Gut Instinct Is Running Office Space Plans
4 in 5 decision-makers don't have the data they need.
Six years since the pandemic turned our working lives upside down, and by now you’d think companies would have figured out the issue of how to design office space. A new survey from workplace tech company Butlr suggests otherwise, and the cost of that confusion is adding up.
Four in five commercial real estate and facilities professionals say they don’t have the data they need to make confident space planning decisions. The result: expensive guesswork at a moment when every square foot needs to justify itself.
The survey, conducted by Wakefield Research in early 2026, polled 400 U.S. decision-makers across commercial real estate, workplace management and facilities roles. The findings, published in Butlr’s report “Beyond Occupancy: The State of Office Space,” paint a damning picture of an industry still flying blind despite years of investment in what’s known as “proptech.”
Despite billions spent on those building management tools, just one in five decision-makers say they base space-planning choices on data. More than a third admit they rely on gut instinct. More than half say they simply don’t know how their space is being used without either directly asking employees or resorting to surveillance methods (and those can create their own issues).
The consequences are anything but abstract. More than half of respondents have already delayed or canceled expansion plans due to all the uncertainty, while three-quarters worry their current layout isn’t delivering the most productive use of space.
The waste gets worse when you zoom in on operations. A quarter of office space is regularly heated and cooled while sitting empty, according to the survey. Four in five organizations don’t align cleaning schedules with actual occupancy, and two-thirds clean every area on the same schedule regardless of foot traffic. Those aren’t rounding errors—they’re recurring costs hiding in plain sight that better utilization data could directly cut.
Then there’s the central irony of the whole report: more than 90% of decision-makers cite privacy concerns as a barrier to collecting the very data they need. Without it, they can’t improve the environments their employees work in, yet surveillance-reliant alternatives threaten to erode trust.
This, as virtually every respondent (99% of those polled) agrees that more efficient workspaces would improve the employee experience, while most link smarter space design directly to retention—no small thing in this labor market.
Until those in charge of the physical spaces we work in figure out how to make the best of those spaces, money that could be spent elsewhere—like on an enhanced work environment or better salaries for employees—will continue to be wasted on heating vacant rooms and emptying empty garbage bins.