How a lack of desks could hinder the great office return in 2025
Aggressive cuts to desk space by many large companies since the pandemic are now hampering the drive by business leaders to bring people back to the office on a more regular basis
There are many factors that have discouraged people from returning to the office, such as a long commute, caring responsibilities at home, or an unwillingness to pay for expensive sandwiches rather than raid the fridge.
But few could have predicted that in 2025, one of the biggest barriers to bring people back to the workplace looks like being a lack of desks. Apparently, businesses have cut their desk space so aggressively since the pandemic that they are now struggling to accommodate all the people they’ve mandated back to the office.
Reason to avoid office
According to a survey by Remit Consulting, a fifth of workers ranked a shortage of desks among their top three reasons for avoiding the office.
Bloomberg reports that workers at Amazon sites in at least seven US cities, including Austin, Dallas and Phoenix, have been told their return-to-office dates have been postponed by as much as four months due to a lack of desk space. A pledge by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to give every employee their own desk as a reward for RTO obedience appears to have made a bad situation worse.
When British digital bank Starling, which has around 3,200 UK employees, made the unpopular call to force hybrid staff to return to the office for a minimum of 10 days a month, its plans were immediately undermined by – you guessed it – too few desks for the bank’s reluctant returners.
Swing back to workplace
It doesn’t take a genius to work out that as momentum swings back towards in-office working, there will be a requirement for more desk space. According to a recent poll of business leaders by KPMG, more than eight out of ten bosses (83 per cent) expect a full return to the office by 2027.
The Virgin Media O2 Business Movers Index, which tracks commuting behaviour in Britain, reveals that number of companies requiring employees to turn up three or more days a week rose to 75 per cent in 2024, from 67 per cent the year before. Nearly one in three UK companies now insist that employees are in the office for a full five days, according to this survey.
Worldwide, JP Morgan Chase, Barclays, Boots, Dell and Laing O’Rourke are among the familiar names that have followed Amazon’s full-time example. Apple, Google, Citibank and BP are in a cluster of firms not far behind, mandating staff back to their desks three days a week, according to data from The Daily Telegraph.
Argument for analytics
All this might be good news for furniture makers – especially those with modular, adaptable, fast-delivery solutions. However, the current mismatch shows just how complicated the hybrid model can be in terms of predicting desk space demand. It also makes a powerful argument for better use of predictive data analytics to plan successfully. Many large employers are still putting their heads in the sand on this issue.
While business leaders push down hard on pedal marked ‘return’, many employees remain much less enamoured at the prospect of going back. When advertising giant WPP called its 110,000 people globally back to the office four days per week, there was an immediate backlash with an angry staff petition and senior executives in WPP-owned companies threatening to quit.
A key argument by employees was that WPP’s mandate would make finding and retaining creative talent harder; the edict was also viewed as a lever to force people out of the door without paying for redundancies in advance of labour-saving AI processes that are set to transform the advertising industry.
Less room to manoeuvre
At the same time as there are protests in specific organisations, there is a more general recognition that economic conditions have changed and there is less room for staff to manoeuvre on attending the office in person. The Remit Consulting survey found that the percentage of staff saying that they would consider quitting their job if mandated back to the office has reduced in recent times.
At the start of 2025, the gulf between employer demands for face-to-face teamwork and employee desires for greater flexibility remains as wide as ever. Will the gap be bridged this year? Much will depend on making more desk space readily available.
Gensler research has repeatedly highlighted that the main reason people come to the workplace is to ‘get work done’. A lack of desks will undermine this objective. Even if many workers now appear more reconciled than before to returning to the office, they still need a properly equipped space to work when they turn up. Workplace strategists will be looking hard at this one.
‘Missing Desks’ is one of 25 trends in WORKTECH Academy’s new report, The World of Work in 2025, which can be accessed here.
