Europe’s office attendance is climbing, and employees increasingly see the workplace as a productive setting. Yet the quality of those workplaces is creating a problem: many employees are returning to offices that make it difficult to concentrate once they get there.
According to JLL, global office attendance increased to an average of 3.2 days per week from 2.7 in 2024. The share of employees who believe the office enables productive work also rose, reaching 73% from 70% a year earlier.
Socializing and internal meetings remain major reasons employees come into the office, cited by 63% and 55% of respondents respectively.
But once there, employees spend around 70% of their time on individual work and virtual calls. That creates a disconnect between what brings people into the office and what they actually need the workplace to support. The perceived effectiveness of offices for focused work fell from 66% to 64%.
Commute time and cost remain the biggest obstacles to office attendance, cited by 48% and 29% of respondents.
Noise Is Becoming a Workplace Problem
The issue is particularly pronounced across EMEA, which recorded the lowest overall Human Experience score among the regions measured, at 88.
Acoustics and sound privacy were the two lowest-performing workplace factors in the 2025 research. Employees also reported problems with meeting rooms and equipment, with meeting rooms ranking seventh among the weakest workplace factors.
The demand for smaller meeting rooms is growing as well. JLL found that the share of required space allocated to rooms for two to four people increased from 39% to 43%.
Meeting-room availability can also be affected when employees use rooms for individual work rather than collaboration, adding pressure to already limited space.
Offices Need to Support More Types of Work
The findings suggest that increasing attendance alone does not guarantee a better workplace experience. Offices need to accommodate the different activities employees perform during the day, from collaboration and virtual meetings to concentrated individual work.
For employers, that means paying closer attention to acoustics, private and quiet areas, meeting-room capacity, technology and amenities as they encourage employees to spend more time onsite.
With office attendance continuing to rise, the quality of the workplace is becoming an increasingly important part of whether employees view the commute as worthwhile.
