provide organizations with more options for optimizing their portfolios, provided they understand when and how employees use space.
If teams have visibility into real demand, they can potentially consolidate underused areas, redesign workplaces around higher-value activities, adjust cleaning and service schedules, and make more informed lease decisions.
The challenge is managing peak demand.
If most employees choose the same middle days of the week, organizations can simultaneously have excess weekly capacity and overcrowded offices.
That is why averages alone can be misleading.
Workplace teams need to understand utilization patterns by day, time, building, floor, neighborhood, and space type. They can then explore interventions such as encouraging teams to coordinate office days differently or changing the physical environment to match demonstrated demand.
The objective is not simply fitting more people into less space.
It is creating the right amount and type of space for the work employees actually need to do.
Workplace strategy requires continuous adjustment
Perhaps the biggest shift for EMEA workplace leaders is recognizing that workplace strategy is no longer something organizations can set every five years and leave unchanged.
Employee behavior changes.
Business priorities shift.
Lease events create new opportunities.
Technology evolves.
Regulations change.
Organizations acquire businesses, enter new markets, restructure teams, and alter their operating models.
A workplace strategy designed around fixed assumptions can quickly become disconnected from reality.
A data-informed strategy creates a continuous cycle:
- Understand employee and business requirements
- Measure how workplaces are actually being used
- Identify gaps between demand and supply
- Adjust space, services, technology, or policies
- Measure the impact
- Refine the strategy again
That approach reduces the pressure to find a single perfect workplace model.
Instead, leaders create an operating framework capable of adapting as circumstances change.
The next phase of EMEA workplace strategy is about balance
The question facing workplace leaders is no longer simply whether employees should work remotely or in an office.
It is how organizations can create a portfolio that works for employees, business leaders, and the wider organization at the same time.
That means balancing flexibility with predictability. Employee experience with portfolio efficiency. Regional consistency with local requirements. Data-driven decision-making with responsible governance.
The organizations best positioned to navigate those tensions will be the ones that can see what is happening across their workplaces and adapt accordingly.
For CRE and workplace leaders, that means moving beyond static workplace policies toward a model based on evidence, shared standards, local flexibility, and continuous improvement.
Because across a region as diverse as EMEA, there is unlikely to be one workplace model that works everywhere.
There can, however, be one clear strategy for determining what works where.
Building an effective workplace strategy starts with understanding how people, spaces, and operations interact. Explore the data and trends shaping workplace decisions in Eptura’s latest Workplace Index.
Frequently Asked Questions
By Amanda Meade
Amanda Meade is a content creator at Eptura, specializing in workplace experience, meeting productivity, and emerging trends in workspace planning and visitor management. With a background in content marketing and SEO, she crafts clear, actionable content that helps teams work smarter through in-office collaboration. Throughout her career, Amanda has worked across industries, including home services, healthcare, real estate, and SaaS, developing a unique ability to distill complex topics into practical insights.
