The Workplace Decisions You’ll Regret in 2026

Work/Shift Insights - Issue #17 | Fit-for-Purpose Workplace Strategy

By Frederic Libet Descorne

Why Q1 locks in expensive assumptions, and how to stop guessing.

Your Q1 workplace decisions will look smart in the boardroom and stupid by Q3.

Not because you lack data. Because you are measuring the wrong things.

Budgets get approved. Leases get renewed. Fitouts get scoped. Policies get tightened. Assumptions harden into “the plan”, and then you live with them for years.

As I am getting ready to travel soon to the US and Canada to meet leaders, designers and workplace teams on the ground. The pattern is consistent across markets.

Most organisations are making multi-million dollar workplace decisions with the wrong evidence.

HR has culture signals. CRE has utilisation data. Designers have workshops and stakeholder opinions. IT has digital friction and tool constraints. Everyone has inputs. Few have a shared view of what is actually blocking performance.

That’s how regret gets baked in.

Four decision mistakes that create regret

These are the patterns I keep seeing when organisations look back and say, “We spent a lot, and we still did not fix the real problem.”

1) Treating the office as a place, not a system

The office is not the main variable. It is one node in a system.

Home work settings, digital tools, team rituals, management capability, change fatigue, psychological safety. These shape what people can do, and what they avoid.

Change the floor plan without changing the system, and you often improve aesthetics while leaving the real constraints intact.

The better question is simple: Where is energy being lost, and why?

If you are a business leader, insist on trade-offs. What is the office for in your context? What is it not for?

If you are in CRE, insist on evidence about work patterns and peak demand, not assumptions based on badge swipes.

If you are a designer, insist on behavioural evidence that becomes a usable brief, not just opinions.

2) Optimising for attendance instead of contribution

Attendance is an output. It is not the driver.

People choose where they work based on whether the environment helps them do the work.

Here is a real example from a diagnostic I ran late last year.

A client had 71 percent satisfaction with look and feel. People loved the aesthetics. But when we measured fit, 56 percent of their time went to individual focus work, and acoustic issues dominated the comments.

The space was admired. The work was blocked.

Hybrid did not create that misfit. It exposed it.

Here’s the line most teams avoid: if the office makes real work harder, people will vote with their feet.

Business leaders: stop asking “How many days” and ask “What outcomes are we trying to enable, and what is stopping them”.

CRE: treat utilisation as a signal, not the target. Ask what is pushing people away.

Designers: design for the real mix of focus, collaboration, learning, confidential conversations and recovery. Not the idealised version.

3) Using instruments that do not connect

Most organisations have measurement. It just does not connect.

Engagement surveys measure sentiment. Utilisation measures presence. Workshops measure preferences. None of them answer the question that matters in decision season:

Where is performance being blocked, and why?

The leaders who made progress stopped asking “Are people happy” and started asking “Does our workplace enable contribution”.

That gap is why CultureFit360™ exists. To connect culture, behaviour and space into one diagnostic view. Not because measurement is missing, but because connection is.

If your metrics do not show you where these forces are misaligned, every decision about property, policy and people becomes guesswork.

4) Letting incentives steer the “insight”

In Q1, diagnosis and delivery blur.

The people diagnosing your workplace often profit from the size of the fitout. Incentives are misaligned. Structures create gravity.

What this produces is predictable. Overbuilding, under-solving, and organisations that spend big while keeping the underlying frictions intact.

The better question is: Do we have at least one independent, evidence-led view in the room before we commit?

That’s not anti-designer or anti-vendor. It’s pro-decision. It is decision integrity.

What to insist on before you lock in a 2026 decision

Before you approve a lease, a redesign, or a workplace policy shift, insist on three things.

1) A shared view of what is actually blocking performance

Not general sentiment. Not attendance. The specific frictions that slow execution and drain energy.

If your leadership team cannot name the top three with confidence, you are not ready to sign a big decision.

2) Evidence of how work happens by cohort, not just by role

Where focus dominates. Where confidential conversations are forced into open plan. Where meeting load spikes. Where hybrid parity breaks.

Expensive mistakes hide in the differences.

3) A brief that translates insight into action

Not a vision statement. A brief your CRE team, designers, IT and leaders can act on, with priorities, trade-offs, and a clear definition of success.

If you cannot answer these three, you are still operating on assumptions.

And assumptions are expensive.

One bad workplace decision can cost ten to fifty times more than the evidence you needed to avoid it.

Decision season question

What is the one workplace decision you are locking in this quarter, and what would it take to prove you are not just guessing?

If you want to explore what this looks like for your organisation in 2026, you can book a call here or email frederic@workshift.au