Welcome to Kadence Wrapped 2025!
In 2025, workplace behavior stopped looking experimental and started looking intentional. Across millions of desk and room bookings, clear patterns emerged around when people came in, how they collaborated, and how reliably offices were used. The data does not simply show more activity. It shows greater operational maturity. Offices were no longer reacting to attendance. They were being used in ways that were predictable, coordinated, and easier to manage at scale.
Rather than signaling another year of disruption, the data points to consolidation. Teams established routines. Collaboration clustered around shared moments. Booking behavior became more reliable. For workplace leaders, this marks an important shift. The question is no longer whether flexible work can be supported, but whether workplace operations are equipped to run efficiently as these patterns stabilize.
What follows is a closer look at how offices actually operated in 2025 and what those patterns reveal about where workplace strategy is heading next.
A Record Year for Workplace Activity
Total bookings on Kadence rose from just over 4.3 million in 2024 to more than 8.1 million in 2025, representing an 87 percent year-over-year increase. Desk bookings grew by nearly 78 percent, while room bookings more than doubled during the same period.
What stands out is not only the scale of growth, but the way it reshaped space usage. Room bookings increased from 11 percent to 13 percent of all bookings, reinforcing the idea that offices are being used less for individual presence and more for coordination. As collaboration becomes more intentional, demand for shared space becomes clearer and more measurable.
For workplace operations teams, this shift matters. Collaboration-driven usage places different demands on space planning, layouts, and service models than desks alone.
Reliability Replaced Uncertainty
In 2025, desk booking cancellations fell from 37 percent to 31 percent, while room cancellations remained relatively stable at around 35 to 36 percent. Major cities including New York, London, Los Angeles, and Amsterdam all recorded meaningful reductions in desk cancellations.
This decline reflects a behavioral shift toward follow-through. Employees are not only booking desks more frequently, they are committing to those bookings. From an operational perspective, reliability is one of the most valuable signals. Fewer cancellations lead to cleaner utilization data, less wasted capacity, and greater confidence when forecasting demand.
As booking behavior stabilizes, workplaces become easier to operate efficiently and consistently.
Routine Became an Operational Advantage
Recurring desk bookings increased by 50 percent year over year, reaching nearly 1.5 million in 2025. Recurrence is one of the strongest indicators of workplace maturity because it reflects established patterns rather than one-off decisions.
Routine creates operational clarity. When attendance is predictable, workplace teams can plan services, staffing, and space allocation with far greater accuracy. Instead of responding to daily fluctuations, leaders can focus on improving performance.
In 2025, routine was no longer an exception. It became an operational advantage.
Teams Chose Coordination Over Chance
More than 6,600 teams and over 4,000 neighborhoods were created on Kadence in 2025, both representing significant growth compared to the previous year. This rise reflects a broader shift toward coordinated attendance.
Teams and neighborhoods enable employees to align schedules, sit together, and plan in-office time around shared objectives. For workplace operations leaders, this coordination is critical. Grouped attendance is easier to support, more efficient to manage, and more likely to deliver meaningful collaboration.
Offices filled with intention rather than coincidence are simpler to operate and more valuable to the organizations behind them.
Office Use Intensified Across Key Cities
Average desk bookings per active user increased from 2.4 per week in 2024 to just over 3 in 2025. Cities such as New York and Los Angeles saw particularly strong growth, while Dallas, Santa Clara, and Hong Kong led globally with averages exceeding four desk bookings per user per week.
These patterns highlight where office demand is concentrating. Understanding which locations are intensifying allows organizations to make more informed decisions about capacity, investment, and long-term portfolio planning.
Office demand is no longer evenly distributed. It is clustering in ways that data now makes visible.
Tuesdays Took the Lead
Tuesday emerged as the most popular day for both desk and room bookings in 2025, overtaking Wednesday from the previous year. This shift suggests that teams are anchoring collaboration earlier in the week, building alignment and momentum sooner.
Timing patterns like this have tangible operational impact. They shape peak demand for desks, meeting rooms, services, and amenities. When leaders understand these rhythms, workplaces can be designed to perform better on the days that matter most.
Morning Routines Held Strong
Despite broader changes in workplace behavior, start times remained remarkably consistent. The most common desk booking start time stayed at 9:00 a.m., while meetings most often began at 10:00 a.m. Half of all meetings started between 9:00 and 11:30 in the morning.
These routines create predictable demand curves. For workplace teams, predictability enables precision. Staffing, services, and space can be aligned closely with how offices are actually used.
Meetings Got Shorter and More Focused
Average meeting length decreased slightly from 1.10 hours in 2024 to 1.05 hours in 2025, with more than 80 percent of meetings lasting one hour or less. Average meeting attendance also declined, from seven participants to 6.5.
At the same time, overall meeting volume increased significantly. Companies averaged more than 21 meetings per week, up from 14.4 the year before. This combination suggests that collaboration is becoming more frequent but also more deliberate.
From an operational perspective, shorter and smaller meetings are easier to support and often more effective.
Workday Length Varied by Region
Average desk booking durations remained between seven and eight hours globally. Australia recorded the longest average workdays at 7.6 hours and the highest proportion of long days, with 39 percent of bookings exceeding eight hours.
These regional differences reinforce the need for localized workplace strategies. Global platforms create consistency, but effective operations depend on understanding how behavior varies by market.
The Workplace Is Growing Up
Preferences around where people work remain varied, but they are no longer chaotic. In 2025, regional patterns around working from home versus coming into the office became clearer and more stable. Europe and Africa recorded lower average desk bookings per week, indicating a stronger tilt toward remote work, while Australia and parts of the Americas showed higher in-office frequency.
What matters here is not which regions prefer the office and which do not. It is that these preferences are now visible, consistent, and measurable. Workplace behavior is no longer fluctuating week to week. It is settling into identifiable patterns that can be planned for.
For workplace operations leaders, this clarity is critical. When preferences stabilize, decisions around space allocation, service levels, and investment stop being reactive. Offices can be sized, staffed, and supported based on how they are actually used rather than how leaders assume they might be used.
The organizations that will get the most value in 2026 will be those that design their workplaces around these realities instead of fighting them.
If you want to see how employee preferences and workplace behavior are showing up across your own offices and where operational opportunities are hiding in plain sight, book a demo with our workplace operations experts and turn workplace data into confident decisions.
