HR has forgotten where work happens: How to reunite HR and Real Estate around work experiences

Every major HR transformation narrative right now — skills-based organizations, agentic AI, fluid talent models — treats work as if it has no address.

The physical environments where employees actually spend their time have gone largely missing from recent conversations, at least at the industry level. That gap may have been manageable before, but as work gets more dynamic and unpredictable by the quarter, the omission is becoming a liability.

There are real reasons HR stepped back from the office debate: RTO politics, geopolitical uncertainty, and an all-consuming AI agenda. But the physical environment never stopped shaping how work feels.

This piece makes the case for why that matters, and what HR leaders can do about it.

Hybrid headaches are lingering

Post-COVID-19, many HR leaders either burned out on the office debate or retreated from it when executive RTO mandates made it politically untenable. Either way, physical workplace experience has stopped being a top HR priority.

Those same organizations are now making bold commitments to skills-based hiring, cross-functional talent mobility, and AI-augmented work. Each of those commitments plays out in the real world, in spaces that were never redesigned to support any of it.

Work has always had more than one address. Employees already move between corporate offices, coworking spaces, client sites, and home, often without a coherent strategy.

As AI matures, that mobility will accelerate, and beyond more complex: routing people dynamically across locations in autonomous vehicles before most organizations have clearly defined the purpose and expected outcomes of those places.

Workers’ choices across the built environment will matter more as their daily journeys become more fluid and unpredictable.

Real Estate is organizationally homeless

Part of the reason physical experience gets ignored is structural. Corporate Real Estate (CRE) has no consistent home, and therefore no consistent advocate in the rooms where HR strategy is discussed.

Despite owning the second-largest cost base in most organizations after compensation, CRE can be positioned almost anywhere on the org chart. Last year, CBRE reported that Real Estate can report up to Finance, HR, a CAO or COO, Procurement, and even Legal.

And it could sit as far as four or five levels down from the CEO, in stark comparison to the CTO or CHRO, who also own significant parts of the work experience.

Even in organizations where CRE reports to the CHRO, it tends to get treated as a foreign body. HR technology teams often exclude it from core HR platforms. People analytics teams often leave spatial data out of their models.

Organizations that exclude real estate from people decisions are optimizing for an incomplete picture of what it feels like to work there — risking significant capital expenditures — and the engagement survey is not filling that gap.

Engagement is not the whole picture

In most enterprises, engagement surveys remain the primary instrument HR uses to understand how employees feel about work. They capture periodic sentiment, but there’s lots they do not capture about the workplace experience.

They do not capture whether someone could find a seat when they arrived at the office, whether the meeting room technology worked, or whether the spaces a team has access to support the kind of collaboration the company says it values.

HR controls which questions appear in annual engagement surveys. CRE and IT teams that want to measure the impact of micro-decisions employees make every day in the workplace are often told no, and the result is consequential.

Organizations are making costly decisions about office footprints, hybrid policies, and technology investments without a complete picture of what work actually feels like for the employees doing the work

At a workplace conference last Fall, a room full of Real Estate leaders was asked whether their office projects were intended to improve talent attraction or retention. Most hands went up. But how many said they could access those figures for the offices in question without ‘asking HR?’ Not a single one.

Treat work experience like a product

The temptation, when you lay all this out, might be to propose consolidation: merge HR and IT, elevate Real Estate into a single super-function, and solve the work experience coordination problem through reorganization. But this would not hold in practice.

IT, HR and Real Estate are large, operationally distinct disciplines, and merging them would create a different set of coordination problems.

The better model in my view: find the small cohort of experience-oriented practitioners already distributed around your organization (e.g., workplace strategy, digital collaboration, employee listening) and give them a coordinated home.

A focused, product-led function accountable for the signals about what it actually feels like to work there, across every channel employees use to get work done.

This function could be led by a new “Chief of Work.” Or embedded in a newly designed people and places team, an experience office, or a transformation group near the CEO or COO.

The title matters less than the independent mandate: someone owns the integrated picture, pulls data from all three domains, and closes the gap between what the strategy says and what employees experience on any given Tuesday.

Lloyds Banking Group as a model to follow

For HR leaders who are already responsible for real estate and workplace, consider whether your title still reflects the full scope of what you own.

For example, UNLEASH speaker Sharon Doherty is the Chief People and Places Officer at Lloyds Banking Group and frequently includes the built environment in her public thought leadership.

Doherty’s organization invests in physical experience the way most HR functions invest in talent and engagement: as something requiring measurement, strategy, and dedicated ownership.

Doherty shares: “We believe great work happens when people have choice, supported by well‑designed spaces and flexible ways of working.

“That means being deliberate about how people, place and digital experience come together – rather than leaving it to chance.

“Done well, it becomes a real lever for high performance.”

However, in this capacity, Sharon is the 1%.

The question for every CHRO reading this: what would it take to make that same claim?

Start by recognizing that the experience across people, place, and digital workplace is already part of the job, even if the org chart suggests otherwise.

Three actions for CHROs to close the Real Estate gap

Conversations about the total work experience are already happening, just in different rooms, at different conferences, with different data sets.

Here is how you can pull them into the same room:

• Start with the data you already have. See if your people analytics team can cut engagement or attrition data by a location metric more narrow than city: new vs. old fit-out, assigned vs. shared space, or high vs. low attendance.
• Bring real estate into the room. Invite your Head of CRE, wherever they sit in the org, to your next people analytics or employee experience strategy discussion. As a data owner, not a courtesy guest. They are measuring things HR is not, and probably vice versa.
• Name what you actually own. If your remit includes employee experience, write down everything that covers. If the building or major collaboration platform engagement is absent from that list, ask whether that is a deliberate strategic choice or an unexamined habit.

Work has always had an address. The question is whether your strategy knows where it is.