Conversation with a UK Top 50 Workplace Leader

Saskia Lorrison has spent her career shaping how some of London’s most complex organisations think about their people and their places.

This year, that work has been formally recognised as Saskia has been named one of the UK’s Top 50 Workplace Leaders in 2026. 

This recognition arrives as she is making one of the boldest moves of her career: leaving London and relocating to Nairobi to join KOFISI as Special Projects Director. 

We caught up with her to celebrate her latest achievement and understand why she chose to move continents.

Workplace Has Always Been About People

Saskia’s view of workplace strategy is not shaped by real estate metrics or portfolio optimisation. It is shaped by something harder to measure and more consequential: whether the people inside a building feel genuinely supported.

“I loved the idea that the workplace wasn’t just about buildings. It was about people, behaviour, culture and experience.”

That conviction has informed everything she has built since. And it leads directly to a framework she returns to often when evaluating workplace decisions: the impact on what she calls “employee number 738.”

“Someone completely removed from the real estate or strategy conversation, who simply shows up, does meaningful work, and needs their environment to support them. Does your decision make their day easier? Less stressful? More human?”

The Service Layer Most Workplaces Are Still Missing

The gap Saskia identifies most consistently in workplace strategy is not physical. Organisations have invested heavily in the built environment, in amenities, design and technology. The deficit, she argues, is in service.

As the lines between workplace and hospitality continue to converge, the organisations that will lead are those that have already internalised what hospitality has always known: that how a space makes someone feel is not secondary to function. It is the function.

“What’s often missing is the actual service layer. The feeling people get when they walk into a space. Hospitality understands this instinctively. It’s emotional. It’s human. It’s about anticipation, warmth and experience.”

Why Nairobi and Why KOFISI

Relocating from London to Nairobi required Saskia to examine assumptions she had not realised she was carrying.

“Coming from London, you naturally assume the most progressive workplace thinking is concentrated in cities with huge budgets and established corporate infrastructure,” she told us. “Then I found KOFISI. Many of the ideas companies in London had been discussing for years were already happening here and happening brilliantly.”

KOFISI was recently named one of the Financial Times’ Fastest Growing Companies in Africa for 2026, the second consecutive year the organisation has received that recognition. 

That is part of what makes Saskia’s relocation to Nairobi so meaningful. She has worked across workplace strategy, employee experience and organisational change at some of the most complex corporate environments in London and is taking this expertise to KOFISI.

“The first time I walked into a KOFISI space, I was greeted by name, even though it was my first visit. That meant more to me than any expensive fit-out, amenity or design feature ever could. That’s what people remember and it’s what a workplace experience should feel like.”

For an industry still searching for the right language to describe what truly great workplace experience means, Saskia Lorrison has already found it. And she has found a place where it is already being lived at KOFISI.