As more employees begin to trickle back to the office, it's time for companies to reassess their workspace and meeting room strategies to serve both in-office and remote workers.
Hybrid work is in a state of flux. Almost 60% of organizations are now requiring some in-office presence, according to Metrigy's "Employee Engagement Optimization: 2025" study of 440 organizations. Another 20.5% of organizations allow employees to choose if and when to come into the office. Just 42.3% anticipate keeping their policy as is in 2026, while 56.5% anticipate changes -- either requiring more in-office time or providing employees with more choices about where they want to work.
As a result, business, facilities and IT leaders must engineer a return to office (RTO) workspace that features meeting spaces that properly support collaboration, regardless of whether the employee is in the office or working remotely. This goal is even more important for companies with fixed RTO policies.
Meeting spaces must reflect an attractive and frictionless environment that enables workers to collaborate more effectively than if they worked remotely -- thus "earning the commute." Moreover, workspaces must be flexible enough to support a variety of meeting scenarios, not just today, but for the future as well.
The evolving office space
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies projected their knowledge workers would only use the office for meetings. That forecast has changed as companies moved more aggressively to bring employees back either full- or part-time. As a result, office space has remained fairly static. Today, about 32% of office space is configured for meetings, up from 30% in 2024. The view that offices would evolve to primarily become meeting spaces hasn't panned out.
Flexibility goes beyond meeting apps into hardware. Flexible meeting rooms enable guests to easily share content without having to connect to the company network.
At the same time, the strategy to provision individual workspaces has gained significant traction. About 60% of companies support hot desking strategies, where employees sign out desks as they need them. Just under 12% are fully reliant on hot-desking, with the rest using a mix of assigned and flexible desks. Metrigy's data predicts a steady rise in hot desking, with nearly 47% of space devoted to the concept by the end of 2025, compared to 39.4% in late 2024.
Adopt workspace management
As workspace strategies shift, workspace reservation software is becoming more important. In fact, companies that record the highest ROI for their collaboration spend are almost 41% more likely to use reservation software. These tools allow employees to find desks that meet their needs, to sit near teammates and to easily reserve appropriate meeting space. Examples include Cisco Spaces, Microsoft Places, Zoom Spaces and dedicated workspace management vendors such as Appspace, Calven and Robin.
Successful companies combine workspace management platforms with digital signage to enable employees to easily locate available or reserved spaces and analytics to understand space utilization.
Ensure meeting flexibility
Slightly more than half of companies use multiple meeting apps, and most plan to continue to do so in the future. IT and AV leaders must ensure meeting spaces are flexible to support a variety of meeting experiences. Typically, we see meeting spaces optimized for a primary app, such as Microsoft Teams, Webex by Cisco or Zoom, but designed to support secondary apps or to let in-room participants plug in their personal devices to run a meeting.
Flexibility goes beyond meeting apps into hardware. Flexible meeting rooms enable guests to easily share content without having to connect to the company network. The physical space also supports reconfiguration as needed so that rooms can be divided up for small meetings or joined for larger ones.
Enable effective hybrid collaboration
It's not enough to put a camera and screen in the front of a room to support meetings with remote participants. Today, more organizations are deploying touchscreens to let in-room and remote participants collaborate on content together in real time. Additionally, center-table cameras, multicamera systems and intelligent microphone arrays permit remote participants to see and hear those in the meeting room more effectively.
Optimizing hybrid meetings also means enabling those in the room to see chats, questions and AI virtual meeting assistants. Participants can now use apps to join meetings through their own personal devices without activating a camera and microphone.
A successful return to office workspace strategy depends on a proactive approach that enables individuals to find the space that works best for their needs, whether that be a shared desk or meeting space. It also requires organizations to provision spaces that support a growing array of collaboration apps and enable remote participants to see, hear, and work with those in the meeting room.
Irwin Lazar is president and principal analyst at Metrigy, where he leads coverage on the digital workplace. His research focus includes unified communications, VoIP, video conferencing and team collaboration
