ORIGINAL WORKPLACE RESEARCH BY AUDIEM
Listening at Scale.
What can we learn when we listen beyond one workplace? We explore employee feedback across organisations to find patterns, question assumptions and open up new lines of enquiry.
BRIEFING 01 · JULY 2026 · RETURN TO OFFICE
What are employees
really saying about
Return to Office?
The experience, not just the policy.
The commute. Finding a desk. Who else is there. Our first briefing explores the everyday experiences behind the Return to Office debate, and what they might tell us about the value of an office day.
Explore the full briefing
The evidence behind Briefing 01: employee feedback from 108,000 respondents across 29 organisations, containing more than 430,000 talking points for analysis.
108,000
respondents
430,000+
talking points
29
organisations
INSIDE THE BRIEFING
Four things worth a closer look.
01The question wasn’t asked. The experience was still there.
More than 15,000 talking points related to Return to Office emerged from feedback that largely came from surveys which had not asked about it directly. Broader workplace conversations already held useful evidence.
02People don’t always use the words we search for.
Employees described commuting, collaboration, noise and days spent on video calls. Semantic search helped find related experiences even when the words “Return to Office” were absent.
03People and space carried the strongest signals.
Across the 67 topics identified in this analysis, People and Space themes dominated. Technology and Business themes appeared less prominently. This describes the study’s feedback, rather than a universal ranking of workplace priorities.
04An office day may be a value exchange.
The evidence prompted a hypothesis: employees may weigh the effort of attending against the experience they receive. Each visit could shape expectations for the next. The briefing introduces this idea; it does not prove the model.
BEHIND THE RESEARCH
Follow the meaning.
Then question
the pattern.
Listening at Scale brings Audiem’s workplace specialism to a broader research question: what can these experiences help the profession understand?
Start with written experience.
The first briefing draws on employee feedback across organisations. Different questions and contexts remain part of how we interpret the evidence.
Look beyond matching words.
Semantic search finds related meanings. Topic modelling helps organise those experiences into patterns we can examine.
Keep findings and hypotheses distinct.
We share what the analysis shows, what it might mean and what needs further testing. A useful question can be as valuable as a conclusion.
THE NEXT QUESTION
What makes the
office day worthwhile?
Coming into the office asks people to invest time, money and effort. What do they get in return? Our hypothesis is that people weigh that investment against the experience of the visit. A worthwhile day may make the next visit feel worth the effort. A disappointing one may do the opposite. That balance is the workplace value exchange we want to test.
A hypothesis to test.
Does this pattern hold beyond Return to Office?
And could it help us understand other workplace experiences?
Hear the thinking behind the findings.
Chris Moriarty and Dr James Pinder discuss the research and the questions it raises.
Available nowListening at Scale is published by Audiem.
