Return to Office vs Workplace Design
If your people won't come in, the problem isn't your people. It's the office.
That's not a popular thing to say in some boardrooms. Return-to-office mandates are back in fashion: three days a week, four days a week, "we expect to see you at your desk." The logic seems simple. Leaders pay for the space, so the space should be used.
But a mandate doesn't fix the reason people stayed away. It just forces them to turn up to the same problem.
A mandate is a symptom, not a strategy
When attendance is low, there are two ways to respond. You can tell people to come in, or you can ask why they don't want to.
The first is quick, cheap and easy to announce. It also tends to produce the least valuable version of the office: people sitting at desks they could have used at home, on video calls they could have taken at home, in a space that does nothing their kitchen table can't.
The second takes more effort, but it's the only one that fixes anything.
What the data actually shows
Across our workplace studies since 2022, average desk utilisation sits at just 42%. On a typical day, more than half the desks you pay to heat, light, clean and furnish are doing nothing.
The usual reaction is to blame hybrid working. But look at how the space is used, and a different story emerges. Rows of identical desks. Too few places to collaborate. Meeting rooms that are booked but half empty. Nowhere quiet enough to focus. An office designed for a version of work that stopped being the norm years ago.
People aren't avoiding the office. They're avoiding an office that isn't worth the commute.
People go where the space works for them
We've seen this on live projects, and the pattern is consistent: give people a better reason to come in, and they do.
CBRE IM: we cut desk density by 50%. Staff came back, because the workplace was built around real flexibility rather than a desk for everyone.
Manchester Airports Group: fewer desks, more variety, and genuine choice in how and where people work.
Savills Birmingham: two offices and two cultures merged into one workplace that people actually wanted to be part of.
None of these projects relied on a mandate. They relied on getting the design right, and that starts with understanding how people work today, not how an org chart assumes they should.
Why the "lazy fix" is so tempting
Mandates are attractive because they feel like control. They need no data, no design work and no investment, and they give leaders something clear to point at.
But they come with costs that rarely show up in the announcement:
Mandate | Design | |
Why people come in | Because they have to | Because the space helps them work |
How staff feel | Resentful and watched | Trusted and given choice |
Your best people | Start looking elsewhere | Want to stay |
The space | Full, but not useful | Built around real work |
Output | Attendance goes up, nothing else does | Productivity and culture follow |
A packed office that doesn't help people do their jobs is just an expensive way of looking busy
What to do instead
If you want people in the office, start with three questions.
1. Who is using the space, and how? Measure it. Occupancy, desk use, meeting room demand and peak days all tell you what's actually happening, rather than what people assume is happening.
2. What do people come in to do? Collaborate, learn, socialise, focus on the work they can't do at home? Design for those reasons, not for a desk count.
3. What's getting in the way? Missing rooms, screens that won't connect, no way to find a free space. Small frictions put people off faster than big design flaws.
Then design around the answers. That might mean fewer desks and more collaboration space, better technology, or zones that suit different kinds of work. It rarely means more of the same.
The bottom line
A return-to-office mandate treats low attendance as a discipline problem. It's almost always a design problem.
Get the workplace right, and the numbers follow: sharper productivity, a stronger culture, and teams who want to be there.
Want the research behind how people really use the office? Download the Dynamic Workplace Report.
