What CEOs Really Want in 2025: Certainty, Skills, and a Smarter Office
When the economy wobbles, tariffs shift overnight, and AI tools promise to do tomorrow what entire departments do today, CEOs start watching every variable that matters: confidence, people, and productivity.
That’s exactly what Joe Galvin, Chief Research Officer at Vistage, tracks for a living. Through the Vistage CEO Confidence Index, now based on input from over 44,000 members worldwide, Galvin captures what small and mid-market leaders are actually feeling beneath the headlines.
His latest data offers a rare look inside the mindset of the executives driving America’s local economies: manufacturers, construction firms, service companies, and logistics operators who employ millions yet rarely make national news. What they want most in 2025 isn’t more growth. It’s more clarity.
Confidence Without Conviction
CEO confidence has hovered near historic lows for almost two years. The Index ticked up slightly this fall to 81.9, but Galvin calls that “a rounding error in optimism.”
Only one in five CEOs believes the U.S. economy improved over the past 12 months. A third think it will improve next year. And yet more than half still expect to increase revenue and profit in 2026.
That contradiction defines the moment: leaders are bullish on their own companies but bearish on everything else.
The reason is simple… Uncertainty.
Tariffs are on again, off again. Interest rates remain high. Inflation has cooled but not disappeared. The result is a kind of strategic paralysis.
“CEOs are asking themselves whether to put up more sail or roll it up and ride out the storm,” Galvin says. Strategic planning season has become an exercise in scenario modeling: How far can you see, and what happens if the wind changes tomorrow?
The Real Labor Shortage Isn’t Headcount
The labor headlines miss the point. Overall demand for workers is flat. In fact, 13 percent of firms in manufacturing and construction expect to reduce headcount in 2026.
But the real shortage isn’t bodies… It’s skills.
There are jobs looking for people and people looking for jobs, but the two no longer match. As automation creeps deeper into production, logistics, and back-office functions, every role now demands a higher baseline of technical literacy.
Trades, especially, are booming but stretched thin. Welders, electricians, and solar installers are aging out faster than replacements can be trained. The next generation of skilled labor will be as critical to the American economy as software engineers were in the 2010s.
That gap has shifted CEO priorities. After tariffs, talent acquisition and retention rank as the second-highest concern in the Index. Hiring remains difficult, but retaining engaged, capable employees is harder still.
Hybrid Has Quietly Stabilized
While pundits keep debating “return-to-office,” most CEOs have already moved on.
Across thousands of mid-sized companies, the hybrid model has quietly stabilized into a predictable rhythm: three or four days in office, one or two remote.
“Leaders aren’t swimming upstream on this anymore,” Galvin says. “They have bigger challenges than trying to break the social contract with their workforce.”
For small and mid-market firms, where culture is built on trust and proximity, ordering everyone back to a five-day office rarely works. It fractures morale and drives attrition.
Instead, CEOs are learning to manage flexibility like any other operational variable: define it, measure it, and lead within it.
The generational divide makes that harder. Boomers still value presence; Gen Z has never known a world without hybrid. Galvin’s advice to younger workers: show up when the smart people are in the office. Proximity still accelerates learning. The digital workplace rewards autonomy, but mentorship still happens over coffee.
Killing the Meeting Tax
If the last era was defined by “the great resignation,” this one may be defined by “the great meeting.”
Too many leaders still equate a full calendar with productivity. Galvin calls it calendar theater, the illusion of work created by constant video calls and check-ins.
“Busy isn’t productive,” he says. “It’s just busy.”
The fix isn’t to ban meetings; it’s to concentrate collaboration. On in-office days, teams should meet, innovate, and build relationships. Remote days should be protected for deep work. That cadence mirrors how real productivity happens, in bursts of focus, not a haze of Zoom invites.
Technology is amplifying the gap. Generative AI now lets knowledge workers cut a four-hour task to thirty minutes. The leadership question becomes: What do you do with the saved time?
Some employees reinvest it in deeper work. Others drift. The companies that win will be the ones that channel individual productivity gains into team-level and organizational productivity, what Galvin calls the three waves of AI.
The Three Waves of AI at Work
- Individual Productivity: workers use AI to automate writing, analysis, and scheduling.
- Workgroup Automation: teams begin linking tools to remove friction in collaboration.
- Organizational Reinvention: businesses redesign entire systems around autonomous agents and data feedback loops.
We’re still early in wave one. But by the time we reach wave three, the office will need to look radically different.
Galvin predicts a paradox: as work becomes more automated, the physical workspace must become more human.
Trust, creativity, and relationship-building will be the only functions that can’t be replicated by code. Future offices will be designed less for rows of desks and more for collision spaces that spark conversation and innovation.
Culture Is Still King
Every company has a culture; the only question is whether it’s intentional.
Galvin defines “conscious culture” as one where values, mission, and purpose are clear, shared, and lived daily.
Leaders set it, but managers transmit it.
“They’re the apostles of culture,” he says. “If my manager connects what I do to something bigger, I’m engaged. If not, culture breaks down.”
In a hybrid world, that’s even more critical. You can’t see trust on a spreadsheet, but you can feel it, like gravity. It takes months to build and seconds to lose.
For CEOs, culture has become a leading indicator of performance. Engaged employees give discretionary effort; disengaged ones quietly quit long before they leave. The most effective leaders are transparent, consistent, and authentic, qualities that matter more than policy memos or pizza parties.
The Office as Strategy
Galvin’s view of Workplace 2030 aligns closely with what many Chicago-area developers and occupiers are already experimenting with: smaller footprints, higher collaboration density, and richer amenity experiences that justify the commute.
As automation scales and AI handles the repetitive work, the human side of the business, trust, creativity, and mentorship, must have physical space to breathe.
That means CEOs will increasingly see office design as a lever of performance, not just a cost center.
It’s the same lesson we see daily at Van Vlissingen & Co.: when you align space strategy with work strategy, retention rises and productivity follows.
Looking Ahead
The 2025 economy is a paradox: slow in data, fast in change.
Most CEOs don’t know whether to brace for recession or gear up for another boom. But they agree on what matters:
- Certainty is priceless.
- Skills outrank resumes.
- Flexibility is now infrastructure.
- AI will reshape, not replace, work.
- Culture and trust remain the ultimate differentiators.
Galvin sums it up simply: “Work will be radically different by 2030. But the companies that stay human will win.”
For more on office space and the future of work, reach out to our team of Chicagoland commercial real estate agents.