We Sold Activity-Based Working Like It Was Furniture. That’s Why It Failed.

March 10, 2026
Announcements

In 2019, I wrote a piece defending the open office at a time when everyone was busy writing its obituary. I stood behind the research, specifically the Leesman Index data showing that choice, not open versus closed, was the real driver of workplace effectiveness. Employees who had multiple settings to choose from were more engaged and productive than those stuck at one type of workstation, regardless of whether there were walls.

(You can read that article here.)

I wasn’t wrong about the concept. But I underestimated how badly the industry would execute it.

The Concept Was Sound. The Execution Was a Furniture Sale.

Activity-based working made a lot of sense on paper: design the office around activities rather than assigned seats, give people agency over where and how they work, and watch engagement follow. The research backed it up. Leesman’s data, drawn from hundreds of thousands of employees across dozens of countries, consistently showed that high-choice workplaces outperformed low-choice ones, across engagement, productivity, and satisfaction.

So what happened?

We sold the furniture and forgot the rest.

Walk into almost any office that “implemented ABW” between 2015 and 2022 and what you will find is benching, two or three phone booths with a line out the door by 9am, a lounge area with furniture nobody sits in, and a handful of “collaboration zones” that employees quietly avoid because there is nowhere private to take a call. The spaces look like ABW. They have the vocabulary of ABW. But the organizations inside them never changed at all.

71% of employees in ABW-designed workplaces performed most or all of their daily activities at a single workstation. (Leesman Index, 11,366 participants)

Companies spent real money building spaces specifically designed to enable movement between settings, and nearly three quarters of their employees never moved. The furniture was there. The behaviors weren’t. And almost nobody asked why.

A systematic review published in Building Research and Information covering 17 studies and over 36,000 participants found that ABW showed positive results for interaction, communication, and satisfaction with the workspace, but was consistently unfavorable for concentration and privacy.[1] Which makes sense when you look at what actually got built: collaborative zones everywhere, real focus infrastructure almost nowhere.

A follow-up review published in the Journal of Facilities Management covering 40 studies across the past decade found the same pattern: when ABW is only partially adopted, satisfaction drops, productivity drops, and wellbeing suffers. When the whole system is implemented together, it tends to work.[2] Most implementations were not complete. They were partial. By design.

Four Requirements. Most Projects Delivered One.

Leesman actually spelled out exactly what ABW requires to work:

The physical design must encourage employees to choose settings based on their tasks.
The technology infrastructure must support working across locations within the office.
The organizational culture must actively support mobile and flexible work.
Employees need training and ongoing support to work that way.

Four requirements. Most implementations delivered one, maybe two. Then they called it done.

This is not entirely the clients’ fault. The industry, dealers, manufacturers, designers, and yes, people like me, often positioned ABW as a space solution. It was easier to sell that way. You could render it. You could show a client a beautiful floor plan with neighborhoods and zones and collaboration nodes and they could nod and sign a purchase order. What you could not easily sell was the organizational change management required to make it work. That part was never in the proposal.

The Data Has Been Saying This for Years.

94% of employees in exceptional workplaces have a real say in where they work within the office. (Gensler Global Workplace Survey 2024, 16,000+ respondents, 15 countries)

Not 94% of ABW offices. Exceptional workplaces. The concept was never the problem.

Research by CBRE shows office utilization has climbed to 53% in 2026, up from 38% in 2024 and 35% in 2023.[3] Companies are investing again. The question is whether they are going to make the same mistake a second time.

A post-occupancy study of 2,090 employees across five sectors found that the key predictors of perceived productivity in ABW environments were not the furniture or even the floor plan. They were task-environment alignment and functional support, the degree to which the space actually matched how employees needed to work.[4] That alignment does not come from a purchase order. It comes from a programming process.

Then the pandemic happened, and remote work gave people something ABW always promised but rarely delivered: actual control over their environment. People built their own version of a high-choice workplace at home. And when companies started calling people back, the offices waiting for them still could not compete with the autonomy workers had built for themselves.

What Business Leaders Can Actually Do Differently

The answer is not to scrap the concept. It’s to stop selling it like furniture and start treating it like what it is: an organizational change initiative. That shift has to start before anyone picks a workstation.

1. Start With Utilization Data, Not a Floor Plan

Before specifying a single piece of furniture, understand how people actually work. Not how they say they work on a survey. People’s self-assessments of their own work habits are almost always wrong. And utilization data alone only tells you how people use what already exists. If your office is nothing but benching and conference rooms right now, the sensors will confirm that people sit at benches and book conference rooms. They cannot tell you there is unmet demand for a focus room that was never built.

You need both. Sensor data and badge swipes to understand actual movement patterns and space occupancy. Surveys to capture what people feel is missing. Focus groups to go deeper on the why behind the numbers. Some teams even do shadowing or work-pattern diaries for a week before a project kicks off. The goal is to understand not just how the current space gets used, but what people would do differently if they had real options. That full picture should drive the program, not the floor plan you already had in mind.

2. Make Leadership Behavior Change First and Visibly

ABW is about changing management, not just staff behavior.[5] If senior leaders still have dedicated offices, still reward facetime, and still equate presence with productivity, the whole thing collapses. Leadership has to visibly change first, not after the renovation. That means manager training, updated performance expectations, and someone at the top actually working from a different spot on Tuesday.

3. Assign Ownership to HR, Not Real Estate

When real estate leads an ABW project, it defaults to a space solution. When HR leads it, it has a chance of being an organizational change initiative. These projects should be owned by HR and supported by facilities and IT, not the other way around. That one structural decision shapes everything that follows.

4. Budget for 12 to 18 Months of Active Change Management, and Build in a Checkpoint

Engagements with organizations that have implemented ABW successfully typically run one to two years.[6] If your change management budget is a single lunch-and-learn the week of move-in, you have not budgeted for change management. Training needs to cover the unglamorous stuff: space etiquette, how to signal availability, what each zone is actually for, and how to find teammates when nobody has an assigned seat.

Around the six month mark, the novelty has worn off and habits have started forming. That is when you do your first real post-occupancy evaluation. Most organizations skip this entirely, which means they keep repeating the same mistakes because nobody wrote down what went wrong the first time. The back half of your change management window should be directly informed by what the first half revealed. Leaders who collect real feedback at that checkpoint and actually act on it tend to end up with spaces that work.[7]

5. Involve Employees Before You Build

Researchers tracking 699 public sector employees through an ABW relocation in Sweden found that participation in the implementation process was significantly associated with higher satisfaction with knowledge, office rules, and support, and that the more process activities employees attended, the stronger the effect.[7] The organizations that skipped this step consistently reported lower adoption. Employees who help shape the space use it differently than employees who show up one Monday and find their desk is gone.

6. Audit Your Technology Infrastructure First

Employees cannot move between spaces if they are tethered to desktop equipment, dependent on paper, or dealing with spotty WiFi in half the building. Successful ABW requires mobile-ready technology throughout: cloud systems, laptops, video conferencing from any seat in the building, and reliable connectivity in every corner of it. That also means power access at every work surface, not just the popular spots. Outlets and USB ports need to be built into the furniture and the floor, not treated as an afterthought. Monitor arms with integrated docking stations let people sit down and be set up in seconds, which sounds small until you realize that friction is exactly why people stop moving around and stake out a permanent desk. Get all of this sorted before the furniture shows up.

7. Name a Workplace Champion and Give Them Real Authority

This is the one nobody budgets for and everybody needs. Data and design can set the stage, but someone has to actually walk the floor. When I was implementing workplace change, I was the person reminding people that a section wasn’t assigned, asking them to erase their whiteboards, or quietly flagging that a loud conversation was happening in the heads-down zone. Not to be an office nag. To show people how to use the space, confidently and consistently, until the habits took hold.

That person needs to exist in your organization too. Call them a workplace experience manager, a culture lead, whatever title fits. What matters is that they are empowered to hold the line on how the space is used, visible enough that people take it seriously, and genuinely bought in to why it matters. Without someone playing that role, the best-designed ABW environment slowly reverts to assigned seating and territorial behavior within a year. The space does not maintain itself.

The Industry Got Paid Either Way

ABW did not fail because the research was wrong. The Leesman data has not changed. The Gensler data has not changed. The idea that giving people real choice over their work environment improves engagement and performance is as well-supported today as it was in 2019 when I was arguing for it.

What failed was the way we packaged and sold it. We made it too easy to buy and too hard to implement. A beautiful floor plan is not an ABW program. A set of phone booths is not a choice ecosystem. And a purchase order is not a culture change.

The industry is gearing up for another round. Companies are spending again. They’re looking at their utilization numbers for the first time and realizing the spaces they built six years ago still aren’t working. Companies want to know why their offices are not working. The answer is the same one the data has been offering for a decade.

The question is whether we are willing to slow down the sales process long enough to actually deliver it.

Sources

About the Author

Morgan Mosher is Director of Workplace at Furngully, a New England-based commercial furniture and workplace design firm focused on sustainable, utilization-driven solutions. With over a decade of experience across real estate, interiors, and consulting, Morgan helps organizations make better decisions about how their spaces support the way people actually work, starting with data.

Connect with Morgan on LinkedIn or follow The Squeaky Wheel, a web series on workplace effectiveness.

Request a Consultation

Transform your vision into reality. 
Schedule a consultation and let’s make it happen.