Designing Offices That Earn the Commute: What Leesman’s Data Means for Irish Fitout

The Leesman Focus Forward 2025 Report, drawing on data from 1,600 workplaces and more than 400,000 employees globally, gives Ireland’s fitout sector a directly actionable evidence base. With 97% of senior corporate real estate leaders confirming hybrid as the norm, the brief has shifted: the office is now specified to outperform the home for activities that only an office does well, and designing for those activities with physical precision is the defining skill in contemporary fitout.

Ireland is well positioned to apply this evidence base. Dublin’s concentration of multinational technology, pharmaceutical, and professional services occupiers means that Irish fitout clients are precisely the corporate real estate leaders the Leesman data serves. Practitioners who translate those findings into spatial briefs, specifying for acoustic performance, varied settings, and informal interaction infrastructure, will consistently produce offices that employees choose to attend.

The report identifies a ten-point gap between office and home experience scores on the Leesman Index, and crucially pinpoints the fitout variables most responsible for closing it. Leesman’s workplace data finds that noise satisfaction scores just 35%, while quiet rooms score 40%. The three most important features employees identify, namely chairs, desks, and monitors, leave one in four people unsatisfied. Each of these is a fitout decision and a direct lever for design teams.

High-performing workplaces show what evidence-led design delivers. Leesman’s Leesman+ analysis, covering offices that score 70 or above on the Leesman Index, shows top-performing spaces deliver a 40-percentage-point uplift in informal social interaction over home, a 20-point uplift for learning from others, and a 22-point uplift for group meetings. These are the activities employees cite as their primary reason for attending, and all are directly enabled by fitout decisions around zoning, acoustic treatment, and social infrastructure.

The commercial case is well established. Steelcase’s Global Report confirms that colleague connection is the primary motivation for office attendance, reinforcing Leesman’s case for informal interaction infrastructure. BREEAM’s Refurbishment and Fit Out standard, widely adopted in Irish commercial projects, awards credits for acoustic performance, indoor environment quality, and occupant wellbeing, aligning evidence-led fitout design with the ESG reporting obligations of multinational occupiers.

Three actions can embed this approach in Irish delivery. First, incorporate post-occupancy evaluation tools into briefing conversations, giving clients an evidence base for spatial decisions rather than trend benchmarks alone. Second, treat acoustic performance as a primary design driver from concept stage, with ceiling treatments and partition systems integrated into layout rather than added at value engineering. Third, allocate dedicated space for individual focus work alongside collaboration zones; Leesman’s data shows 89% of employees rank desk-based focused work as their most important activity.

The evidence base for what makes an office worth attending is extensive, independent, and directly actionable. Ireland’s fitout sector, serving some of the world’s most data-literate organisations, is well placed to lead the shift to evidence-led design. The offices that earn the commute will be specified around what employees actually do, and the practitioners who build for that will define the next generation of commercial interiors in Ireland.

(The views expressed by the writer are his/her own and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of BusinessRiver.)