WX trends: The surprising truths of the 2025 workplace

Appspace Chief Innovation Officer, Thomas Philippart de Foy, dives into the Appspace 2025 Workplace experience trends & insights report, highlighting opportunities for innovation in the coming years.

I’m excited to share key insights from the Appspace Workplace experience trends & insights report, a deep dive into the evolving dynamics of employee experience and how organizations can cultivate thriving workplaces in the years to come. This report isn’t just about predicting trends; it’s about helping businesses proactively shape their future.

I always find delving into the report data fascinating. It validates many of my own observations about the evolving employee experience and the modern workplace. It also brings a few surprises – and these are the elements I love to interrogate: How are people feeling and why? What are organizations getting right, and what do they need to work harder on to help them succeed? 

Appspace’s 2025 report gives organizations valuable insights into what we should be focusing on to make sure we’re thriving right into 2026 and beyond. 

However, what truly struck me this year is not just what has changed, but what alarmingly hasn’t.

With all the learning from the move to home working and the speed of change during the pandemic, it’s disappointing that the pace of positive change dissipated.  

From communication and collaboration to culture and technology, the report serves as a critical wake-up call for organizations: do better, or risk being left behind.

“82% of respondents said they had challenges when attempting to connect and collaborate with employees”

So, how do we innovate? How do we find ways to support our teams to be more engaged, productive, and happier at work? I think this report gives us some great answers. 

When it comes to technology, first get the basics right

Before we look at how we can innovate to set our organizations up for a bright future, we need to get the basics right – and our report’s findings show that for many companies, they’re not there yet. 

When the number of employees who say they’re very satisfied with workplace tech drops in the last year it’s a wake-up call to do better. 

“Only 26% of employees are completely satisfied with their company’s workplace tools and technologies — a drop from last year when 29% were completely satisfied.”

The top employee challenge – and it’s one that pops up year after year – is that employees aren’t using the same tools and platforms to get work done. So now you have siloed working and teams that aren’t sharing know-how and new ideas. And with that you can say goodbye to any potential innovation pipeline.

Making time to innovate

To make time and space for innovation in any organization, employees need to be supported by the right technology to do the admin tasks that can take up so much time. 

Look at how smart technology is being used in the workplace today – we have AI-powered meeting summaries and AI agents that can act on your behalf and are evolving to do much more than just administrative tasks, they’ll soon have the ability to use all that invaluable data from within your organization and help you to innovate and automate processes. 

Using smart tech means employees will have more time to focus on what they do best. For me that’s worth its weight in gold – time to think, to get creative with challenges and find great solutions.

Bringing people together

“More than a quarter of employees don’t believe their organization cares about fostering a workplace environment that prioritizes a positive employee experience.”

Our report found that what’s important to most (92%) employees is a sense of community and personal connection. 

Once you have technology that sparks connection – right across the organization – it’s much easier to deliver on strategies to improve collaboration, communication, learning and development, and to bring people together. 

I know from experience that when you have these ingredients in place, people are happier in their jobs. That attracts new talent and has a positive impact on retention and the bottom line. Then you’ll have time to bring together your big-picture experts, your deep thinkers, your creative mavericks. I can’t wait to see what that brings.

Get your copy of the 2025 Workplace experience trends & insights report today.