The flight to quality has become a flight to experience

Gillian Stewart, director, Michael Laird Architects

Across the UK office market, occupiers are consolidating into fewer buildings, but they are also becoming more selective. They are no longer paying for space alone but investing in environments that help them attract staff back, retain talent, embed culture and simply work better day to day.

In this context, the traditional leasing metrics we rely on (rent, square footage and yield) only tell part of the story. For years, the industry has framed demand as a “flight to quality”. But quality, at least as we have traditionally defined it, is no longer enough. What matters is more than just how a building looks, or how it performs on day one, but how it feels to use and how it supports the people inside it over time.

The new challenge is this: experience is now clearly driving value, but how do we define it properly, evidence it convincingly and price it with confidence?

From aspiration to reality

As an architect and interior designer with more than 40 years’ experience in workplace design, and as a judge for the BCO’s Customer Experience Award, I see this gap play out again and again. Many buildings have an impressive vision for occupier experience at planning stage and on completion. But few deliver that experience consistently once people are actually using the space.

Judging is illuminating precisely because it exposes the difference between promise and reality. Some submissions are extremely compelling on paper, with detailed strategies, polished narratives and strong headline metrics. But once you visit the building, meet the team responsible for running it and speak directly to occupiers, the picture often shifts.

The projects that stand out are those where the design intent genuinely carries all the way through into everyday use. They are operationally dependable, adaptable and managed by people who understand their occupiers and have real relationships with them. The schemes that fall short often do so at the point where responsibility moves from development into operation. That handover moment is where experience is most easily diluted.

Customer experience is far more than a decorative layer added at the end of the process. It is, and should be treated as, a material component of asset performance.

Experience as asset performance

Buildings that deliver a consistently strong occupier experience increasingly achieve higher retention rates and more predictable incomes. In last year’s BCO judging, the most convincing entries were able to evidence how long tenants stayed, how relationships were managed as businesses expanded or contracted, and how flexibility helped maintain loyalty over time.

Retention at this level comes from regular dialogue, responsiveness and a willingness to adapt space and services as occupier needs evolve. Where landlords genuinely understand their customers, they can often retain them within the same building or estate, even as their requirements change.

Yet many of the experience drivers that underpin this loyalty are still underestimated. Intuitive wayfinding, ease of arrival, shared amenity, a sense of welcome and the quality of on‑site management teams rarely feature prominently in investment appraisals. They are, however, precisely what occupiers talk about most, and what they notice immediately when missing.

One common mistake is assuming that great experience looks the same everywhere. A high‑rise tower with expansive views sets very different expectations from a series of lower‑rise buildings arranged around a courtyard. Smaller floorplates can foster a stronger sense of community; larger assets may naturally lend themselves to more formal landlord‑tenant relationships. Location, building typology and local culture all play a significant role in shaping what “good” looks like in practice.

This is why experience cannot be reduced to a checklist of amenities. A gym or café is not, in itself, an indicator of success. What counts is whether provision is relevant, well-managed and genuinely used.

A shared language for experience

Without common points of reference, landlords struggle to justify investment, occupiers find it harder to compare options and designers are often briefed on features rather than outcomes.

The value of benchmarking customer experience lies in the creation of shared  knowledge. The combination of hard data on retention, response times and utilisation with first‑hand testimony and what you can actually observe on site is critical to establishing a recognised way to evaluate experience. Desktop metrics matter, but they are never enough on their own. Experience has to be felt as well as described.

The flight to experience reflects a structural shift in how offices are used, valued and judged. For an industry that excels at measuring the tangible, the next priority is learning how to better understand and capture what people actually feel when they walk through the door.

That means investing with confidence, learning from others, and recognising that some of the most powerful drivers of asset performance are human, relational and operational.

Gillian Stewart is a director at Michael Laird Architects and judge for the BCO Customer Experience Award.