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The company you keep
How proximity builds performance
Unispace Global Workplace Insights 2026–2027.
Our fifth global study: 5,170 employees, 12 markets, 5 industries.
People get better at their jobs in the company of people who are already better at them. That happens in the flow of work: close to hard problems, watching experienced colleagues handle them, being trusted with something slightly beyond reach.
The workplace has always helped people develop, even though few organizations plan for it. That matters more now, because AI is removing the routine work people learned through while raising the level of judgment they need.
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What the report gives you
- Five years of global data on why people come in and what they get from being there
- The five capabilities the workplace builds in a person: judgment, professional confidence, exposure, relationships, and validation
- How development needs change across early, mid, and high tenure
- What the shift means for the workplace brief: people and behavior, built environment, and technology
- A view of the data across 5 industries and 12 markets
Swipe through the below to learn more about
what's inside this year's Unispace Global Workplace Insights report.
The top three ways people say they develop all involve other people.
This year 92% say working alongside colleagues with different levels of experience accelerates their development, and 93% say they learn as much from those colleagues as from formal training.
The moments people most want in the room are the ones that shape careers. Preference for in-person interviews rose 9.5% year-on-year, client presentations 9.4%, and one-to-ones 7.5%, while meetings that only broadcast information have stayed on screen.
Three-quarters of the working week now involves AI.
AI's reach is broad and shallow: no single AI-assisted activity accounts for more than about 10% of the day, and 25% of the workday still involves none. People are sampling it widely without yet relying on it for anything central.
AI took on the routine work first, which matters because people have always learned by doing a task badly, then better, in front of someone more experienced. AI now does much of that work quickly and convincingly, but it doesn't teach anyone how to do it.
Employees are clear about which responsibilities will stay with people as AI takes on more of the work.
Creative thinking leads at 29%, with strategic decision-making (28%), quality control and assurance (27%), and building trust (27%) within three points. There is no runaway answer, which is itself the finding, because every item on the list is relational or judgment-heavy, and none of them arrives from a tool.
Employees rated the physical workplace more positively across every matched feature this year.
Spaces for restoration rose 12.6%, acoustics 11.2%, lighting 10.7%. This is a marked improvement on the 2025 data.
Despite this, noise and distraction is still the leading barrier to workplace performance globally, and it has barely changed. Better acoustics haven't solved the noise and distraction complaint, because people also need to protect their attention from movement, interruptions, digital load, uneven attendance, and the cognitive weight of the work itself.