The office as a magnet: not just a place to clock in

When the workplace stopped bringing us together automatically, the office stopped being a given. Now it has to earn the trip. A strong community in person doesn’t happen by itself. It has to be designed. Together.

The question we still hear most often in organisations is: “How many days at home, and how many days in the office?” But it’s rarely the right question. The right one is: How do we create quality, relationships and a shared direction when nothing brings us together by default any more? That’s exactly what has changed. The office used to be the place where culture just happened: in the corridors, by the coffee machine, across the desk. Today we have to build it deliberately.

The office should be a magnet, not a checkpoint

In Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, 38% of hybrid employees say their biggest challenge is knowing when and why they should actually go into the office. And when the answer is unclear, required attendance easily turns into resistance. Rigid attendance rules aren’t just unpopular, they cost you people. Randstad’s Workmonitor 2025, with responses from more than 26,000 employees in 35 countries, shows that 44% have already quit a job because of a lack of flexibility, and that 36% would do so if they were refused a request for flexible working.

And yes, as leaders we can of course set whatever terms we like and require people to come in. But is that really the right approach? Back in 2024, the Confederation of Danish Industry (Dansk Industri) concluded that the most effective way to increase attendance isn’t more rules, but a better office. Voluntary attendance needs an office that’s worth the visit. In other words, we have to stop thinking of attendance as something we enforce, and start thinking of it as something we attract.

What are we actually best at when we’re together?

A magnet only works if there’s something valuable at the other end. That’s why the most important exercise isn’t counting days. The most important exercise is working out what we’re actually best at when we’re physically together, and then investing in exactly that.

The office is strongest at relationships, and at anything that thrives on being together: onboarding new colleagues, the difficult conversations, bouncing ideas off each other, innovation and culture. This is where trust is built, and where informal knowledge flows. On the other hand, the office is often worse than home for individual deep work, and for virtual meetings taken from a desk in a busy open-plan space. Neither place is better overall. We just have to use each space for what it does best.

Try sitting down as a team and making a list of what gives you energy and what you get the most out of when you’re together. Then the office starts to make sense again. Not because someone decided it, but because you found the strengths yourselves and decided to invest in them, together.

Plan what your time together is for

This is the mistake we see most often: we call people into the office, and then have them sit at their own screens in back-to-back virtual meetings, side by side. Sound familiar?

“I simply haven’t had time for a cup of coffee at the office today.”

That’s what one leader told us. If you hear something similar in your organisation, it should be a big flashing warning light. Because if none of the shared time is spent on what can only happen in person, the trip has no value. We’ve written more about meeting inflation in Meeting overload: how to get your focus time back.

The solution is to plan the shared time as deliberately as we plan everything else that matters. Design at least one block of office time a month around something that can only happen when you’re in the same room. Not routine, but real shared work, relationships or learning. And remember the paradox: even the spontaneous has to be planned. Informal time together doesn’t happen by itself in day-to-day hybrid work; it needs space in the calendar.

Three questions you can use as a guide the next time you bring the team together:

• What do we use office time for that we couldn’t do just as well from home?
• Who haven’t we had a real conversation with in two weeks?
• What would happen if we cancelled half the meetings and spent the time on deep work and each other instead?

A strong community rests on a shared framework

Freedom works best when the ground rules are clear. Gallup finds that 91% of employees see the hybrid policy as fair when the team itself decides the framework. So the precondition for a strong community at the office is that you’ve done the groundwork: a hybrid team agreement, also known as a team charter. Not as an HR policy from above, but as the team’s own ground rules. We’ve been saying this since 2022, when we wrote about renegotiating the team contract and growing a hybrid culture. It’s a job for team leadership, and it can’t be handed off to the communications department.

Sit down together and get specific about:

1. When do we meet in person, and why? What’s the purpose of our time together?
2. Which tool do we use for what? Email, chat, meetings and documents. When do we use which channel?
3. When do we expect a reply, and when don’t we?
4. How do we record decisions and agreements?
5. How do we make sure everyone takes part equally in hybrid meetings?
6. How do we notice if someone is drifting away from the team?
7. When do we review the way we work?

Once the framework is in place, the office doesn’t have to be somewhere you clock in. It becomes somewhere you come back to, because something happens there that doesn’t happen anywhere else.

Start small. Set aside an hour with the team for your first draft of a team charter, and reserve one block of office time in the coming month for something only you can do together. That’s often enough to feel the difference between an office you have to go to and an office you want to go to. And if you’d like a hand with the process, that’s exactly what we work on in team development, as a workshop or a talk. Write to us here, and we’ll get back to you with a concrete proposal.