The age of agency: London navigates a new chapter of work

On London’s Southbank in County Hall, WORKTECH London 2025 brought together global thinkers from leadership, technology, design and workplace strategy to examine how work is evolving. Across the 17^th and 18^th November, more than 50 expert speakers shared their perspectives from AI agents and spatial cognition to workplace science, data maturity and organisational culture. Throughout these discussions, a common thread emerged: who has agency in shaping the future of work?

In an ecosystem of stakeholders from employees, leaders, designers and now, AI, it is difficult to ascertain who holds the puppet strings of workplace change – if indeed anyone does at all. Is agency held by employees navigating new expectations and autonomy? By leaders redefining culture in uncertain conditions? By workplaces designed to influence behaviour and performance? Or, by AI systems increasingly coordinating collaboration, decisions and organisational flow?

The conversations at WORKTECH London pointed to the transition that agency is being redistributed across the spectrum of people, place and technology. Understanding who has influence, and how that influence shifts, is becoming critical to how organisations design workplaces, deploy AI and support their culture.

Leadership and emotional agency

The day opened with a challenge to conventional leadership. In his keynote, Nicholas Janni, leadership pioneer, author and co-founder of Matrix Development, argued that many organisations are led from a narrow band of cognitive capability, dominated by analysis, pressure and performance metrics, while deeper human capacities that support clarity and judgement remain underused.

Janni described this as a loss of emotional agency: when leaders suppress emotion, they also suppress perception. Under uncertainty, this creates boardrooms that default to control rather than coherence, narrowing rather than expanding organisational possibility.

‘Most people only see the black letters on the page. Agency lives in the white space’

Janni argues that leaders often operate inside the visible tasks and problems, while the intuitive, creative and relational aspects of work go under the radar. For Janni, reclaiming agency begins with widening this internal field, integrating body, heart, mind and attention so leaders can respond rather than react.

Agency, in his view, is the capacity to notice, interpret and act with presence. As work becomes more complex and interdependent, this form of emotional agency becomes foundational to how organisations navigate change.

Spatial conditions for agency

A recurring insight across the case studies and panels was that spatial design strongly influences who feels in control of their working day. When environments offer clarity, variety and navigability, people experience agency; when they create friction or ambiguity, that agency diminishes.

At Haleon, this was demonstrated through measurable outcomes. Its new health-optimised HQ in London has improved sleep quality, reduced daily stress and strengthened cognitive performance – evidence that light, acoustics, biophilia and sensory design can restore agency by reducing cognitive and physiological load.

Revolut’s London HQ applied the same principle culturally. Designed as a testbed for global standards, its ‘you do you’ approach prioritises movement, choice and functional variety. Instead of prescribing behaviour, the workplace allows employees to choose environments that fit their needs.

Tim Fendley’s session on wayfinding showed why this matters. Drawing on neuroscience and urban navigation, he illustrated how disorientation weakens belonging and performance, while legible spaces give people certainty, a fundamental component of agency.

Data and digital agency

If spatial design shapes physical control, data increasingly determines organisational control. Several sessions showed that the agency often sits with whoever can interpret and govern the information layer of the workplace.

JLL’s session highlighted this directly. Many organisations want AI-enabled optimisation, yet lack the data foundations to act with confidence. Siloed systems, legacy platforms and inconsistent definitions leave workplace teams dependent on partial or outdated insight. In this context, data ownership becomes a form of agency, but not everyone who needs to make decisions has the clarity to do so.

Hybrid planning reinforced this point. As Sainsbury’s, Capgemini and XY Sense explained, mid-week pressure, meeting-room scarcity and fluctuating attendance patterns cannot be managed by intuition alone. Real-time occupancy and behavioural data restore agency to teams responsible for planning space fairly and efficiently.

But the London discussions also highlighted a quieter shift: as more systems automate recommendations, from room allocation to collaboration patterns, data can either empower employees or subtly direct them. The distinction lies in transparency and governance.

Organisational agency

Greg Lindsay, journalist, urbanist and Director of Applied Research at NewCities, delivered one of the day’s most provocative ideas of the day that agency in the workplace is expanding beyond humans. As AI shifts from a supportive tool to an autonomous actor, it begins to shape how work is organised, how decisions are made and where authority sits inside organisations.

‘The robots aren’t coming for your job – they’re coming to create entirely new ones’

Lindsay described an emerging landscape in which agency and personality are being embedded into workflows, platforms and environments. In this context, AI agents do more than assist; they anticipate, orchestrate and coordinate. The movement toward ‘self-driving organisations’ reframes autonomy itself, raising the question of who holds agency when systems can act on our behalf?

This idea echoed across discussions on digital twins, multi-agent collaboration and AI-driven decision support. These technologies promise clarity and speed, but they also concentrate agency in the algorithms that set priorities, surface insights and guide behaviour. When AI begins to suggest attendance patterns, allocate resources or shape team rhythm, the boundary between support and direction becomes less visible.

AI doesn’t eliminate human agency, it redistributes it. The challenge for organisations is deciding whether AI amplifies human judgement or establishes a parallel layer of authority operating alongside it. Governance will define whether AI-led workplaces remain human-led workplaces.

Co-created generational agency

The London discussions also showed that cultural agency – the ability to influence how a workplace feels, functions and evolves – is shifting across generations and organisational structures.

During the ‘Purposeful Places’ panel, Joanna Hawkins, Operations Director at Herbert Smith Freehills, stated that younger employees increasingly assess workplaces through transparency and identity, using peer-generated content such as TikTok tours to judge whether environments align with their expectations. Traditional hierarchies offer limited agency; visibility, mobility and participation matter more.

GSK illustrated that health-optimised environments can also alter culture. Improvements in sleep, stress and cognitive performance expand people’s capacity to engage, collaborate and contribute which gives employees greater agency in shaping collective experience.

Virgin Media O2’s post-merger journey reinforced this point. Integrating two corporate identities required inviting employees into the process, ensuring culture was co-created rather than imposed.

The future of agency in the workplace

In the closing discussions, speakers turned to what these shifts mean for the longer-term evolution of work. In a conversation between Jeremy Myerson, Director of WORKTECH Academy, and Kasia Maynard, Head of Research and Editorial at WORKTECH Academy, Myerson noted that organisations are entering a phase in which autonomy and interaction must be held in deliberate balance. Hybrid routines have expanded individual agency, but they have also fragmented shared understanding, making coherence harder to sustain.

Looking ahead, the agency will not settle in a single place. It will continue to move between people, systems and environments as AI becomes more proactive, data more granular and workplaces more adaptive. This places new emphasis on governance and ensures that autonomy strengthens collective purpose rather than pulling against it.

Sustainability and wellbeing broadened this, as buildings become more intelligent and health-aligned, they begin to act as partners in decision-making, influencing when people focus, rest or collaborate. The workplace itself becomes part of the agency equation, shaping behaviour as much as responding to it.

WOKRTECH London highlighted that the future workplace is heading towards a model in which agency is shared, negotiated and consciously designed, forming the basis of a more adaptive and human-centred world of work.