Why People Choose to Come Into the Office

Key takeaways 

• Employees are more likely to choose the office when it offers 3 things: meaningful connection with colleagues, spaces that support different work activities and a clear shared purpose for being together.

• Office attendance varies significantly throughout the week, so average occupancy can be misleading. Workplaces need flexible zones that feel connected on quieter days and accommodate higher attendance on peak days.

• A high-performing office must support more than collaboration. Employees also need spaces for focused work, confidential conversations, informal interaction and team-based activities.

• Shared commitments, such as team days, town halls, onboarding, and project work, can create stronger reasons to attend than blanket office mandates alone.

• Organisations can improve office attendance by understanding their occupancy patterns, identifying where the home currently supports work better than the office, and creating purposeful ways for teams to spend time together.

When I came into the corporate world in 2016, almost exactly 10 years ago, the big bold experiment was not work-from-home but "Activity Based Working" (ABW). This was a paradoxical workstyle whereby employees were told "You can work wherever you like… so long as it is 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday, somewhere within our office space."

Now in 2026, workstyles have transcended those limitations, but the paradox remains. If you are a senior leader and have a lingering sense of unease at the extent of your people’s in-office time, that's the paradox tapping you on the shoulder.

The question at hand here is "Why do people choose to come into the office?" I am baking in two assumptions into the question. First, coming in is a choice. Second, they people need a reason to choose. I don’t think we should engineer these elements of autonomy and individual control out of the equation, e.g. via blanket mandates or a pure compliance drive. For, as machine learning ascends, we more than ever we need people to be people, not machines.

The historic direction from factory to ecosystem, from stasis to flexibility, from optimised & repeatable, to creative and changeable, has not reversed but is rather intensifying. Now it's not offshoring but AI-shoring, creating a keen awareness of the line between what AI “agents” can do and people can do. Cheat notes: people can do much, much more, if we let them have reasons and choice.

So why would they choose to work with each other in-person?

This is exactly the question I have investigated for many organisations. Each has its own story but here I want to focus on three recurring themes and how, as a leadership team, you can act on the insight. 

#1 Because They Want To Be With People

Here is a typical survey result showing the top reasons an organisation's employees nominated for coming into the office.

As we might expect these are almost all interactive, but the accent is slightly heavier on the emotional side of connection rather than formal descriptions of collaboration. Working from home can be quite lonely and isolating, presenting a real psychosocial risk. Apart from getting stuck in our own heads, the sense of individual vs shared responsibility for tasks and projects can become overwhelming. The sense that we are in it together, that succeed or fail we'll do so as a team, is how we're meant to operate as social creatures.

As such, the last thing in the world you want is an office that, itself, feels as empty and isolated as home can feel.

This presents a very real dilemma, considering what Figure #2 is about to reveal to us.

This graph represents a truth that few have yet cottoned on to - that the term "average occupancy" is not just meaningless but misleading in understanding office population density.

You see, the graph shows how many days in a fortnight an office had different levels of occupancy. We use a fortnight because a fortnight has 10 days.

It is telling us that:

• 1 day a fortnight 10% to 20% of employees come in
• 2 days, 20% to 30%
• 4 days, 30% to 45%
• 2 days, 45% to 55%
• 1 day, 55% to 65%

Imagine the vastly different experience in each of these regular scenarios? You probably don't need to imagine, we've all commuted in only to find a ghost town. Or, a workplace so packed we can't find a place to sit.

Incidentally, if you are surprised at how low these occupancy percentages are, consider that before COVID, average office occupancy was only 80%. This was due to factors such as sickness or carers leave, annual leave, and work being undertake at other locations such as with clients.

For the organisation cited in Figure #2, noting that most hybrid organisations are similar, there is no meaningful average - no "normal" or status quo.

Property planners are faced with a dilemma - if they right-size the office for the busiest day a fortnight, it will feel very empty over at least another 7 days. If they right-size to the average, the big days will be impossible. What to do?

Fortunately there are approaches that allow the workplace to flex with the bell curve. We need to introduce the term density - the # of people in close proximity.

Density correlates to interaction and the very social connectedness that people commute in to experience. The Allen Curve, shown below in Figure #3, shows the relationship between how far two people are sitting from each other and how frequently they interact. The higher the density, the more people are close to other people, the more they can and will interact.

The answer lies in dovetailing zoning and ways of working conventions such that people can create their own density on quiet days, and overflow for short periods into 'touchdown' areas on peak days. This is imminently do-able.

#2 Because the Office is, <ahem>, "Fit-For-Purposes"

The plural there is intentional. As we've already seen, people come in for a variety of purposes. That's still only half the story, since once they are in the office, there could be any number of work activities they need to undertake.

Figure 4, below, shows a typical result when we ask employees which activities are important in their work, and then plot that against how well they say the home environment enables the activity vs the work environment.

We can see that activities involving confidentiality or individual focus are important to people but not well supported in the office environment compared to in the home environment.

If someone would like to come in to collaborate, but also needs to focus or has an individual deadline, this could easily be a decisive factor in choosing to stay home.

The takeaway here is to provide a sophisticated office design that is more than workstations and meeting rooms. The highest performing workspaces provide variety of settings encompassing solo and collaborative work, privacy and openness, formality and informality.

#3 Because They Are Supposed To

I phrase it this way advisedly, and a little cheekily, to cover a range of reasons that are bigger than individual preference or convenience.

There are a range of "Whys" that bring people in on days where, all things being equal, they'd prefer to work from home.

These whys can take many forms but they all derive from some form of social contract or mutual obligation:

• We have a new starter and our team leader has asked us to be in all week to help them settle and feel connected.
• It's the monthly Town Hall which is catered and I did RSVP last week. It's not good form not to show up.
• My team day is Thursday so I don't really have a choice.
• Harry is working to that project deadline and I know it would be helpful if I'm nearby so he can pick my brains.
• Our hybrid policy says 3 days a week in the office, so I better go in.

The bluntest instrument here is a blanket policy. It's not hard to see how a stark quota of days could undermine a mindset of purpose, and no one's success vision includes cohorts of grumpy, reluctant, disengaged employees who have commuted solely because they were told to.

On the other hand, obligations need a level of codifying. And they provide a mechanism for knowing with confidence when the office will be buzzing. At Amicus we have lunch and an informal "around the grounds" chat every Tuesday lunch. There is a broad obligation to be there, and people mostly are, but it is not so black and white that there's no discretion about it at all.

Creating Reasons so the Choice Takes Place

If you want your people to be present more often than they currently are, you can take action based on these three insights with confidence that you’ll be tapping to motivations that genuinely drive behaviour:

1. Understand your occupancy bell curve and create protocols and spaces to create the right density more of the time.

2. Get data on your people’s work activities and evaluate your office design against the full suite. Where their home is outperforming your office space for important activities, rectify the design.

3. Take an inventory of all the ways you are creating a network of social contacts that can drive presence. Apart from your hybrid work policy, consider team-orientated “ways of working” charters that create authentic reasons to spend time in person that are bigger than any individual.

If your office space can be “fit for purposes”, has enough people density most of the time, and cohesive social contracts that help people understand they belong enough to be missed, you have every chance of seeing higher in-person presence.