How to Measure Workplace Experience

How do you measure something as abstract and ever-changing as workplace experience?
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?
Where there’s a will, there’s a way, as far as workplace leaders are concerned.
These days, the focus is on effectiveness, not efficiency. In other words, how productive and energized people feel in the workplace as well as how good the vibes are. We need new metrics to capture this.
First came the shift from measuring how many people are using the office to how people are using the office, aka space utilization. 70% of workplace leaders we surveyed in autumn 2024 are measuring space utilization in some way – but what’s next?
For many, it’s measuring workplace experience. Could there be a future where experience per square foot replaces cost per square foot?
We think there will be, and we’re seeing the beginnings of it now.
But how?
If only it were as easy as shooting out an anonymous survey asking employees to rank their workplace experience on a scale of one to ten. Unfortunately it isn’t, for reasons we’ll get into shortly.
In this post, we’ll cover:
- A definition of workplace experience (WEX)
- How it’s different than employee experience (EX) and why it’s important to distinguish between them
- Three things you need before you start measuring workplace experience
- Five metrics to track
Workplace Strategy in 2025: A How-To Guide for Workplace Innovators
Looking for a solid strategy to improve workplace experience without blowing through your budget and skyrocketing carbon emissions? Download this guide.

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
The difference between workplace experience and employee experience
They’re often used interchangeably, but they’re 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 physical workplace. In the latter case, the same is true but for 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 and employee experience are similar and definitely overlap. If one is bad, the other is likely to be as well. But it’s important to differentiate them because improving each requires different steps and different teams.
What you need to measure workplace experience
Measuring workplace experience is going to be massively challenging at worst and require a completely new approach at best. To start off from the best-case scenario, workplace leaders will have to do some reshuffling of established office norms.
That’s because workplace experience is highly subjective and contextual. Workplace experience metrics are both qualitative and quantitative, and organizations haven’t taken a stab at standardizing methods of collecting data until now.
What’s more, correlating changing perceptions to measurable outcomes (e.g. productivity and retention) is a difficult one because there’s many other variables that could be responsible.
All that being said, measuring workplace experience is valuable. The data you gather paints a picture of what’s working and what isn’t. And now that the pressure is on for workplaces to be effective instead of just efficient, tying each space to a definitive outcome is quickly becoming critical.
Here are three prerequisites for measuring workplace experience.
1) Cross-departmental collaboration
One sole team isn’t responsible for workplace experience. The multiple teams that are responsible for workplace experience have only started collaborating closely over the last few years. So it’s no one’s fault that communication silos have cropped up, simply because different teams talk different “languages” (e.g. CRE vs HR).
Things need to change here 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. And yes that’s right, even the silos between the “facts” people and the “feelings” people.
Workplace experience is made up of facts and feelings.
2) Workplace changes to actually measure
This seems like a stupidly obvious point. But, 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 your strategy.
Categorizing spaces into individual focus or collaborative is steadily becoming obsolete. Diverse space types provide better workplace experiences, but you won’t figure out which ones to keep and which ones to toss 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.
A great workplace experience drives great performance – that we already know. But it’s up to you, as a workplace leader, 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’s also important to note that there’s some pretty important non-tech starting points for accurately measuring workplace experience, like organizational transparency, open communication and trust in leadership. No piece of tech will be able to help if your organization’s shared values are in the wrong place.
Bearing that in mind, here are five things to include in your workplace experience tech stack:
- Space utilization sensors and software to measure how people are using the workplace. HubStar’s space utilization software gives you full coverage by combining data from sensors, WiFi 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 showcases events and amenities for you and schedules everything people need for a productive day in the office
- Meeting room technology to facilitate effective meetings, wherever participants are dialing in from. There’s nothing more annoying than coming into the office for a meeting only to find you can’t 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
4 Ways to Use Data to Design Your Hybrid Office
Does your upcoming office redesign have you totally stumped? Data to the rescue! Read more for the right types of data and how to use it.

4 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 aren’t.
Some solid space utilization metrics to start tracking are:
- 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, how many attendees are physically and virtually present, etc
- 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 capacity likely aren’t providing 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 (e.g. 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’s 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.
That way, you can correlate the cause (a change to the workplace) and effect (more or less people enjoying the experience the space provides).
5 Space Utilization Metrics for a Better Workplace in 2025
Read more for a deeper dive into each of these metrics and how you can use them to build a better workplace experience this year.

#2 Employee workplace survey scores
Surveys are a fantastic way to understand how your workplace experience is performing and get actionable feedback. Compare the scores over time and BOOM – you’re measuring workplace experience!
But it’s not so simple.
Several factors may be coming together to make your surveys completely ineffective before you even draft the survey questions. These include:
- Workplace culture: unless people feel that the organization’s culture welcomes constructive criticism, you won’t get honest responses
- Degree of trust in leadership: Does your organization’s leadership have a history of taking action on employee feedback and transparently explaining why certain feedback won’t be actioned on? If not, you can bet everyone thinks surveys are 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, rendering your entire survey ineffective and providing misleading data
Unfortunately there’s 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’s critical to analyze survey data in conjunction with the other metrics described here, like 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, there are steps you can take to nudge employees into giving honest feedback that helps you measure workplace experience. Here are a few:
- Ask both open and close-ended questions
- Be mindful of question wording
- 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 [your company] as a place to work?”
Notice the inclusion of the word “place” here. While employee NPS is a reflection of overall employee experience rather than workplace experience specifically, there’s a lot of overlap going on. People who wouldn’t recommend their company as a place to work probably aren’t having a great time in the office either.
More likely than not, your organization is already measuring these. 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).
So let’s say your organization sends out NPS surveys once every six months. Compare space utilization trends with changes in the score (fingies crossed for positive improvement) at the beginning and end of the six months.
Has NPS score jumped up a few points while utilization trends in meeting rooms has increased by 30%? You’ve just measured an improvement in workplace experience.
Don’t forget to include any kind of workplace changes in this comparison. Does the score go up after implementing quarterly all-hands events? That’s also a measurable improvement in workplace experience. It shouldn’t come as a surprise either – one Harvard paper found that quarterly in-person events increased employee communications by 113%.
Infographic: The State of Social Connection in the Hybrid Workplace
At the end of the day, social connection is what workplace experience is all about. Download this infographic for the latest stats on social connection in today's hybrid workplace and 3 steps to rebuilding it.

#4: Employee retention rate
It’s already been proven that workplace aesthetics drive job choice. Making the jump from that to workplace experience driving retention is not a big leap.
Compare changes in workplace policies and/or design to retention rate to start measuring the impact of workplace experience on how long people 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 your organization, making them more or less likely to take up that LinkedIn recruiter on their interview offer.
By comparing retention rates before and after workplace changes over longer periods of time, you’re gaining insight into how those changes are impacting workplace experience.
However, retention rates aren’t an airtight metric for workplace experience because they lag behind the changes you make. 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 absolutely should be measured. So even with time lag and lots of other variables impacting measurement accuracy, it’s still worth doing.
Like all the other metrics here, it’s essential to look at retention rate alongside other workplace experience metrics, like surveys and space utilization rate.
Let’s say you see retention dip despite an office redesign. But surveys show employees feel more engaged. The workplace changes might not be the issue at all – something else could be in play.
Build an outstanding workplace experience with HubStar H2O
Boost connection, collaboration and workplace experience with the most interoperable hybrid workplace solution in the market today.

Share this post