How to Create a Workplace Strategy in 2025

The average person spends 81,396 hours at work over their lifetime.  As a workplace innovator, your end goal is to make those hours positive ones.

That’s going to require a lot of rethinking and squashing of established workplace norms. It’s also going to require a workplace strategy. 

There are some pretty hefty roadblocks in the way, however. The primary one being that the physical workplace hasn’t kept pace with what people want and need. 

In 2024 we saw many organizations roll out some incredibly inspiring offices and workplace experiences. But overall, today’s work environments aren’t helping employees or leadership teams. 

59% of employees are quiet quitting. 47% would quit if forced back into the office full-time. Only 25% say their leadership teams are engaged, passionate and inspiring.

How can you build a better work environment amongst changing hybrid work patterns and mandate wars? And how can you do it in a way that’s aligned with your organization’s culture and business objectives?

A workplace strategy is how you get there.

In this post, we’ll cover: 

• What workplace strategy really means
• Why a workplace strategy is a must-have in 2025
• Three mindset shifts you’ll need to make as a workplace leader to create a successful strategy

Read on for the full run down. 

Workplace strategy: a definition 

A workplace strategy is a plan that aligns work patterns with the work environment.

Its goal is to align employee experience, business objectives and cost effectiveness.

A solid workplace strategy isn’t an easy feat to pull off. That’s because it brings together multiple stakeholders including HR, Corporate Real Estate, IT and many more.

Key elements of a successful workplace strategy include: 

• Workplace experience 




• Hybrid and flexible work policies 




• Workplace design 




• Corporate real estate portfolio optimization




• Workplace decarbonization




• Employee wellbeing 




• Leadership communication 

Why do you need a workplace strategy? 

It’s tough to balance cost effectiveness and an incredible workplace experience. Fluctuating attendance due to hybrid work policies, budgetary restraints and lofty company objectives make it tougher. Today’s workplace is dynamic instead of static, with change as the default. How can you possibly manage a workplace where nothing is ever certain?

A workplace strategy helps you strike that balance.

Without a workplace strategy, the office can’t support today’s work patterns. That means a poor workplace experience plus damaged productivity and culture.

Without a workplace strategy, corporate real estate teams have no way of knowing what’s working and what’s not. That means a risk of investing in decisions that don’t pay off.

And finally, without a workplace strategy, stakeholders work in silos. That means it’s impossible to adapt as work patterns and global conditions change.

So what are the workplace norms that need to be squashed to move forward and create better experiences, improve productivity and boost real estate performance? 

The new status quo, if you’re looking for a workplace strategy that’s always fit for purpose, requires a few mindset shifts. 

Three mindset shifts to create a successful workplace strategy in 2025

1) Shift from providing workspaces to providing workplace experiences. 

What do product designers and workplace leaders have in common?

A lot of things this year, it turns out. 

Chief among them is the process required to achieve the desired outcome without breaking the bank or confusing end users. 

Gone are the days when workplace strategy meant providing the right number of desks and conference rooms. In 2025, workplace  leaders need to think like product designers, crafting workspaces that cater to specific workplace personas.

To design spaces that feel intentional, comfortable and user-friendly, you’ll need to understand the unique needs of various employee groups—whether they’re heads-down analysts or collaboration-driven creatives.

The goal isn’t just to accommodate; it’s to anticipate, designing experiences employees value before they’ve realized they need them. 

Piloting your ideas is key, and the consequence of failing to do so is the workplace equivalent of throwing handfuls of cooked spaghetti at the wall until something sticks. 

Treat your workspace strategy like a beta launch: test new layouts, introduce different zones, and collect feedback. Did those standing desks actually improve focus? Are collaboration hubs freeing up larger meeting rooms? This iterative process ensures your workplace evolves with your team, not against them.

2) Shift from where work gets done to how work gets done. 

Despite the full-time RTO mandates cropping up in headlines every month or so, the hybrid work era has shown us that location isn’t the main event—it’s the quality of work and collaboration that matter most.

The task facing workplace leaders is helping teams identify which tasks are best done in the office and which are best done remotely. Most of us feel that brainstorming sessions and town hall meetings are best done in-person. Even so, this varies by team, so making assumptions does not a successful workplace strategy create. 

Encourage open discussions with your team about what’s working and what’s not. Teams that aligned their work methods around strategic in-person gatherings saw a whopping 96% satisfaction rate in one survey. This shift empowers employees to see the office not as a mandate but as a resource for meaningful work.

3) Shift from real estate efficiency to real estate effectiveness. 

For years, workplace metrics focused on cost per square foot –  measuring the cost of accommodating employees and not much else, since it was a given that people would be in five days per week. 

Over the last couple of years we’ve seen organizations start measuring space utilization – the number of employees using a space over time compared to its capacity. In other words, space utilization measures how employees are occupying the real estate portfolio. Workplace leaders can infer a lot from this metric – for example, the right ratio of individual to collaborative spaces and even why people are coming into the office in the first place. 

But what good is an efficient office if employees would rather get a root canal than be there (true story)? Dynamic workplace strategies prioritize effectiveness—measuring how well the CRE portfolio supports productivity, collaboration, and employee well-being. 

But how do we measure something as abstract as how somebody feels in the office? Workplace leaders are still figuring this out. Data sources could range from hybrid policy changes rates to employee survey scores. 

Measuring real estate effectiveness has become even more critical to a successful workplace strategy, since most organizations are planning on increasing or decreasing portfolio size. 

A by-product of portfolio reduction is more people sharing the same space at different times, automatically increasing how “efficient” each space is. Some organizations have seen space-sharing ratios jump by 30%.

But that alone doesn’t make the entire real estate portfolio effective, even if space sharing reduces costs.

That’s the task facing workplace leaders on their workplace strategy creation journey – figuring out what makes workspaces effective and how to measure that, even if it’s not an exact science just yet.  How would we measure workplace experience per square foot, for instance? Or the link between renovations and retention? 

If each workplace persona needs completely different things from each workspace, what does real estate effectiveness even mean? 

Ok, we’re getting a little meta right now. But getting the answers will require squashing established workplace norms with a liberal amount of teams working together who have barely collaborated in the past.