The Modern Office As Experiential And Hospitality Space
The return-to-office debate was never really about mandates. It was about the product. For five years, companies have written policies, rewritten them, and enforced them, only to discover that it is impossible to mandate enthusiasm. Employees now behave like consumers of the workplace, and buildings that fail to earn the commute are losing the same way commodity malls lost to e-commerce. The office is no longer simply a container for labor. It is a workspace product competing against the employee’s kitchen table, and the product now has to win on experience.
The Consumer Mindset Has Entered The Office Market
Few people have better articulated this shift than Joe Brady, the former head of real estate for Walgreens, past CEO of the Americas at The Instant Group, and author of Work Shop: The Consumer-Driven Transformation of Commercial Real Estate. When Joe joined us on The Real Finds Podcast, he drew a direct line between the decline of the traditional shopping mall and the trajectory of the traditional office. Retail learned, painfully, that when consumers gained the option to buy anything from anywhere, only the places that offered a compelling reason to show up survived. Offices are now living the same lesson. Employees gained the option to work from anywhere, and the buildings still winning are the ones that treat every visit as a trip worth taking.
Brady’s core insight is that the office has moved from a cost center mindset to a consumer product mindset. Companies once leased space the way they bought copier paper, on price per unit. Today, the relevant question is the one retailers have asked for a century: what does the customer actually want, and will they come back?
What The Data Says Employees Actually Want
Thankfully for office landlords and occupiers, its nolonger 2021 and consumer preferences are no longer speculative. Gensler’s 2025 Global Workplace Survey of more than 16,800 office workers across 15 countries found that only 14% of employees want a traditional corporate workplace experience. The rest gravitate toward environments Gensler describes as nature retreats, creative labs, and residential experiences: natural light, operable windows, greenery, hospitality-grade comfort, and settings that feel closer to a boutique hotel lobby than a cubicle farm.
The business case is just as clear. Gensler found that employees in high-performing workplaces are nearly three times more likely to stay with their company, and 90% of employees who like their workspace say they are proud to work for their employer, compared to just 47% of those who feel disconnected from their environment. In a labor market where talent retention is a board-level concern, the workplace has become a recruiting and retention asset, not an overhead line.
The capital markets have noticed. CoStar’s 2026 forecast projects national office vacancy holding near 14.1% through year end, but that headline number hides the real story: demand is consolidating into a shrinking pool of high-quality, amenity-rich buildings while commodity space empties out or leaves the inventory entirely. We covered the Chicago version of this bifurcation in our analysis of Sidley Austin’s move to 725 West Randolph, where a trophy-hungry tenant left a large legacy footprint behind. Winners and losers are being sorted by experience, not by location alone.
Hospitality Is The New Office Operating Model
If employees are consumers, then landlords and employers are in the hospitality business whether they like it or not. Hotels have always understood something office owners are just learning: occupancy is earned nightly. Nobody is contractually obligated to return to a hotel, so every touchpoint, from arrival to checkout, is engineered to make the guest choose it again. Applied to the office, that philosophy changes almost everything about how a building operates. Here are five moves office owners and occupiers should prioritize to make thier consumers choose thier workspace every morning:
- Invest in the arrival experience. The lobby is the front desk of the brand. Concierge-style staffing, warm design, and frictionless access set the tone before an employee reaches their floor.
- Treat food and beverage as anchor tenants. Quality coffee, grab-and-go options, and shared dining space drive daily traffic the same way the right operators drive a shopping center, a dynamic we broke down in our ranking of the retail tenants that actually pay.
- Program the building like a venue. Building community matters for the longterm success of a workspace. Speaker events, fitness classes, tenant socials, and seasonal programming give employees a reason to pick an office day, not just endure one.
- Measure experience like a retailer. Badge data, space utilization sensors, and tenant satisfaction surveys are the office equivalent of foot traffic and conversion rates. What gets measured gets improved.
- Design for variety, not density. Employees want a menu of settings: quiet zones, collaboration space, outdoor work areas, and residential-feeling lounges. A sea of identical desks is the office version of a dead department store.
For owners of older buildings, this is not a cosmetic exercise. As we outlined in Reviving Troubled Office Spaces, some assets can be repositioned into experience-led product, while others are better candidates for a different future entirely, including office-to-residential conversion.
The Chicagoland And Southern Wisconsin Angle
This consumer shift is not just a downtown Chicago story. Across Lake County and the North Shore, well-amenitized suburban campuses in Lincolnshire, Vernon Hills, Deerfield, and Bannockburn are competing for employees who now weigh a short commute and a hospitality-grade workplace against a full remote day. In the Northwest suburbs along the I-90 corridor, Schaumburg and Hoffman Estates owners are reinvesting in fitness, food halls, and conference amenities to hold tenants. The DuPage County office markets of Oak Brook, Naperville, and the I-88 corridor are seeing the same flight to quality, with experience-rich buildings capturing an outsized share of leasing while commodity floors sit. Even in Will County and southern Wisconsin markets like Kenosha, Pleasant Prairie, and Racine, where industrial dominates, the office and flex components of corporate facilities are being upgraded because the front office now competes for the same talent as the plant floor.
The pattern is consistent: employees choose buildings, buildings win tenants, and tenants pay for the buildings employees choose.
What Comes Next
Expect the gap between experiential offices and commodity space to keep widening. With construction pipelines historically thin and obsolete stock exiting through conversion and demolition, the supply of true hospitality-grade office will stay scarce, supporting rents at the top of the market while the bottom continues to reprice. Employers will increasingly treat workplace experience as part of total compensation, and landlords who operate like hoteliers, measuring satisfaction and programming relentlessly, will out-lease those who still think of themselves as rent collectors. Joe Brady’s retail warning is the roadmap: the mall did not die because people stopped shopping, and the office will not die because people stopped working. Both only fail when they stop earning the visit.
If you own, occupy, or invest in office space across Chicagoland or southern Wisconsin and want to position your workplace as a destination employees choose, contact Van Vlissingen and Co. at 📞 847-634-2300 or 🌐 vvco.com to put the Midwest’s oldest commercial real estate brokerage, development, and management firm to work for you.