The office has to earn its place: what Hassell's 2026 workplace research means for HR

Hassell's Too Connected to Concentrate report, published this month, surveyed 2,500 knowledge workers across Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, the UK and the US. Its central argument is that the workplace is being reshaped by two changes moving at very different speeds: a slow physical reset in where people work, and a much faster digital disruption in how they work.

For HR and people leaders, the second of these deserves more attention than it is currently getting.

Two speeds, one workplace

Hassell's longitudinal data shows office attendance has crept up gradually and unevenly since the pandemic. In Australia, the proportion of people working from the office four or more days a week rose from 52% to 59% over three years, still below pre-pandemic norms. That slow drift is consistent with Property Council of Australia data on the property market itself: national office vacancy sat at 15.9% in January 2026, up from 15.2% six months earlier, with demand concentrating in premium, well-located buildings rather than office stock generally.

AI adoption has moved at a different pace entirely. Hassell found the number of people using AI frequently at work has roughly doubled in two years across every market studied. Australian data points the same way: a Rippling survey of over 1,000 HR and people-operations leaders in August 2026 found 39% of Australian organisations report advanced AI adoption in HR, ahead of Europe (21%) and Canada (16%), with recruiting and candidate screening the most common use case. More than half of respondents said AI had already cut onboarding time.

How Australia compares

Hassell's charts, rather than its text, offer a rough cross-market read. On office attendance, Australia sits behind Singapore but ahead of the US and UK. On frequency of AI use, the ordering flips: Australia appears lowest of the four markets shown, behind Singapore, the UK and the US. These figures are read from the report's chart lines rather than stated as exact percentages, so they should be treated as directional rather than precise.

That produces a genuine nuance. Australia's general workforce may be adopting AI more slowly than comparable markets, but HR as a function is moving faster: the Rippling figures above put Australian HR teams' AI adoption well ahead of their European and Canadian counterparts. AHRI's Quarterly Work Outlook adds detail on where that adoption is concentrated, finding AI use is higher in transactional HR activities and lower in strategic ones, with talent management at 34% and workforce planning at 30%.

The practical implication for HR leaders is that "AI adoption" is not one number to benchmark against; it is a function-by-function picture worth auditing directly, to see where AI has genuinely landed and where it hasn't.

What people actually want from the office

Given a choice between six possible workplace futures, Hassell's respondents consistently preferred settings built around individual work over settings built around teams, a pattern that held regardless of age, seniority, industry or how much time people spent in meetings.

That challenges the design brief many HR teams have set for the office over the past few years, which has leaned heavily on collaboration. Hassell's own framing captures the distinction: working individually is different from working in isolation, and the future workplace needs to support focused, solo work as a core function rather than an afterthought.

The same survey asked what changes would most help people use AI effectively at work. The leading response was more space for learning and mentoring (33%), followed by more space to focus (30%) and more privacy (29%). This aligns with AHRI's workforce trends research, which found Australian employers have continued lifting learning and development spend even as wage pressure and talent competition remain elevated.

Read together, the two data sets point to capability-building and mentoring, hard to replicate remotely, as the office's clearest value in an AI-enabled workplace.

The implication for HR

For talent attraction and retention, this reframes what "good office" means: quiet, focused space, genuine access to mentoring and learning, and a clear reason to choose it over working from a kitchen table or a café, rather than the building with the most AI-enabled meeting rooms.

As AI makes location increasingly incidental to the work itself, the workplace's value has to come from what it deliberately provides.

A note: Hassell's core findings are drawn from a five-country sample; figures quoted as global should not be read as Australia-specific unless stated. Australian data cited separately in this article (Property Council, Rippling, AHRI) is linked to its original source above.

Join the conversation. The Next Step is co-hosting an event with MinterEllison, The Future Workforce: what it means for leadership, HR and HSE, in Sydney on 4 November.