How the Market Renamed the Worksumer

Ten years in the evolution of the vocabulary of individual demand for space, from the 2016 Italian coinage to the frameworks and indicators through which JLL, CBRE and Gensler now measure some of the same dynamics of choice, experience and use of the workplace. Between 2016 and 2026 the way individual demand for workspace is named changed several times. The term worksumer, coined in Italy in January 2016 and reconstructed in the first article of this series, narrowed within months. Over the same period the international industry developed a parallel vocabulary, in English, describing closely related behaviour, and it produced something the Italian term lacked: measurement instruments and data series.

In brief

• The vocabulary of individual demand for space moved in ten years from Italian to English and from editorial register to measurement register: employee experience, workplace experience and consumer experience applied to the office now describe behaviour close to what the worksumer denoted in 2016.
• The timeline is short. The term consumerization appears in 2001 in the IT field, Airbnb establishes a Global Head of Employee Experience role in 2013, the worksumer is coined in January 2016, JLL publishes the research Workplace: Powered by Human Experience in June 2017.
• The decisive step comes around 2022, when experience measurement becomes an acquirable asset: in June 2022 HqO acquires Leesman, with an archive of nearly one million office respondents and 6,410 organisations assessed across more than 100 countries.
• By 2026 that behaviour has reference numbers. CBRE benchmarking records global average office utilisation of 53% in 2025, against 35% in 2023, and a space composition in which amenity areas rise from 10% in 2021 to 22% in 2025 while individual space falls from 56% to 35%.
• The consumption metaphor has a precise limit worth declaring: in consumer markets the payer and the user are the same person, while in office real estate the spend belongs to the organisation and the use belongs to the individual. The indicator that reconciles the two is the utilisation rate, which according to CBRE has become the metric most tracked by corporate real estate teams.

Two parallel trajectories

The two trajectories differ above all in their starting point and in their relationship with data. Italian coverage in 2016 circulated an insight applied to the relationship between individual, work and space, without building an empirical base around it. Internationally, over the same years, adjacent concepts had already developed along different paths, from the consumerization of IT to employee experience, converging progressively onto the physical workplace as well. It is in this second trajectory that investment in measurement consolidates above all, through to the indicators that now appear on the dashboards of corporate real estate teams.

What happened in Italy between 2016 and 2017

The Italian path can be reconstructed publication by publication. In the first formulations of January 2016 the worksumer describes an economic and organisational figure, with an explicit argument about the shift of choices from the organisation toward the individual. In later pickups the meaning moves toward a generational and professional profile, associated with mobility and creative professions. In September 2016 the term is used to introduce the theme of bleisure. By 2017 some pickups bring it close to simply denoting those who alternate remote work and office.

The full reconstruction of this path, with period sources and dates, is in the first article of the series on the origin of the term.

What matters for anyone working in office real estate today is what fell away. The initial formulation tied individual behaviour to verifiable economic conditions. Later pickups kept the description of the behaviour and left behind its explanation, which is the useful part when deciding how much to invest in services, environmental quality and contractual flexibility.

The international timeline, term by term

2001, consumerization. The term is coined by Douglas Neal and John Taylor of the Leading Edge Forum to describe the entry of consumer standards into work tools, with first publication in June 2004 and mainstream diffusion marked by the issue The Economist devotes to the theme on 8 October 2011. The reference is to software and devices, with physical space still outside the perimeter.

2013, the organisational role. Airbnb establishes the position of Global Head of Employee Experience, held by Mark Levy. The choice moves the theme from consultants’ language into org charts.

January 2016, worksumer. In Italy a term is coined that brings the logic of choice and consumption into the relationship between individual, work and space.

March 2017, managerial systematisation. Wiley publishes The Employee Experience Advantage by Jacob Morgan, which organises the theme into three environments (physical space, technology, culture) and turns it into a management category.

June 2017, workplace experience. On 22 June 2017 JLL publishes the research Workplace: Powered by Human Experience, conducted among more than 7,000 employees across twelve countries including Italy, with input from forty companies. Among the findings, 52% of respondents report satisfaction with their current work environment and 47% identify concentration as a priority. The research introduces a model linking space design, engagement and organisational performance.

June 2022, measurement becomes an asset. On 14 June 2022 HqO acquires Leesman, bringing into a single platform an archive of nearly one million office respondents, nearly 300,000 home-based respondents and 6,410 organisations assessed across more than one hundred countries. Assessment of work experience becomes, at that moment, a data infrastructure with a market value.

2026, consumer experience applied to the asset. In March 2026 Sue Asprey Price, leader of JLL’s Work Dynamics division, describes workplace strategy as increasingly close to the design of a consumer experience. In the same year the Gensler Global Workplace Survey, conducted among 16,459 workers in sixteen countries and ten industries, measures preferences on working conditions in detail.

What the concept gained along the way: the numbers

CBRE’s 2026 benchmarking on space utilisation and occupancy supplies the empirical base that was missing in 2016.

Global average utilisation of office buildings stands at 53% in 2025, up from 38% in 2024 and 35% in 2023, with average peak utilisation of 80%, the first value to exceed the target threshold indicated by most respondents. Rising utilisation goes together with the concentration of attendance into days of high relational intensity.

Space composition tells the same story from the supply side. Between 2021 and 2025 individual space falls from 56% to 35% of floor area, collaboration space rises from 14% to 19%, support space from 20% to 24% and amenity space moves from 10% to 22%. Areas devoted to services, food and beverage, wellbeing and social use have more than doubled their weight in four years. Investment on that scale signals that demand for experience is being treated as real demand.

The third signal concerns indicators. According to CBRE, utilisation rate is now the metric most tracked by corporate real estate teams, cited by 83% of respondents, and the most important for 29%. Raising utilisation is a top goal for 81% of teams and 87% of organisations set explicit targets. The same survey lists employee sentiment and Net Promoter Score among the metrics followed, the latter an indicator born in consumer marketing with Frederick Reichheld’s article published in Harvard Business Review in December 2003. A tool built to measure customer loyalty now appears on property dashboards: the most direct signal of the shift this article describes.

The limit of the consumption metaphor

The vocabulary of consumption applied to the office has a weak point worth declaring, because it conditions every business case.

In consumer markets payer and user coincide in the same person. In office real estate the spending decision belongs to the organisation, with a multi-year horizon and an objective function that includes cost per employee, while use belongs to the individual, with a daily horizon and different evaluation criteria. The worksumer expresses a preference; another party signs the cheque.

This asymmetry explains three recurring phenomena. Investments in experience remain hard to justify while they are presented as cost per employee rather than as an effect on utilisation. Satisfaction surveys produce high scores even in lightly attended buildings, because respondents evaluate without bearing the cost. Decisions to reduce floor area and decisions to improve quality are often taken by different functions, at different moments, on different data.

The indicator that reconciles the two parties is measured utilisation, because it translates individual preference into a figure the property function can use. Its rise to first place among the metrics tracked by corporate real estate teams, documented by CBRE in 2026, marks the point at which behaviour described ten years earlier becomes a line in the accounts.

Why it matters: implications for landlords, corporates and advisors

For the institutional landlord. The availability of utilisation benchmarks makes it possible to negotiate on quality of use alongside rent. An asset producing utilisation above market average has a renewal argument that rent alone does not supply, provided the figure is measured and shared with the occupier.

For the corporate real estate manager. The sequence of terms indicates which data to request. Declared experience surveys should be read together with attendance data, and space composition should be compared with international benchmarks before approving a reconfiguration project. The share of floor area devoted to amenity in a given portfolio, set against the 22% CBRE recorded for 2025, is a quick test of alignment with the market.

For the advisor. Translation between vocabularies is part of the service. A client asking for an employee experience programme and a client asking for a floor area reduction plan are working on the same variable in different languages. Recognising that makes it possible to propose a single measurement base instead of two separate projects.

Operational implications

The terms in circulation describe different aspects of the same behaviour, and each leaves something out. The table below serves as a working glossary.

Three operational points follow. The first concerns internal consistency: choosing one term and using it with the same definition across all project documents reduces the risk that different functions measure different things while believing they are discussing the same one. The second concerns sequence: utilisation measurement precedes space reconfiguration, because a composition redesigned on declared data inherits the errors of the declaration. The third concerns comparison: international benchmarks on space composition are public and should be used as an explicit reference in documents presented to the executive committee.

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