Attendance Starts with Design, Not Days

Purpose Over Presence

If you look closely at most organisations struggling with attendance right now, you’ll notice something quite consistent. The problem isn’t that people don’t want to come in. It’s that they don’t see the point of coming in. And that’s a very different challenge from the one many senior leaders think they’re dealing with.

There’s been an extraordinary amount of energy spent arguing about the “right number of days” in the office, as if the friction around hybrid working can be solved by adjusting a dial marked “attendance.” Three days. Two days. Anchor days. Mandated days. “At manager discretion.” “Flexible within teams.” Every variation has been tested somewhere, and yet the same underlying issue keeps surfacing: days alone are not a strategy. They never have been.

The real conversation isn’t about presence. It’s about purpose.

People are perfectly willing to commute when they know the day will be valuable. They resist it when the day is badly designed, unstructured, or—most common of all—no different from what they could have done better at home.

And that’s the leadership blind spot hybrid work keeps exposing: people aren’t resisting the office—they’re resisting a day without purpose.

We’ve entered a world where the office is no longer the default location for work. Its value is no longer assumed. It must be earned. And that shift calls for a much more honest conversation about how workplaces function, how teams behave, and what organisations are actually asking people to do when they make the effort to show up.

The Days Fixation: A Very Expensive Distraction

One of the most counterproductive trends of the last two years is the obsession with day-counting. Attendance has become something organisations try to measure like timesheets, rather than something they design like a product. And this is where so many companies go wrong. They tally bodies, rather than interrogate value.

A policy can force presence, but it cannot create engagement, momentum or connection. Numbers might go up temporarily under mandate, but they almost always fall again once the novelty (or the pressure) fades. That’s because people aren’t responding to the policy—they’re responding to the experience.

Whenever attendance dips, leaders often assume the fix is to adjust the rules. In reality, the rules were never the lever. The experience was.

The question companies should be asking is remarkably simple, yet rarely asked with sincerity: “If we’re asking people to come in, what are they coming in for?”

What Actually Brings People In

Across client projects, global surveys and WEX platform analytics, the patterns are consistent. People will enthusiastically come into a workplace when three things are true: they know who they’ll see, they know what they’ll achieve, and they trust that the space will support the work that actually benefits from being done together.

Collaboration is always the first driver—not the vague “we collaborate better in person,” but the specific types of work where being together changes the outcome: problem-solving, sprint planning, decision-making, design refinement, knowledge exchange, early project alignment, cross-functional sessions, mentoring conversations, and the kind of unstructured dialogue that simply cannot be replicated via video calls.

The second driver is relationships. Humans want to feel part of something. Belonging is not fluffy; it is a hard business advantage. People come in when they know their team, their peers, their “work friends,” and their leaders will be in the same space. That sense of rhythm and presence matters more than most organisations realise. When presence becomes a lottery, attendance collapses.

And the third driver is clarity. People need to know what the in-office day is for. They need structure, predictability, and a sense that the effort of commuting translates into value. When the purpose is clear, attendance becomes natural. When it is ambiguous, attendance becomes negotiable.

The Uncomfortable Truth: Most Offices Simply Don’t Work Anymore

If we’re honest, many offices still reflect a world where individual focus work dominated. The work has changed, but the workspace hasn’t. And this mismatch is at the heart of attendance challenges.

Rows of desks. Meeting rooms that are always full or always too big. Poor acoustics. Technology that works beautifully until six people join from home. Hybrid meetings where half the team can’t see the whiteboard. Neighbourhoods that don’t feel like neighbourhoods. Collaboration spaces that are either too few or poorly located. Focus spaces that are noisy. Social spaces that don’t feel social. It’s a familiar story.

Employees are not irrational—if the office makes their work harder, they’ll avoid it. If the office supports their work, they’ll use it.

Design and behaviour are inseparable. A workplace designed for yesterday’s work patterns will never achieve today’s expectations.

Why Activity-Based Working (ABW) Consistently Outperforms Traditional Models

One of the strongest conclusions from the last decade of workplace transformation is that ABW is not a trend; it is the most pragmatic response to the way work actually happens now. It recognises that different activities require different environments and that people perform best when they can choose the right setting for each task.

In organisations where ABW is implemented intentionally, we see measurable gains—higher attendance, stronger collaboration, greater satisfaction and a more efficient footprint. It works because it respects the reality of how modern teams operate: dynamically, socially, and across varied modes of work.

The most successful ABW environments aren’t flashy; they’re thoughtful. They are built around neighbourhoods that anchor teams, collaboration zones that feel truly shared, quiet spaces that protect focus, hybrid meeting rooms that support equity, and design principles that make movement through the space intuitive.

When the workplace feels purposeful, people treat it that way.

The Behavioural Anchor: The Role of Team Agreements

Even the best-designed workplace fails without behavioural alignment. This is the part of hybrid that trips up most organisations—not because people are resistant, but because they’re unsure.

When are we in? What do hybrid meetings look like? How do we protect focus time? What’s our availability rhythm? How do we support new joiners? Where does mentoring happen?What does “being present” actually mean?

Without answers, teams create their own interpretations. And this fragmentation is the silent killer of hybrid performance.

Team Agreements solve this by creating shared norms. They bring clarity to the very areas that hybrid work exposes: communication patterns, collaboration rhythms, in-person rituals, expectations around availability, mentoring commitments and how the space should be used. When teams agree on how they work, the workplace becomes predictable. And predictability creates trust—one of the most powerful drivers of attendance and performance.

A Practical, Honest Roadmap Forward

There is no shortcut here. Organisations that succeed with hybrid and workplace transformation follow a clear pattern—one rooted in evidence, not assumptions.

They begin by understanding the work at a granular level: the activities, the collaboration patterns, the high-value interactions, the barriers, the frustrations and the moments where proximity truly matters. They then design around those insights, not around hierarchy or legacy layouts. They create environments that support performance, not presenteeism. They engage their people early and build behavioural norms that reinforce the space rather than undermine it. And they test, refine and iterate, rather than leaping to a full overhaul without learning.

They treat the workplace as a system, not a building.

The Real Shift Leaders Need To Make

If hybrid has taught us anything, it’s this: attendance cannot be mandated into existence. It must be designed into existence. People are willing to come in—happily, consistently, enthusiastically—when the workplace helps them do better work, build better relationships, and feel more connected to something meaningful.

The organisations that embrace this truth are the ones seeing attendance stabilise, performance rise and culture strengthen. The ones still focused purely on enforcement are fighting a losing battle.

A workplace earns its occupancy. And when it earns it, it doesn’t need to chase it.

Successful Hybrid Work: It Works by Design, Not by Default

Hybrid Requires Systemic Redesign, Not Attendance Targets

Hybrid working may feel familiar now, but most organizations are still approaching it as if it’s a temporary compromise rather than the new foundation of how work actually happens.

The shift to hybrid wasn’t a gentle evolution. It was an abrupt rewiring of expectations, habits, behaviors and priorities. And yet many companies continue to treat hybrid as a matter of “setting the right number of days,” as if attendance targets alone could create structure, clarity or cohesion. They can’t. Hybrid only works when the entire system around it—workspace, culture, behavior, technology and leadership—has been intentionally redesigned to support it.

From Location Debate to Performance Model

The organizations that succeed with hybrid understand that it’s not a negotiation over where work happens. It’s a re-engineering of how work happens. They treat hybrid as a performance model, not a balancing act between remote and office culture. And they recognize that hybrid will always remain unstable if the environment and expectations around it remain ambiguous.

Hybrid breaks down for predictable reasons. When people don’t understand the purpose behind being in the office, attendance becomes compliance-driven rather than value-driven. If the workplace itself doesn’t reflect how people actually work today, the office quickly becomes a source of friction rather than support. And when teams don’t have shared agreements around communication, collaboration, availability and meeting structure, hybrid turns into a guessing game. People end up working hard, but they’re working without a shared rhythm or clear anchors.

Designing Hybrid Around Evidence, Not Assumptions

What ultimately sinks most hybrid models is ambiguity. People guess. They interpret. They assume. They make decisions based on what feels individually safest rather than what works best for the team. This isn’t because they lack commitment. It’s because the rules were never clarified. Hybrid exposes every gap that used to be filled by proximity, and unless those gaps are closed intentionally, they widen.

Where hybrid works, it works for one simple reason: it’s designed around evidence rather than assumptions.

Leaders start by understanding the actual work being done, the activities that benefit from in-person interaction, the moments that create value when people gather, and the tasks that are better suited to quiet, uninterrupted remote work. They listen to their teams. They analyze collaboration patterns, friction points and opportunity areas. They understand the practical and emotional triggers behind attendance. And they build hybrid rhythms around what truly matters rather than what feels administratively convenient.

They also understand that hybrid is not a monolithic model. Different teams require different patterns. A product team’s hybrid rhythm will never mirror the needs of a finance function or a customer support group. Successful organizations calibrate hybrid at the team level rather than forcing one blanket structure across the business. They allow variation where the work demands it, but they structure that variation with clarity so it doesn’t devolve into chaos.

The Workplace as a Strategic Differentiator

A major differentiator in successful hybrid organizations is the workplace itself. They do not expect a traditional office layout - designed around individual desks and large formal meeting rooms - to support a hybrid workforce that now relies far more on collaboration, mobility, connection and focused bursts of interaction. They redesign their spaces with intention. They give people settings that are fit for purpose: places for deep focus, informal discussions, structured workshops, hybrid meetings, quiet individual work, project-based collaboration and social connection. They reduce the dominance of assigned desks and create a living environment that reflects the real patterns of modern work.

The transformation isn’t aesthetic. It’s functional.

The workplace becomes a tool rather than a location, a place that helps people work better together, rather than simply a place where work used to happen by default. And when a workplace is designed to support the work, attendance becomes voluntary, steady and purposeful rather than forced, inconsistent and transactional.

Team Agreements Create Operational Clarity

Even the best workplace design still collapses if the behaviors inside it don’t align. This is where Team Agreements become the backbone of successful hybrid working. These agreements aren’t policies; they’re the shared understanding of how a team works together.

They define what good communication looks like, when people gather in person, how meetings run, how decisions move forward, how availability is managed, how junior staff gain visibility and support, how focus time is protected and how teams use the office when they’re together. When teams co-create these agreements, hybrid stops feeling improvised and starts feeling intentional. People no longer negotiate the basics on the fly. Expectations are aligned, and trust rises.

Hybrid also succeeds when leaders embrace their role in creating clarity. Hybrid is not a hands-off model. It requires leaders to be accessible, consistent and grounded. Teams need to see how their leaders use the office, how they manage availability, how they support collaboration and how they model the behaviors that make hybrid work sustainable. Leadership ambiguity becomes team ambiguity. Leadership clarity becomes team confidence.

The Payoff of Getting Hybrid Right

When hybrid is done well, its benefits are significant. Teams collaborate more effectively because their in-person time is purposeful. Employees feel more balanced because they can choose environments that support their cognitive and emotional rhythms. Attendance becomes more stable because the workplace adds value instead of adding friction.

Onboarding improves because teams intentionally build moments for connection rather than relying on chance. Culture becomes visible again instead of dispersed and diluted. And organizations gain a more efficient, thoughtful real estate footprint because space is designed around activity rather than tradition.

Hybrid working doesn’t fall apart because people prefer their homes. It falls apart because organizations haven’t yet redesigned the environment, expectations and behaviors that hybrid requires to succeed. Once those building blocks are in place, hybrid becomes one of the most effective, human-centered and performance-driven ways of working available.