Gensler’s study underscores the importance of creating a great workplace that balances functionality with an engaging experience for employees. Achieving this delicate balance is undoubtedly a challenging task!

Want a High-Performing Workplace? Here’s What Matters Most.

Our global research identifies what makes a high-performing workplace and what design factors matter most.

By Janet Pogue McLaurin and Anita Grabowska

Note: This blog is the second of a blog series sharing insights from Gensler’s Global Workplace Survey 2024. Read part one here.

With the Summer Olympics rapidly approaching, the stories of the athletes who will be competing are starting to surface. I’m always inspired by the grit and determination of these athletes and how one-hundredth of a second can determine the difference between bronze, silver, or gold. Olympic athletes know the importance of the environments in which they train to maximize their performance. Top performers in the workplace follow a similar model — they’re the people at the top of their organizational game, driving performance and innovation across the company, and they also need the best workplaces to optimize their performance. The focus of Gensler’s latest research was to identify what makes a high-performing workplace and what design factors matter most.

In our global study of 16,000+ office workers in 15 countries and 10 industries we uncovered that while work and employee expectations of the workplace have fundamentally changed, less than one third of workplaces have been redesigned in the last three years. That’s a missed opportunity! It’s time to reevaluate what matters most for workplace design.

Top performers have better workplaces and better experiences.

We explored performance at three different levels: an individual level measuring employee engagement, the team level measuring strength of team relationships, and an organizational level measuring a culture of innovation, which is an index Gensler has used since 2016. Each of these measures are composite scores of four to six questions to give us a more holistic understanding of performance. In this study, the “top performers” are respondents who score in the top 25% of each outcome – they are the most engaged, workers with the strongest team relationships, and those who work in the most innovative companies.

We saw that top performers work differently — spending more time learning and socializing, coming into the office to sit with their team, and working in locations outside home or the office. But we also found that top performers tend to have high-performing workplaces. When we mapped workplace performance against engagement, team relationships, and innovation scores, we found a direct correlation — these scores increased as workplace performance increased.