What Three Million Hours of Coworking Reveals: What Croissant's Exclusive Data Tells us about Hybrid Work

There's endless online chatter about flexible work, hybrid options, RTO or the rise of co-working but what does modern work actually look like in 2025?

As an expert partner to both workspaces and businesses worldwide, we're here to lift the lid on the reality of hybrid work. While the headlines debate "remote versus office," Croissant's data reveals what employees actually do when given freedom and flexibility over where and how they work.

The early promise of hybrid work was freedom: skip the commute, pick your hours, work where you're most productive, have time for school dropoffs and wellbeing activities. What few predicted was how structured that freedom would become.

Some argue that flexibility creates chaos. But Croissant data shows flexibility actually leads to more coordination.

Hybrid work, in other words, isn't an experiment anymore. It's an evolving system of deliberate human coordination. And Croissant's behavioral data from millions of coworking sessions proves it.

Teams plan their in-person days weeks in advance, coordinate schedules in Slack, and often book the same spaces repeatedly for small group work.

This is the new rhythm of hybrid life: it's not random, it's governed by intentional synchronization. It's time to get up to date on the realities of hybrid work. Here are some key myths about flexible work in 2025, and the hidden truths behind them.

Myth 1: Teams Use Coworking For Solo Focus Work

For years, coworking was synonymous with freelancers seeking an alternative to coffee shops: a desk, Wi-Fi, and a bit of background buzz. The common perception was that professionals turned to coworking to escape distractions at home, to hunker down in silence and get work done.

But this is now a myth. Workers seek coworking options today for connection, not quiet.

Across millions of hours of logged activity, over 70% of Croissant's users book spaces for team collaboration, not solitary work. The behavioral data paints a clear picture: teams are using coworking spaces as pop-up offices — flexible, local hubs for meetings, project sprints, and quick bursts of teamwork.

The most common bookings with Croissant are small private rooms, phone booths, and conference areas. These are environments designed for interaction, not isolation.

As Croissant Global Partnerships Lead Fernanda Grace Lins explains,

"People book these spaces because they have something to accomplish together."

Instead of long individual sessions, Croissant's data reveals short, purposeful bursts of collective energy, whether that's a marketing team syncing on campaign strategy, a product team running a sprint or two colleagues meeting halfway between their homes for an in-person brainstorm ahead of a new business meeting.

Myth 2: Coworking is driven by uniform global trends

It's easy to think of hybrid work as a single global movement. Employees everywhere leaving the office, booking coworking spaces, business leaders around the world realizing cost savings by ditching their HQs and issuing a company wide coworking stipend.

But Croissant's data tells a different story. How people work in the hybrid era depends on where they live, how they commute, and what kind of company they work for. Every city and company defines flexibility in its own way.

For instance, in London, coworking is driven by commute fatigue. With average round-trip times nearing 90 minutes, companies are struggling to justify mandatory office days. Instead, teams cluster in local coworking hubs.

Meanwhile, in Germany, a more decentralized economy means workspaces are distributed more evenly across smaller hubs in a number of cities.

New York sees more of a split pattern, with downtown coworking soaring for client-facing roles and suburban satellites on the rise for day-to-day collaboration and project work.

In the Nordics, a cultural focus on wellbeing and work-life balance drives steady but moderate coworking use in all major cities, supported by regulation and employee rights.

These regional differences paint a global picture of hybrid work that's situational, not universal. The reality is that flexibility means different things depending on infrastructure, commuting norms, and culture. So office managers and People leads should be wary of assuming what flexibility will look like for their workforce, or opting for the same model as their competitors.

Myth 3: Flexibility just means chaos in practice

Managers around the world since 2020 have worried that if their teams are handed a flexible work offer, productivity will drop, coordination will collapse, culture will fragment and chaos will reign. There's a valid concern that "out of sight" translates to "out of sync".

But Croissant's millions of hours of coworking data actually shows the complete opposite. One pattern appears consistently across markets and industries: when employees have control over their work environments, they collaborate more deliberately, not less.

When working flexibly employees coordinate deliberately, not randomly, to meet specific teammates in recurring patterns.

"When people have flexibility, they don't scatter randomly," says Croissant's Fernanda Grace Lins. "They synchronize. They plan meetups, they track their team's rhythm, they decide when connection actually matters. What we're seeing is the rise of purposeful collaboration."

This is the fundamental behavioral shift that Croissant's millions of coworking hours make visible: hybrid work has evolved from accident to intention.

Among Croissant's top-performing enterprise clients, recurring team bookings (same teammates, same weekday, same location) have risen 48% since 2022 — clear evidence of routine and predictability.

As Fernanda puts it:

"Flexibility isn't the absence of structure. It's a structure built on behavior."

The repeated clustering trend reflects a self-organizing logic: workers are choosing to gather weekly for alignment and brainstorming, even when their employers don't mandate it. So flexibility doesn't create chaos — it creates collaboration.

Myth 4: Successful hybrid companies replicate the office with a fixed work pattern

Too many leaders apply the old office logic to the hybrid environment and try to enforce strict work patterns for their employees.

Fixed anchor days, rigid schedules, and uniform attendance policies bring some predictability for senior management. But in practice, they end up recreating the very problems hybrid work was designed to solve.

As Croissant's Fernanda Grace Lins puts it:

"The winning companies don't force everyone into the same pattern. They recognize that people have different work styles, and they give teams infrastructure to meet when it matters. Hybrid success isn't about replicating the office—it's about supporting connection."

Croissant data shows huge variance: some employees need coworking time every week; others only every couple of months. The old one-size-fits-all rhythm of 9-to-5, Monday-through-Friday simply doesn't map onto how modern teams operate.

Instead of a fixed HQ, flexible workspace platforms like Croissant give teams a toolkit for designing collaboration around purpose, not presence. This is what we call "infrastructure for intent."

There's no one right way to work in 2025. That means hybrid work isn't about replicating offices, it's about giving teams the infrastructure to connect when it matters.

Myth 5: Coworking takes a vacation

Traditionally, offices used to fall silent in July. As workers flocked out of the cities for a summer break, productivity often dropped, teams scattered and whole floors sat empty in offices.

But the hybrid era has rewritten those rules. In 2025, work doesn't stop in July, it just shifts to a new location.

Croissant data shows that July, long considered a downtime month for office work, is actually one of the busiest periods for coworking activity.

Even while on vacation, workers are still meeting, just in a different way - from beachside coworking spaces or collaboration hubs close to family. This means coworking isn't a seasonal or one-off convenience, it's a year-round habit.

Flexibility has redefined "out of office" to mean "working from anywhere", making the summer slump in coworking a myth of the past.

Myth 6: Companies only use coworking for quarterly offsites

Some still see coworking as a logistical patch to bridge an operational gap - rather than a tenet of the new way of working.

That means they associate it with a temporary or one-off event, whether that's a quarterly retreat, an annual all-hands team get together, a single day of training or a summer brainstorming event.

Croissant's data reveals this mindset is years out of date. After analyzing millions of coworking hours, the pattern is clear: coworking is now part of the daily infrastructure of work. It's part of the rules of working — not the exception.

Croissant's exclusive insights reveal that companies use coworking weekly or monthly for structured meetups, not just one-off offsites.

Data shows that Wednesdays and Thursdays (not Mondays and Tuesdays as we might have thought) now account for most coworking collaboration sessions. That's not randomness; it's a synchronized rhythm teams have organically built.

External data echoes this behavioral shift. The Harvard Business Review found that teams meeting in-person biweekly reported 25% higher trust and cross-functional alignment.

So coworking has evolved from a quarterly gathering to a weekly habit — the modern-day equivalent of a dedicated project room. Companies that still treat it as an occasional perk or temporary bandaid are missing the truth about "purposeful collaboration" as a driver for culture.

Myth 7: Coworking spaces are only for freelancers, not full time staff

Many people assume coworking is where members of the gig economy go to have an office for the day, rather than a collaboration hub for corporate employees.

In the days of the rise of the digital nomad, coworking was all-too-often framed as a vehicle for individual professional freedom. This misconception remains.

But Croissant's data shows the coworking landscape has now flipped. The majority of coworking sessions are now booked by full-time employees working on team projects, not just freelancers looking for reliable Wi-Fi.

"People aren't booking spaces for solitude anymore," says Fernanda. "They're meeting specific teammates, running sprints, and making big decisions. Purposeful collaboration has replaced the old watercooler effect."

Millions of hours of coworking data also show that product, engineering, and R&D teams are the heaviest coworking users — proof that core business functions now rely on flexible space.

If you still see coworking as exclusively a tool for digital nomads wanting to work from Bali - rather than a piece of the puzzle for your enterprise hybrid staff, you could be missing a trick.

Myth 8: A coworking stipend = a successful flexible model

Many confuse flexibility with choice.

The assumption goes: 'if we give our workers a coworking pass for use around the city, or a monthly stipend for coworking, they'll feel satisfied.' In the days of high demand from employees for flexibility, you can see why this is appealing - minimal cost, low policy change, the minimum number of external vendors to deal with and promising optics of being a flexible employer.

Croissant's data, and our many years of behavioral observation, prove this clearly doesn't work. Companies that simply hand out coworking passes without structure or purpose show the lowest utilization and engagement levels.

'Here's a coworking pass, go use it,' with no strategy behind it," says Fernanda Grace Lins, Global Partnerships lead at Croissant. "This kind of flexibility without direction isn't freedom — it's confusion."

In fact, hybrid without structure just becomes remote by default - risking a breakdown in mentorship, a growing loneliness epidemic in the workforce, a co-ordination tax where employees are forced to build culture from scratch and falling productivity rates.

In Croissant's dataset, the strongest engagement comes from organizations that empower employees to design intentional collaboration rhythms — weekly, biweekly, or monthly in-person sessions where teams know why they're meeting.

These companies often record 2–3x higher utilization of coworking than those offering stipends alone. True hybrid success comes from a defined people experience strategy, not just access to spaces.

A stipend may check the box, but it's structure that fuels connection.

A coworking stipend must be underpinned by in-depth data on how employees collaborate. What's more it should be offered as one tool in an intentional hybrid work policy that you envision as a piece of strategic infrastructure into 2026 and beyond.

Myth 9: Utilization data should drive hybrid work

Real estate and operations teams have long measured workspace success by utilization rates. Office managers have kept an eye on how full a space is, and real estate leads have made portfolio decisions simply by how many people walk through the door on a given day. It's tempting to apply the same metric to hybrid work: if coworking seats are filled, the policy must be working. Right? Wrong.

Croissant data shows that utilization alone is a failed indicator of success. What matters is why people are meeting — not simply how often they show up.

"You can have high utilization and still have a disconnected culture," Fernanda notes. "The smarter question is: how many of those bookings involve teammates working together?"

That insight led Croissant to develop its own internal metric: Collaboration Intensity — the percentage of sessions with two or more teammates. It's a behavioral proxy for connection, culture, and engagement.

Croissant data shows that teams with high collaboration intensity also show stronger retention and satisfaction scores.Leesman studies also show that when hybrid policies focus on the quality of collaboration rather than space utilization, we see an almost 20% uptick in employee effectiveness.

A partner like Croissant can help you stitch together data on who collaborates, where, using what kind of space, how often, whether they bring along new colleagues and how their work patterns change seasonally.

This means you can iterate your hybrid work based on actual behavior, not just bums on seats - making hybrid work less about the office itself and more about moments that matter to your employees.

Myth 10: Flexible work is just a phase

Ever since the pandemic, new economic cycles bring predictions of a "return to office" wave. Some believe flexible work to be just a passing post-pandemic experiment that will end as office culture "normalizes".

They could be waiting for some time.

After analyzing data from millions of coworking hours across thousands of cities, Croissant's data shows hybrid work is a designed behavior, not a stopgap.

"People think flexibility is chaos, but it's actually coordination," says Fernanda. "Hybrid work isn't going anywhere — it's becoming measurable."

Croissant's longitudinal data shows consistent or rising coworking usage across 2023–2025, even as traditional office occupancy stagnates.

Externally, Stanford University reports that hybrid work adoption has stabilized at around 60% of all knowledge workers.

Major employers around the globe now see flexibility not as a phase, but as a seismic shift towards a more outcome-driven work model.

The New Rules of Hybrid Work

So we've busted the myths, and exposed the reality of the hybrid work era.

If the post-pandemic years were about adapting to the shock factor of remote work, the hybrid work era of 2024 and beyond is now about optimizing for hybrid and embedding it as an operating principle.

There are clear differences between high-performing teams and those that struggle. So what are the new rules of hybrid work based on Croissant's exclusive data?

1. Micro-collaboration beats quarterly offsites. The traditional offsite is giving way to frequent moments of micro-collaboration through coworking - short, local, and recurring. Data shows these shorter meetups sustain team culture and connection throughout the year more effectively.
2. Measure collaboration intensity over space utilization. Analysis suggests high "collaboration intensity" correlates with better employee satisfaction and retention, while space utilization metrics don't give the full picture.
3. Success in flexible work requires strategy. Chucking a coworking pass as a perk at your teams isn't enough. Data shows employees simply won't engage unless it's underpinned by a clearly articulated strategy.
4. Comparison is the thief of productivity. There's no singular way to work, so investing in a particular kind of building just because your competitors do is a recipe for disaster. The healthiest hybrid cultures aren't tied to a building; they're measured by connection frequency and the unique ways your teams work.

Hybrid work isn't a phase, it's an evolving dataset. And the companies that measure it will master it.