Assigned Seating Is Slowly, Quietly Coming Back To Offices

In the efforts to bring tenants back to the office, coworking became king. Companies have spent millions of dollars building out office floors that prioritize the flexibility required for hybrid work.

Instead of sitting at the same desk every day, businesses could save money by allowing employees to touch down wherever they felt comfortable.

Executives at these office occupiers said at Bisnow’s New York Office Conference on Wednesday that it might have all been for naught.

“There’s a slow, quiet shift that’s happening, back towards more assigned seating and less flex seating,” Scotiabank Global Head of Real Estate and Corporate Services Linda Foggie said at the event.

Employees returning to the office are craving stability and personalization, even if they aren’t in-person five days a week, panelists said at onstage at 7 Penn Plaza.

Some offices have already begun the transition away from open floor plans and bullpens to more structured individual workspaces. The percentage of enclosed offices more than doubled from 4% in 2023 to 10% in 2025, according to an analysis of more than 27,000 workplaces by HubStar.

Still, nearly 1 in 5 workers don’t have an assigned desk, according to Gensler’s global survey of more than 16,000 office-based employees. Nearly 60% say they would prefer to have a space to call their own. 

While a return-to-office mandate may force employees to show up, policies alone can’t create a comfortable working environment. And unassigned seats, or hot-desking, may even be a detriment to company culture.

For some, hot-desking has been linked to feelings of anxiety, reminiscent of searching for a seat in the cafeteria on the first day of school. Among employees with assigned seating, 87% report feeling a sense of belonging at work. In unassigned environments, the figure falls to 74%, according to Gensler.

Additionally, 80% of employees with assigned seats say they focus effectively in the office, compared to 67% of those who must find a new spot to settle every time they come in.

For office occupiers, sentiment and retention are becoming more important factors in leasing than whether employees are swiping in or not.

“It's about the talent, not just about the cost, but also the experience that you're creating for your employees,” iCapital Network Head of Global Real Estate and Workplace Gabrielle Rubin Deveaux said. “We've shifted from rightsizing to optimizing, taking into account there may be fewer high-impact locations.”

That’s likely to continue as artificial intelligence use increases, providing employees with more time to focus on the human side of work. Gensler’s survey found that AI power users spend less time working alone and have stronger team relationships than late adopters. 

Collaborating at work means that more employees are looking for what Foggie referred to as “third spaces,” in addition to — not instead of — their desks. 

“I feel like the demand has never been higher, and I also feel like we're so far away from getting it exactly right when we're thinking about what the ratio is,” Foggie said. 

Traditionally, the average ratio is one conference room for between 10 and 20 employees, with collaboration space making up about a third of the workspace. 

But since the pandemic, board-sized conference rooms are commonly found occupied by a single person on a Zoom call, leaving their colleagues to stumble around, looking for a place to take a call.

Nearly 80% of meetings happen in rooms designed for six people or fewer, according to HubStar’s report. Rooms built for 17 or more log utilization rates of just 12%.

HubStar found that the average ratio has shifted to one conference room for every eight desks, with collaboration space making up 40% of the office.

Those collaboration spaces are often not conference rooms. Casual spaces, like cafés and wellness areas, are becoming locations for meetings and socialization. 

“There’s a necessity to provide community spaces — spaces for people to be together, to collaborate, to innovate,” TP Bennett Principal Director Emma Green said. “Our understanding of that is so much deeper, and we have to be designing from that perspective.” 

Some of that understanding has come from the years following the pandemic that landlords have spent studying how tenants are using their buildings.

“What days are my people coming in, and how are they using my space? What space is not of use to them? Where do I have the opportunity?” Foggie said. “To allow me to plan and strategize on that space more thoughtfully, that should be an amenity that landlords are addressing.”

That data is collected by nearly every landlord but doesn’t necessarily get shared externally. Onstage at the event, panelists realized that there may be an easy solution that could benefit all parties looking to bring employees back to the office.

“Knowing that that's something that you’d be interested in is actually very interesting to hear,” Rudin Vice President of Asset Management Jane Luger said. “We can partner with our tenant base and get them the data that we already have access to and they don’t.”