Work/Shift Insights - Issue #21 | Workplace Decision Intelligence

By Frederic Libet Descorne

The brief said collaboration. The data said otherwise.

A recent diagnostic showed people spending 56% of their working time on individual work. The project had been briefed, designed and committed to on the assumption that collaboration was the dominant activity.

The brief was not wrong when it was written.

It was wrong by the time it was delivered.

The same diagnostic kept finding the same kind of mismatch. Around 70% of meetings ran with two to four people for under thirty minutes, while the fitout still included a generous count of large collaboration rooms. Hybrid friction sat at 38%, while the policy had been set against the working pattern of two years earlier. Manager and non-manager experience diverged by six to eight points across several cultural pillars, while the decision had been shaped largely by the manager view.

This pattern is not a one-off. It is the hidden condition behind too many major workplace decisions in 2026.

You did not get the workforce wrong.

The workforce moved while the decision was being made.

This is behavioural drift.

CoreNet's recent APAC summit found that 53% of regional leaders now expect AI and automation to be the biggest force reshaping corporate real estate in the next three to five years. That number is not a forecast. It is a confession. The market has already noticed that something is shifting under it. The leaders saying it out loud are the ones close enough to the data to feel the drift in real time.

I have spent the last three years arguing that workplace decisions need an evidence base they currently lack. The reaction is rarely disagreement. It is usually a slow recognition that the absence has been there all along.

So why does the drift keep showing up after the commitment, and not before?

Because the delivery chain is built to move the decision forward, not always to pause it early enough.

Brokers help land the lease. Workplace strategists often develop the strategy from inside a project already gaining momentum. Designers translate direction into spatial response. Furniture partners fill the floorplate. Change managers support adoption. Each role matters. But very few are structurally set up to walk in early, read the current behavioural evidence, and say that the picture behind the decision may no longer be current. That is not a criticism of the chain. It is a description of the chain.

I have watched executives go quiet when a diagnostic came back. Not because the findings were dramatic. Because the findings sat so far from the assumptions in the room that the room had to recalibrate before it could move at all.

Behavioural drift is not one variable. It is several, compounding.

AI tools have changed what people do at their desks. Australian research puts weekly AI use at 70% of knowledge workers, with only around one in eight working with genuine fluency. The behavioural footprint of that gap is already visible across workplace data. Hybrid has changed when people need to be in the room. Tenure mix has changed who is in the room and what they expect from it. None of those changes shows up cleanly in a workplace decision shaped eighteen months earlier. Together, they form a single pattern.

Lease decisions move on five-to-ten year clocks. Workforce behaviour now moves on six-to-twelve month clocks. The gap between the two is where confidence quietly stops being earned.

This is the question almost no one in the room is paid to ask.

Is the workforce inside this decision the one that actually walks into the office tomorrow?

I am still surprised by how often the most recently hired cohort turns out to be the one most aligned with how the work actually happens. It is the inverse of what most leadership teams expect to find. And it tells you exactly how recently the workforce moved.

Most leaders sense the drift. They feel the data in the deck is partly stale. They feel the persona in the brief does not quite match the people in the open plan. They feel the hybrid policy is solving for last year's friction. But the deal is in motion. The fitout is on the timeline. The capex sign-off is two weeks away.

So the drift gets carried into the commitment, and the commitment gets locked.

That is exactly the moment a small, fast diagnostic earns its keep.

CultureFit360™ is not another opinion inside the project. It is the independent test the decision is missing. It sits upstream of the delivery chain and asks whether the picture behind the commitment still matches how people work now. It does not ask whether the original brief was wrong. It asks whether the decision is still ready to commit. It is the re-baselining step that almost every workplace decision is missing, and almost no one else is paid to provide.

A fast, focused diagnostic. A current evidence base. A read on the workforce that is younger than the assumptions about to be built into a five-year asset.

That is the trade.

When was the workforce inside your current decision last tested?

Sources

-Humanova, 2026 National Workforce Report: Australia Is Not Ready for the AI Era. [link]

-CoreNet Global APAC Summit, drawing on Colliers APAC poll, 2026. [link]

-Internal diagnostic findings drawn from a recent Work/Shift CultureFit360™ engagement, anonymised by agreement.