Shaping your Workplace Design with Employee Engagement

The way we occupy the office in 2026 is complex and in a constant state of flux. There are many positives that come from increased flexibility and for many people, this less rigid working style opens up a lot of opportunities. Where hybrid working and fluctuating head counts can pose a challenge however is when you need to comprehensively understand how your office is performing and whether people have what they need to be productive at work.

With increased remote working and working from home, many organisations are looking for ways to monitor employee performance and ways of working but it has to be done in the right way. Tech giant Meta has recently seen pushback from their employees who feel they’re being observed and not trusted, rather than being tracked to help shape training objectives.

Maintaining employee engagement is a delicate balance and there is reliance on trust being present within your organisation if you want employees to remain engaged at work. The employee engagement process is not just about asking for input and feedback. The focal point is to create a complete picture of how your people work best and how company culture and working environment feed into that.

When it comes to planning an office refurbishment or relocation, understanding what employees need from their workplace is essential. In this article, we are going to explain the importance of employee engagement and how collecting workplace data can inform an office design.

What is employee engagement?

Employee engagement is more than just how happy an employee is at work. It is a good indicator of how well a business is supporting and nurturing their staff.

There are lots of factors that can influence levels of employee engagement but typically the workplace culture is one of the most important elements that feeds into an employee’s connection to their work.

For an employee to feel engaged at work, the types of things we would look to measure include employee motivation, connection to work and workplace behaviours.

Why is employee engagement important to businesses in 2026?

Employee engagement underlines many aspects of a business and goes a lot deeper than just whether people are happy within the organisation. It is a way for businesses to demonstrate how they value their employees.

Ahead of making any significant changes to a working environment, you need to understand how your employees use the office. This really matters to the way a business operates because the workspace needs to support them, help build culture and spark innovation.

Research has shown that employee engagement stretches way beyond supporting changes to the working environment. A 2025 report from Effectory showed that employee engagement leads to a 22.5% increase in alignment and a 20.6% improvement in employee retention. Employee engagement is closely linked to how people feel about their work setting but it also impacts their ability to do their work effectively and feel valued within an organisation.

Engaging with employees also allows you to measure the current performance levels of your office and that is a valuable dataset to hold when you want to review the changes the new office design has had on your people. Without collecting this data and measuring how the space works, it becomes difficult to truly know how to get the most out of your environment and your people.

There is also a benefit to keeping staff involved in the office design process as the final design is more likely to be a success if it resonates with the team. If people are left out of the process, or feel disconnected to the workplace consultation process, it can make it difficult to implement meaningful design changes or adopt workplace policies.

Why does employee input matter for workplace change?

When organisations design their workspaces without consulting their employees and gathering the relevant insights, they are essentially designing to an assumption.

Designing for assumptions can be incredibly costly because if you don’t know how the environment needs to perform, it won’t support the employees. This is where employee engagement is so valuable as it helps to formulate the design brief and provides the evidence to back up the design.

Another way that feedback matters to workplace change is that it can help to identify the difference requirements between departments. Using employee input to configure your office will give help to coordinate an effective workplace strategy that informs how your employees are working today, but also what they expect from the office in future.

How do you capture what your people think about your workplace?

Workplace consultancy usually focuses on the design aspect of an office but it is not just what people want to see in terms of design. It is about understanding the behaviours, workflows and activities that take place in an office and then how the physical environment can best support those. In order to access this input and feedback, there should be a regular dialogue and multiple ways for employees to feed their ideas into the business.

The most common ways to track these findings and patterns is through workshops, focus groups and surveys. Engagement surveys are a simple way to reach the entire workforce but you have to ask the right questions and then ensure that the data is analysed to form tangible design outputs.

At Rhino, we are supporting clients with our in-house workplace technology tool, Rhino Edge. Edge is able to merge feedback and data points from a variety of sources. By looking at the existing data capture within a business, we’re able to get into the finer details of what works and what needs to be improved on.

This means that it’s not just survey data that we look at and we can assess data from internal feedback loops, IT tickets, HR surveys or suggestions from employees based on the day-to-day running of the office. That’s why it is important to look at lots of different data alongside the survey conducted as part of the workplace consultancy process.

Collecting a variety of inputs

Every organisation contains employees who are less vocal but when designing a new office, everyone is equally important. Some people may not feel comfortable speaking up in meetings and others may not have opportunities to share their views which is why it is essential to engage people correctly and make it possible for people to share their ideas and feedback.

Capturing a cross section of the business is important to not only developing ownership within the team but also to understanding what is actually important within the business. For people that are quieter or less forthcoming with their ideas, there needs to be a process in place that actively engages them.

One of the biggest mistakes organisations make is only listening to feedback from the leadership team and other senior figures. These inputs are certainly valuable but frequently they are out of touch with the rest of the workforce and don’t always represent the true challenges being faced within the organisation.

How Rhino Edge can shape your workplace strategy

Typically, extracting the value from employee surveys and workshops can be a slow process and don’t always capture the full story of the people within an organisation.

Where we have helped create value for our clients is through simplifying the survey analytics and transforming them into practical design solutions.

Rhino Edge helps organisations move away from estimating what employees want and towards understanding what employees actually need. It’s helping our clients shape more meaningful workplace strategies and build a clearer picture of how to make their offices more functional and supportive.

For more information on how Rhino Edge can support your business, get in touch with one of our team.