How workplace experience has become the next operating challenge for financial firms

Launched at WORKTECH’s Financial Workplace event in New York, new research by Maptician in collaboration with WORKTECH Academy reveals a growing disconnect at the heart of the financial workplace.

Hybrid work has largely stabilised across the sector, with employees now spending an average of 3.4 days per week in the office, yet workplace experience remains unresolved. Organisations have defined policies and invested heavily in infrastructure, but are still struggling to translate this into something consistent and meaningful in practice.

Employees now come into the office primarily for interaction, collaboration and shared activity, while the systems in place remain focused on managing space, access and coordination rather than enabling those moments.

This creates a structural mismatch. Attendance is still partly driven by mandate, while the value of the workplace is increasingly defined by experience – and the two are not aligned.

The result is a workplace that runs efficiently, but doesn’t always deliver impact. Employees are present, but not consistently engaging in ways that generate value, leaving organisations with high attendance but uneven outcomes.

Experience as an attendance lever

Experience is now the primary driver of attendance – with 56% of employees coming in for interaction and experience, compared to 43% driven by mandate – yet its delivery varies widely across teams and locations. At the same time, workplace value is shifting from space to service, while investment continues to favour physical and technical infrastructure. Performance is still largely measured through attendance and utilisation, standing in for more meaningful indicators. In effect, organisations have built the structure of hybrid work, but not the capability to realise its value.

What’s emerging is a deeper shift in how workplace value is created. Employees expect environments that support interaction, coordination and flexibility, yet most organisations lack the systems, ownership and data to deliver this reliably at scale.

To address this, the report introduces the workplace experience stack – showing how policy has reached maturity, infrastructure is still evolving, and experience remains the least developed and hardest to scale layer.

Addressing this requires moving beyond managing the workplace as a static environment, towards operating it as a performance system. This means aligning space, technology, services and behaviour around clear outcomes, and continuously adapting based on how the workplace is used.

As investment in workplace technology and AI continues to grow, the advantage will come not from the tools themselves, but from how effectively organisations translate them into everyday experience.

Read the full report, ‘The Future Financial Workplace: How Experience Has Become The New Operating Challenge’, here.