The value of the In-person Workspace

The office hasn’t disappeared. But what people expect from it — and what makes it worth the commute — has fundamentally changed.

The office obituary has been written many times over the past five years. Remote-work advocates declared commuting a relic, and Zoom calls a reasonable substitute for hallway conversations. Square footage became a liability on balance sheets. And yet, in 2026, the conversation has quietly shifted. The question is no longer whether in-person work has value. It is what kind of in-person work has value and what has to change for employees to want to show up.

That distinction matters because the market is now separating sharply along exactly that line. Generic commodity space, four walls and a fiber connection continue to struggle. Space that gives people a genuine reason to be there is filling up.

What the data actually says

The productivity debate around remote and hybrid work has never been simple, and 2025 research doesn’t resolve it into a clean winner. What the data does show clearly is that collaboration the kind that happens when people are in the same room, has measurable downstream effects that are difficult to replicate digitally.

When employees have at least one meaningful collaborative relationship at work, Gallup finds they are 29% more likely to stay with their employer over the next year and 43% more likely to remain for their entire career. Collaboration isn’t just a productivity story. It’s a retention story, a culture story, and increasingly a talent story, particularly for younger workers who entered the workforce during a period of disruption and may never have learned how to build professional relationships in an office setting.

The chart above reflects something that runs counter to the simpler remote-work arguments: employees aren’t coming back to the office because they’re forced to. The top drivers of collaboration, meeting colleagues, and focused work in a shared environment are intrinsic, not compliance-driven. Employers who design around those motivations are seeing results. Those who reopen space without rethinking what it’s for are not.

The office is being rebuilt, not abandoned

The post-pandemic office market has sorted itself in ways that were predictable in retrospect but underappreciated in the early years of the recovery. In the Chicagoland market, the vacancy overhang is real, but it sits heavily in commodity space that was already commoditized before COVID. The buildings that command attention right now are the ones investing in what the physical environment can offer that a home office never will.

In a conversation on The Real Finds Podcast, Spencer Levine of RAL Companies, whose firm has developed more than three million square feet of mixed-use space, put it plainly: amenities, access to nature, and thoughtful floor plans are no longer differentiators. They are the baseline expectation. The developers pulling ahead are the ones treating the office as an experience, not just a location.

This connects to something broader about how physical workplaces function in organizational life. A building shapes how people interact, how ideas move, and what kind of culture is even possible to build. That’s not a soft claim, it’s reflected in the retention and engagement data. Loneliness at work, for instance, is measurably higher among fully remote employees (25%) than those working on-site (16%), according to Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace report. The absence of physical space has social costs that take time to appear and longer to reverse.

What tenants are looking for now

The lease negotiation conversation has changed since 2019. Tenants in the current market — and it remains a tenant’s market in most submarkets — are asking a different set of questions. Less about price per square foot, more about what the space does for them.

• Flexibility. The ability to scale square footage, adjust term lengths, and build in contraction rights without punitive conditions.
• Experience. What does arriving at this building feel like? Is there food service, a fitness center, outdoor space, natural light, somewhere to take a call outside?
• Commute logic. Is this location defensible for our team? Suburban locations with Metra access and adequate parking matter more than they did pre-pandemic.
• Culture alignment. Does the space reflect what we want our organization to feel like?

The Lincolnshire Corporate Center is a useful case study in what happens when a development answers those questions well. The 330-acre Class A campus, with lakeside amenities, on-site dining, fitness facilities, and significant natural surroundings, isn’t performing despite the broader office market headwinds. It’s performing because the physical environment justifies the commute for the employees who work there. Major tenants like Zebra Technologies and Honeywell aren’t making irrational decisions. They’re responding to what their employees actually want from a workplace.

Similar dynamics play out across the suburban corridor. In markets like Barrington, where transit access, smaller footprints, and community feel are part of the draw, businesses that need to pull talent from a dispersed residential base have found that suburban positioning can be an asset rather than a compromise, particularly when the alternative is competing for Class A downtown space at downtown prices.

The return-to-office trajectory

The chart reflects what practitioners in the market have been observing anecdotally for the past 18 months: companies are quietly adding required office days without making it a headline policy moment. The share of employees required on-site four or more days per week grew from 23% in 2023 to 34% in 2025, while full remote arrangements continued to contract. This isn’t a triumphant return. It’s a gradual recalibration toward what most organizations already suspected: fully distributed teams have real costs that become visible over time, and hybrid arrangements work best when they’re structured rather than ad hoc.

The nuance is important, though. Research consistently shows that about 90% of hybrid employees say they’re at least as productive in their current arrangement as they were in a traditional office-only model. The office’s value is not primarily about productivity in the narrow sense. It’s about the things that don’t show up in individual output metrics: mentorship, informal knowledge transfer, the kind of trust that develops when people share a physical space over time.

A note on what this means for space decisions

Neither landlords nor tenants should read the current environment as settled. Demand patterns are still shifting. Hybrid norms vary significantly by industry, company size, and workforce composition. What works for a financial services firm in the northern suburbs is not what works for a logistics company or a creative agency.

What is consistent across situations is the principle that drove the better-performing office assets through the disruption: space has to earn its place. The days when employees would accept a generic environment because that was simply what offices were like are over. The physical workplace now competes for presence, attention, and commitment in a way it never had to before. The landlords and tenants who understand that are making better decisions than those who are still treating this as a temporary deviation from a prior normal that isn’t coming back.