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What are employees actually saying?
The opening research analysed more than 108,000 responses to general workplace surveys (by design, none of which were specifically about Return to Office, or RTO). From those responses came more than 430,000 individual talking points, and of those, only about 15,000 (roughly 4%) even touched on RTO or hybrid working. Perhaps it’s unsurprising given those are ‘industry’ terms — but a deeper dive into the data revealed the conversations people are having anyway.
Several findings stood out:
- Employees describe experiences related to RTO, even when they’re not asked about it. Few organisations actually ask employees about Return to Office directly, yet employees’ experiences are already surfacing in broader workplace feedback; the challenge is recognising the signals.
- Employees rarely talk about “Return to Office”. They describe the commute, finding a desk, office noise and video calls from their desk. Keyword searches alone can miss these signals; deeper analysis surfaces the everyday experiences behind employees’ return to the office.
- The strongest signals are simple — it’s about people and space. Other drivers like technology and business outcomes barely register.
- Employees appear to judge the office through a value exchange: what they give up to attend versus what they get in return. It’s a hypothesis that needs further testing, but it could explain workplace experience well beyond the RTO conversation.
So, if employees are weighing what they give up against what they get back, who sets the terms of that exchange?
Who decides, and who decides who decides?
This first question put to the room was deliberately simple, and it exposed a recurring disconnect between those who set mandates and those who have to make them work.
Experiences varied widely. In one organisation, decisions were coordinated between executive leadership and the facilities and building operations teams, based on evidence gathered from colleagues, with a stated willingness to “pull a lever” later if needed. In another, a mandate was driven largely by HR, with the real estate team being asked to validate and accommodate it. In a third, a move from three to four days was announced by the CEO with little collaboration, leaving operational teams scrambling to make it work. One participant noted that their team received just two weeks’ notice ahead of the wider organisation.
The contrast was telling. Where operations teams were involved early, they could say what was physically possible and leave room to adjust. Where they weren’t, they inherited a target without the capacity to meet it. The harder question was purpose, a theme that returned when discussing mandates.
Mandates, monitoring and the question of “why”
When it comes to mandates, participants agreed participants agreed the RTO conversation has moved beyond the pandemic and evolving employee expectations to include generational expectations, talent and attraction, and how to preserve learning and development.
One organisation has chosen to treat flexibility as a differentiator for attracting talent, applying the same policy to every grade, and even committed not to review the policy for three years to give it a sense of permanence. Its policy of three days, ideally including a Monday or Friday, is a soft guideline rather than a rule. Others take a harder line. Attendance is tracked by swipe card, reported through personal dashboards and, in some cases, built into performance management. That prompted a wry discussion of emerging practices like “coffee swiping” (badging in, having a coffee and leaving for the day). As one participant put it: set a quantitative target and people will find ways around it.
The bluntest answer to “why?” was also the most honest: organisations have expensive space, stakeholders to answer to, and an instinctive discomfort with empty buildings. Others argued that a company’s buildings are part of how it signals who it is — its brand, its culture, its community. Still, few could point to hard evidence that mandates improve productivity or collaboration, strengthening the argument that experience matters as much as policy.
Further external research also suggested that hours worked outside the office have remained roughly flat in the US despite the proliferation of mandates, hinting at a compliance gap. Several attendees were keen to see what the performance data shows in two or three years, comparing organisations with firm policies against those with flexible ones.
That raised a different question: instead of just enforcing attendance, could technology make it more worthwhile? Rather than counting heads through badge scans and desk bookings, it could nudge people to come in when the colleagues they most need will be there. It could also iron out the “kinks” that make the working day harder. For example, why does booking a desk not prompt employees to book a parking space, pre-order lunch or plan their day around the colleagues who will be in?
Capacity, occupancy and the peak-day problem
The discussion then turned to data versus expectation. One participant observed that if average occupancy before the pandemic was around 60%, we may not be doing so badly now, yet organisations are still chasing levels they never achieved before 2020. Another described designing a new headquarters for roughly 70% attendance, only for leaders to panic when four days a week implied 80% occupancy daily. The challenge is that averages hide peaks. Tuesday to Thursday run hot while Fridays remain stubbornly quiet, so a building that works on paper can feel full on the days that matter.
Physical limits were stark. One organisation described having around 50% more people assigned to a building than desks in it, so asking for more attendance simply is not possible without changing something else. A shift from three to four days was also assumed to be cost-neutral, even though service levels, cleaning, catering and security all scale with footfall.
Participants explored several responses:
- One size fits all? Some participants said that not every role needs the same working pattern; for example, traders versus IT teams. Others questioned whether tiering might create a two-tier workforce. Equally, some colleagues may resent those with more flexibility, while others, relocated away from the headquarters, may feel sidelined or less visible.
- Are satellite hubs part of the solution? Smaller sites on the edge of a major urban centre, each hosting a few hundred people, have proved remarkably popular. They address the commute, which several participants noted is among the top reasons people give for not coming in, and has nothing to do with the experience of the workplace itself.
- Earning the commute through experience. While results were mixed, some participants recalled trying to lure employees to the office with events and activities taking place on quieter days.
The common thread was that capacity is not just a question of how many desks a building has, but of how many people judge the journey worthwhile on a given day. Where ways of working are developed through discussion and coordination across business units, peaks and troughs can be smoothed out; rely on mandates alone, and Fridays are likely to stay quiet.
Planning for the long term in a short-term world
Real estate decisions are made over anywhere between five and twenty years, yet not many felt confident forecasting headcount even two years out. One attendee described a ten-year lease containing a five-year facilities contract, an eight-year fit-out depreciation cycle and a decision about how people work that gets revisited every six months, all moving at different speeds. Workforce planning remains a shared challenge, and AI-related headlines only add to the uncertainty. Lease terms are becoming more flexible, but perhaps not quickly enough, and, unlike a decade ago, few would willingly sign a long lease today.
One organisation credited its speed to having property and real estate teams embedded in the business, which let them build flexibility into deals and respond quickly as plans changed. Elsewhere, design, location and operations were decided in separate silos. When headcount and policy keep shifting, the room suggested that agility depends on how closely facilities and property teams are plugged into the business.
The fundamentals still win
Whatever the planning horizon, the building still needs to work for the people in it. One participant described consulting 1,500 colleagues on a brand-new building, with great investment in social space, a staff restaurant with the best view, and a more relaxed feel. The result is a modern, popular workplace that is, fundamentally, still a workplace. That prompted a challenging thought: have the basic needs of people in the workplace really changed? After all is said and done, a desk, a comfortable chair, technology that works and somewhere quiet to focus still top the list of employee priorities.
Others offered practical lessons. In the move from individual offices to open plan layouts, meeting rooms often get commandeered by executives for private calls, reducing collaborative space. This makes features like acoustic phone booths more important than ever. Similarly, even in hot-desking environments, people remain territorial about their ‘regular’ space.
The biggest frustration is also the simplest: people come in, then spend the day on video calls they could have taken at home. That is a fundamental challenge to the “why” of RTO mandates, and employees are starting to ask what the office adds if the day looks the same. But it is also a clear opportunity. The office’s advantage is the in-person time it makes possible, so the task is to design days, spaces and schedules around what is best done together, and to create the opportunity for colleagues and teams to attend the office on the same days to benefit from face-to-face collaboration. The case for in-person time is still being built, however, which is why capturing the evidence matters.
Gathering that evidence starts with asking. As the discussion made clear, workplace teams have often decided how people should work rather than asking them. As one participant put it, the environment needs to serve the business, not the other way round. Understanding how people actually work, and what they need from a day in the office, is how we answer the “why”.
AI, people and talent
Looking ahead, the room turned to the inevitable topic of AI. Practical questions came first. How will offices cope when people start talking to their AI tools aloud? Does that signal a revival of the private office (which some research suggests younger generations would like)?
The broader concern was talent development. Analytical and research tasks that once trained graduates are exactly those AI can now perform. Several attendees expect headcount to hold flat rather than fall sharply, but someone still has to verify AI's output, and at some point there will be no one to replace those who can. If juniors never learn the craft, where do the next senior leaders come from?
This connects to the generational debate. Participants suggested that younger colleagues often want to be in the office, but also want their more experienced colleagues there to learn from, and that expectations differ by tenure and generation. It was also suggested that few organisations have defined what their culture really means in practice. Without that, expectations of when to be in, and why, are left to chance, and that matters most for the junior colleagues who learn by watching.
Questions remain, but the opportunity is clear
Across the evening, a consistent picture emerged: employees weigh what the office asks of them against what it gives back, and the strongest outcomes came where those delivering the workplace had a say in the decision. Mandates may get people through the door, but but being able to work effectively, as well as a positive experience, is what makes them want to return.
Of course, much remains to be answered. How do we decide who should be in, and when, based on evidence rather than assumption? And how do we measure the value exchange while protecting the development of junior talent as AI changes their work? The answers will depend on the organisation and what it wants to achieve from a strategic, cultural and talent perspective.