• Hybrid Working and Organisational Change: My doctoral research, titled A Critical Analysis of Employee Experience of Hybrid Working in the Office Sector: From Workplace Nomadism to Embedded Hybridity, positions me as an emerging specialist in the evolving dynamics of hybrid working and its impact on organisational structures and culture.
• Employee-Focused Building Change: A central thread running through my research is the primacy of employee experience in shaping decisions about built environments. Rather than privileging managerial or organisational imperatives, my work foregrounds how employees negotiate, adapt to, and are affected by changes in their physical workplaces. I am currently working with several organisations to understand how their hybrid working strategies can be delivered from the employee perspective. This specialism connects directly to my professional background in Office Agency and my ongoing engagement with the RICS, positioning me to contribute meaningfully to evidence-based practice in workplace strategy, asset management, and occupier advisory.
• Collaboration Opportunities Between the University and the Built Environment Sector: As Employer Engagement Lead within the School of Architecture and Built Environment at Northumbria University, I have developed sustained and productive relationships with industry partners across the built environment professions. My specialism in this area encompasses the design and delivery of collaborative initiatives that bridge the gap between academic research and professional practice.
• Education, Employment Collaboration and Authentic Teaching Delivery: My approach to teaching is grounded in the principle that meaningful learning in the built environment professions must be anchored in authentic, practice-based experience. I am interested in researching and publishing on the pedagogy of authentic assessment in professional education, with a particular focus on how employer collaboration can be embedded systematically within curricula to enhance graduate employability and professional identity formation. This specialism reflects my conviction that the most effective built environment educators are those who remain active and credible participants in the professions they teach, ensuring that the classroom and the workplace remain in productive, ongoing dialogue.

Jane Loxley is Assistant Professor and Employer Engagement Lead in the School of Architecture and Built Environment at Northumbria University, where she has held an academic post since 2011. She brings nearly three decades of professional expertise to her research and teaching, including 24 years as a Chartered Surveyor specialising in Office Agency, a practitioner foundation that underpins a distinctively applied and industry-informed research identity. Jane's work is animated by a core intellectual interest in the relationship between organisations, the people who inhabit them, and the built environments through which working life is experienced, negotiated, and transformed. This nexus, spanning employer strategy, employee experience, professional practice, and organisational adaptation, forms the connective tissue of her research, her teaching, and her engagement with the property and built environment professions.

Jane recently completed her PhD at Northumbria University, a study examining employee experience of hybrid working within the office sector. Her thesis, A Critical Analysis of Employee Experience of Hybrid Working in the Office Sector: From Workplace Nomadism to Embedded Hybridity, makes an original contribution to knowledge at a moment of profound and ongoing transformation in how, where, and why people work.

This research speaks directly to some of the most pressing questions facing employers, property professionals, and policymakers today. How do organisations adapt their physical and cultural environments to support new patterns of work? How do employees experience, resist, or embrace hybrid arrangements, and what conditions enable genuine embedding rather than surface-level compliance?

The research-practice nexus that characterises Jane's research is equally evident in her role as Employer Engagement Lead for the School. In this capacity, she has built and sustained an extensive network of relationships with employers across the property, construction, and built environment sectors, relationships that are intellectually generative, informing curriculum design, shaping research questions, and creating the conditions for genuine knowledge exchange between the university and the professions it serves. In 2023, she launched the Built Environment Careers Fair, which is now an annual event, establishing it as a significant regional platform for connecting emerging talent with the professions that will shape the built environment of the future.

This employer engagement work is itself a form of applied research into the relationship between education and professional practice, reflecting Jane's sustained interest in how organisations, including universities, adapt to changing labour markets, shifting professional expectations, and the evolving needs of the workforce.

Jane is a Member of the RICS North East Regional Board, a position she has held since January 2023. Her Board membership reflects and reinforces a long-standing commitment to knowledge exchange between academia and practice: championing the next generation of surveying professionals, influencing the conditions under which they enter and develop within the profession, and ensuring that research-informed, employee-centred perspectives are present and audible at the heart of regional professional life.