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Yes. Personal service can lawfully take place anywhere the person can be found: their workplace, the street, a gym, a court building. For people who run a business, the rules even list a place of business as a proper address for service. A professional server will be discreet, but there is no rule making the workplace off limits, and for subjects who are never home, it is often where service succeeds.
Work feels like protected territory, and the mistake is understandable: employment law protects much of what happens there. Service of legal documents is not one of those things.
Personal service attaches to the person, not to any location, so wherever the individual is, service can happen. The Civil Procedure Rules go further for those sued in connection with a business: an individual trader's principal or last known place of business is itself a permitted address for service. Practically, workplaces are attractive to servers for one reason: predictability. A subject who is elusive at home is reliably somewhere between nine and five, and a single workplace attempt often succeeds where five doorstep visits failed.
A server cannot trespass. Public areas, receptions, car parks, the pavement outside, are open; secure office floors are not, and a server refused entry by an employer must leave, though nothing stops them waiting lawfully outside or asking reception to call the person down. Professional conduct rules do the rest: a reputable server arrives without drama, asks for the person by name without broadcasting the reason, confirms identity quietly and hands the documents over in as low key a way as the situation permits. Causing a scene serves nobody, least of all the evidence.
Being served at work has no legal significance beyond service itself: the documents mean the same as they would at your door, and the deadlines are identical. Take them without discussion, deal with the contents privately and promptly, and if the manner of service was genuinely oppressive, humiliating by design rather than merely unwelcome, raise it with the instructing party or the server's professional body. What you should not do is refuse them, since a refusal in front of colleagues achieves the embarrassment without preventing the service.
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This page provides general information about the law and practice in England and Wales and is not legal advice. Rules change and individual circumstances vary; always take advice from a solicitor on your specific situation. Prices shown are indicative, exclusive of VAT and confirmed in writing before any work begins.