As the CHRO role expands beyond traditional HR boundaries, people leaders are taking on greater influence over workplace strategy, technology decisions, and employee experience.
In this special edition of the Data Driven HR Monthly, we explore how leading organisations are rethinking the office as part of the overall employee experience, drawing on new research from JLL and insights from across the field. The article features perspectives from Laura Adams, Chief Human Resources Officer at JLL, who shares how the role of the CHRO is evolving and what it takes to align people, place, and technology in a way that supports performance, wellbeing, and long-term workforce readiness.
Read the article and then register for the LinkedIn Live with David and Laura on February 5 by clicking the image below.
This edition of the Data Driven HR Monthly is sponsored by JLL
The CHRO role continues to evolve. What’s changed?
Not just the disruption of AI or changes in employee expectations. The entire CHRO mandate.
In our upcoming LinkedIn Live event, Laura Adams, JLL’s Chief Human Resources Officer, will speak to us about how the pandemic fundamentally shifted people leadership and why today’s CHROs must harness technology and data while thinking like business operators.
At JLL, a global leader in commercial real estate services with 110,000+ employees, Adams represents the evolution of the CHRO role. Don’t miss our conversation, where she’ll share her insights on CHROs’ increased influence on workplace strategy and technology integration, while keeping people at the heart of everything they do.
Discover how influential people leaders are redefining work itself through AI, data, and strategic business decision-making.
Register for this can’t-miss LinkedIn Live event today.
“The CHRO landscape is incredibly broad today. You’re operating at the intersection of business, technology, and people.”
For decades, workplace strategy sat squarely in the domain of corporate real estate. HR shaped culture, IT shaped systems, and real estate shaped space, each operating with its own data, language, and priorities. That era is ending. As organisations navigate themes such as hybrid work, AI adoption, talent scarcity and rising employee expectations, the CHRO is emerging as one of the most influential architects of workplace strategy.
“The CHRO landscape is incredibly broad today,” says Laura Adams, Chief People Officer, JLL. “You’re operating at the intersection of business, technology, and people. This requires a deeper understanding of how your business operates globally and locally.“
This shift isn’t sudden; it’s the result of a long-running evolution in how people expect work to fit into their lives.
JLL’s recently published Corporate Real Estate Trends to Watchreport highlights that mandates alone cannot solve the workplace challenge. While 66% of employees say they understand their organisation’s office policy and 72% view it positively, office attendance still falls far below expectations. JLL’s analysis finds that attendance issues stem less from policy and more from two factors: the quality of the experience and where the office is located:
“Put simply: people don’t reject the office—they reject bad office experiences and poor locations.”
The organisations making the most progress are those that treat the workplace as part of the overall employee experience and track the impact of those decisions. Increasingly, that mandate sits with the CHRO.
“The pandemic was really a catalyst that got businesses paying attention to our people like never before,” says Adams. “Add technology disruption, data-driven decisions, and massively changed workplace expectations, and you’ve got total transformation.”
“The pandemic was really a catalyst that got businesses paying attention to our people like never before. Add technology disruption, data-driven decisions, and massively changed workplace expectations, and you’ve got total transformation.”
WHY WORKPLACES MUST BECOME EXPERIENCE-CENTRIC
If organisations want employees to commute, collaborate, and build community in person, they must make the office “commute-worthy.” JLL’s research highlights the growing importance of location and vibrancy: offices in lively lifestyle districts command a 32% rental premium, and globally 67% of employees (see FIG 1), rising to 74% among 25–34-year-olds, prefer workplaces in vibrant neighbourhoods. In practice, this operates less as a perk and more as a core expectation shaping where people choose to work.
JLL data shows:
- 73% of employees say more greenery improves wellbeing, and
- 74% prefer personalised workspace experiences
Similarly, BCG’s research finds that employees choose how much energy and creativity to bring based on how they’re treated. Feeling valued and respected is a stronger predictor of retention than pay.
A customer-centric view to employees shifts the focus from bringing people back to creating an experience they want to come in for.
THE CHRO AS A CREATOR OF AN INTEGRATED WORK EXPERIENCE
“HR, real estate, and IT working closely can create a different kind of conversation where small teams are solving problems together. It’s an opportunity to fail faster and learn from each other. More tactile, more interactive.”
A consistent theme across multiple research sources is that the employee experience today has three interdependent components: people, technology, and place. Yet, as Brian Elliott notes, real estate and workplace teams remain the “missing leg” in most employee experience strategies. They are often disconnected from HR and IT, under-resourced, and unable to influence outcomes that depend on integrated data and design decisions.
The separation between these functions is narrowing as organisations rethink how work is delivered. Leaders like Tracey Franklin at Moderna — now Chief People and Digital Technology Officer — symbolise a broader movement to unify the domains shaping how work happens. Phil Kirschner points to a growing move toward a ‘Chief of Work’ role that aligns HR, IT, and corporate real estate under a single leader responsible for how work is delivered.
“HR, real estate, and IT working closely can create a different kind of conversation where small teams are solving problems together,” says Adams. “It’s an opportunity to fail faster and learn from each other. More tactile, more interactive.”
This convergence is being driven by a number of factors, including:
1. Hybrid work requires orchestration, not policy.
Successful companies don’t rely on badge-tracking or blanket mandates. Research from Brian Elliott, Nick Bloom, and Prithwiraj Choudhuryshows that organisations thriving with flexible work share three traits: trust-based leadership, clear norms, and intentional in-person time. Mandates rarely shift behaviour if the workplace experience doesn’t create enough value for employees.
2. AI is amplifying the role of people leaders.
As the JLL report emphasises, AI isn’t about removing human decision-making. Instead, it’s about augmenting workflows and enabling people to focus on meaningful interactions. These shifts mean CHROs now play a central role in aligning workplaces and technology with new ways of working.
“At the end of the day, our people matter to us; they are the ones interacting with our clients. AI and technology exist to help make our people better. That’s really the power of all of this – we don’t want to lose sight of the building engineer, the project manager or any of the important roles our people play.”
3. Connecting the Data That Shapes Work
Data on work is still split across functions in most organisations: real estate tracks utilisation, HR tracks engagement and retention, IT tracks the digital experience, and Finance tracks performance. These datasets are rarely brought together, which makes it hard to answer basic questions such as whether office attendance links to performance. CHROs are increasingly taking the lead in joining up these views so organisations can understand the full picture. One example is Microsoft, where chief people officer Amy Coleman recently announced an update to the company’s flexible work policy, commenting that: “We’ve looked at how our teams work best, and the data is clear: when people work together in person more often, they thrive — they are more energized, empowered, and they deliver stronger results.”
4. Employee experience is now a measurable business outcome
As Elliott shows, firms like Atlassian, Dropbox, and Zillow assess their workplaces by looking at outcomes. These include examples such as how often people choose to come in and how well teams connect rather than cost per square foot. These signals help leaders understand whether the workplace is supporting the organisation.
A NEW OPERATING MODEL FOR REAL ESTATE AND PEOPLE LEADERS
JLL’s research finds that 2026 will be a decisive year for workplace transformation. Office utilisation rates remain stuck at roughly 54% globally, far below the 79% target companies set for hybrid environments. Yet the answer is not further downsizing. Instead, companies must embrace elastic portfolios — spaces that flex to meet organisational goals.
Three shifts stand out:
1. From mandates to curated experiences
The second trend in the JLL report highlights that sustainable attendance depends on designing experiences tailored to human needs, not enforcing uniform rules. Employees want agency, social vibrancy, wellbeing support, and predictable norms.
2. From facilities management to experience facilitation
Leading companies are learning quickly: PagerDuty evolves designs iteratively across sites. Atlassian builds modular spaces optimised for “intentional togetherness.” Allstate uses simple weekly sentiment kiosks to gauge experience by location. These rapid-cycle experiments show how small tests yield significant outcomes, without major capital spending.
3. From siloed data to a unified EX intelligence layer
BCG urges leaders to segment employees with the same sophistication used for customers: discovering what different employee personas value most and then shaping work around those differentiated needs. When applied to workplace strategy, this means not only knowing who is coming to the office and when, but why, and designing spaces responsive to those motivations.
THE CHRO’S EXPANDING MANDATE: DESIGNING THE FUTURE WORKPLACE
The CHRO is now central to decisions once viewed purely through operational or financial lenses:
- Location strategy: Choosing vibrant neighbourhoods that support wellbeing and community.
- Experience architecture: Defining the moments that matter such as onboarding and social connection and shaping spaces to amplify them.
- Technology integration: Ensuring digital and physical experiences work together, especially as GenAI and Agentic AI tools reshape workflows.
- Workforce development: Linking space strategy to learning, growth, and skill-building, a mandate increasingly expected from modern CHROs.
The scope of the CHRO role has expanded. As JLL notes, CHROs are now involved in decisions on real estate, AI, culture, and workforce capability — work that was once handled elsewhere in the organisation.
“CHROs need to be tech-savvy, process-oriented, and understand how the business actually runs. It’s challenging and exciting to lead in such an expansive, dynamic environment.”
LOOKING AHEAD
Work is changing on several fronts. Hybrid models will continue to evolve, AI tools are moving faster than most workplace strategies, and competition for talent remains high. Employees are also making choices about where and how they work based on the experience they have — a pattern reflected in both the JLL and BCG research studies.
In this environment, organisations benefit when the workplace supports the way people actually work and helps them do their best work together. That means designing spaces with clear use cases in mind, tracking the outcomes those spaces create, and bringing HR, IT, and real estate into the same conversations about how work gets done. It also means giving CHROs a stronger role in shaping decisions that influence the day-to-day experience of employees.
These shifts set the stage for my upcoming LinkedIn Live conversationwith Laura Adams, JLL’s CHRO on February 5, 2026. Laura brings insight into the CHRO role and how organisations can create environments where people and teams can perform at their best.
It’s a conversation you won’t want to miss – register for the LinkedIn Live here.
REFERENCES
Insights from the following resources were all used to develop this newsletter:
- Amber Schiada, Steven Lewis, Hannah Dwyer (FRICS), and Kamya Miglani, Corporate Real Estate Trends to Watch: Five Trends that will define success in 2026 (Jones, Lang Lasalle, IP, Inc, 2025)
- Debbie Lovich, Gabrielle Novacek, and Chenault Taylor, What the Return-to-Office Debate Misses: Employees Are Customers (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2025)
- Brian Elliott, The Missing Leg of Employee Experience: Why Chief Work Officers need to blend people, technology and place(Work Forward, 2025)
- Phil Kirschner, Chief of Work: A Modern(a) C Suite Role(The Workline, 2025)
- Brian Elliott, Nick Bloom, and Prithwiraj Choudhury, Hybrid Work Is Not the Problem — Poor Leadership Is(MIT Sloan Management Review, 2025)
- Amy Coleman, Flexible work update(Microsoft, 2025)
- Dawn Klinghoffer and David Green 🇺🇦, How Microsoft Uses People Data to Shape Flexible Working That Helps Teams Thrive (Digital HR Leaders podcast episode, 2025)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Green 🇺🇦 is a globally respected author, speaker, conference chair, and executive consultant on people analytics, data-driven HR and the future of work. As Managing Partner and Executive Director at Insight222, he has overall responsibility for the delivery of the Insight222 People Analytics Program, which supports the advancement of people analytics in over 120 global organisations. Prior to co-founding Insight222, David accumulated over 20 years experience in the human resources and people analytics fields, including as Global Director of People Analytics Solutions at IBM. As such, David has extensive experience in helping organisations increase value, impact and focus from the wise and ethical use of people analytics. David also hosts the Digital HR Leaders Podcast and is an instructor for Insight222’s myHRfuture Academy. His book, co-authored with Jonathan Ferrar, Excellence in People Analytics: How to use Workforce Data to Create Business Value was published in the summer of 2021.
