World of Work in 2026: our top trends for the year ahead

How will the workplace shape up this year as organisations grapple with new metrics for employee performance, increasingly blurred lines between physical and digital infrastructure, and a challenging path to the future of work?

WORKTECH Academy’s new report, The World of Work in 2026, presents 20 trends that illustrate core priorities and considerations for organisations in the year ahead. The trends outlined in this report suggest that 2026 could be a year of enhanced performance, sustainable growth, adaptive best-in-class design, and returning to basic human needs. It could also be a year when the human and the digital, and the boss class and the workforce, remain unaligned.

Human Performance Reset

The trends broadly sit under four megatrends. The first is ‘Human Performance Reset’ which explores how offices are shifting from productivity theatres to performance enhancers – focusing on human capability, skills gaps and human-centred design. The first trend in the report focuses on 2025’s word of the year: ‘workslop’. It explores how organisations can manage the abundance of residual poor-quality digital content produced by AI.

Workplace Without Walls

The second cluster of trends fall into the theme of ‘Workplaces Without Walls’. These trends look at the workplace as a living, evolving system where spaces bleed into each other and are centred more on adaptability and function than aesthetics. In this context, digital blends into physical, fixed spaces are quickly becoming obsolete, and a new metrics are required to understand how space is performing.

Sustainable Growth

Another overarching theme explored in the report is the idea of ‘Sustainable Growth’. Trends under this umbrella term tackle longevity from different vantage points: economic, environmental, and the labour market. From micro-innovation hubs where local production ecosystems are created from underutilised real estate assets to the resurgence of biophilic design to support neurodivergent employee, this megatrend explores how the current landscape of work is broken. In order for it to grow, systemic change needs to happen this year.

Back to Basics

The baseline expectations of work and workplace that existed five years ago have shifted. The fourth and final cluster of trends identified in the report centres around the idea of going ‘Back to Basics’. These trends highlight the desire to find new foundations for expectations and productivity at work – and then start building from there.

Trends within this category cover employees’ sense of belonging at work, the pushback on return to office policies, and the expectations of what people want from a workplace experience today. Spoiler: it’s not always more and more amenities.

Where does AI fit in?

Where does AI fit into this picture? This year marks a notable shift from AI as a novelty to AI as an everyday, embedded tool. In relation to Gartner’s Hype Cycle, AI quickly moved through ‘peak of inflated expectations’ at the beginning of 2025 to ‘trough of disillusionment’ at the end of year, but 2026 will see AI embark on the ‘slope of enlightenment’ and ultimately work towards a ‘plateau of productivity’ throughout the year.

Although seemingly contradictory, AI assistance will help us highlight what it means to be human and shine a light on our basic needs and expectations. Despite causing major disruption to the labour market, AI will also help create new entry points for graduate workers, create opportunities for new jobs ,and offer efficiencies to clear a path for greater innovation. While AI has largely been the catalyst of change in 2025, this year it will take on a more supportive role to plug in the gaps it has exposed.

 Future Mundane

The final trend in our report signals a message we centred on at our annual Innovation Day workshop in November 2025 – the idea of ‘The Future Mundane’. This idea that the future is accretive and changes are incremental stems from the work of futures designer and author Nick Foster, who explains that there are different streams of thinking required to achieve a balanced reading of the future. It plays into the theory that we ‘overestimate the impact of change in the short term and underestimate it in the long term.’

The World of Work in 2026 report was compiled in partnership with the Global Partners of WORKTECH Academy and drew on expert contributions from around our global member network.

Access The World of Work in 2026 report here.

To access the Innovation Zone, which includes all our quarterly Trend Reports, join WORKTECH Academy here.