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.