Six years ago, there was a sudden disruption to something many of us had considered almost immutable: where work happens.
The pandemic forced a huge number of people to work from home, and technologies and practices that had previously developed slowly suddenly had to catch up. What had been an exception became normal remarkably quickly. It also showed us that many knowledge-work jobs could be done somewhere other than the employer’s premises.
Now the pendulum appears to be moving again.
In Finland, several large employers have recently increased expectations for working on-site. OP Pohjola has announced that employees in its central organisation will be expected to spend at least half of their working time at the office. Tieto has introduced guidance that employees should work at the office or customer premises at least three days a week.
The reasons are understandable: learning, innovation, collaboration and getting people to meet each other more often.
And I get it. I absolutely do.
There are things we gain from seeing each other face-to-face that are difficult to recreate online. We get to know our colleagues differently. We go for lunch together and have conversations nobody thought to put in a calendar. Sometimes the five-minute conversation while getting coffee turns out to be more useful than the Teams meeting that was actually scheduled.
I also recognise the value from a work ability perspective. When we see people regularly, we pick up small changes in behaviour, routines or energy that may be harder to notice through scheduled online meetings. That doesn’t mean we can’t support wellbeing or work ability remotely, but it does mean we have less everyday information available to us.
And I understand the other side just as well.
Flexibility over where we work has made a real difference to people’s lives. Not commuting gives time back. Home may also be a much better place for concentrated work than a busy office. And after several years of hybrid work, people have organised their lives around that flexibility. Giving some of it up isn’t necessarily a small change.
I don’t think either side of this discussion is particularly difficult to understand.
Organisations have good reasons for wanting people to spend time together. Employees have good reasons for valuing flexibility. And ultimately, organisations have the right to decide where work gets done. I’m not questioning that.
But I still find myself thinking:
Hang on… have we thought enough about what happens when we make that decision?
If learning, collaboration and connection are what we want, does specifying a number of office days actually create them?
And what else might change at the same time?
Being at the office is not the same as working together
If the aim is collaboration, learning, innovation or connection, getting people through the office door is only the first step. What happens once they are there depends on the work they are doing, the space they are doing it in, who else is there and how the work has been organised.
This is also what I recognise from working with hybrid arrangements. Sometimes people come to the office only to spend much of the day in remote meetings. Sometimes everybody comes in, but on different days. Sometimes the office itself makes the work people came there to do surprisingly difficult.
None of this means that coming to the office doesn’t have value. It means that the value doesn’t come from presence alone.
And that’s why I think there are some questions worth asking.
Five questions for better hybrid work
1. Why do we want people there?
If the answer is collaboration, what kind of collaboration? If it is learning, how do we expect that learning to happen? If we want more innovation, what do we expect people to do differently when they are together?
“Collaboration” is a difficult argument to challenge because almost nobody is going to say that they don’t want collaboration. But it is also a very broad word.
Before using it as a reason for office presence, I think we need to be clearer about what we actually mean by it.
2. What kind of office are we asking people to come to?
If we want people to collaborate, does the office make it easy to collaborate? Can they also concentrate when they need to? Are there enough meeting rooms and quiet spaces? Can you take a confidential call somewhere? And if everybody actually follows the new policy, is there enough room for everybody?
The Finnish Institute of Occupational Health studied exactly this in its Why Come to the Office? project. One of its conclusions was that the office needs to support different kinds of work and make both working and interacting with others easy. The researchers describe the office not only as a physical space, but also as a social and cultural one.
I think this is an important point. If we want people to come to the office for different reasons, the office needs to make those things possible. Collaboration needs places where people can actually work together. Concentration requires somewhere to concentrate. Hybrid meetings need spaces and technology that allow people who aren’t there to participate properly.
There is something slightly odd about asking people to come to the office for collaboration and then finding that everyone spends the day wearing noise-cancelling headphones because that’s the only way to get any work done.
3. What are people actually doing there?
Not all work benefits from the same environment. Solving a difficult problem together, onboarding someone new or developing an idea as a group may be better face-to-face. Reading, analysing data or writing something that requires concentration may be a different story.
The Finnish Institute of Occupational Health also recommends looking at hybrid work from the perspective of the actual work tasks, rather than assuming the same arrangement suits all work.
And the same job can contain both kinds of days. One day I may benefit enormously from sitting in the same room with my colleagues. On another, I may spend the entire day in online meetings with people in other countries or need several uninterrupted hours to concentrate.
Perhaps the more useful question isn’t which jobs can be done remotely, but which activities benefit from being done together.
4. Will the people we need actually be there?
This is another challenge I’ve encountered when working with hybrid arrangements. People come to the office, just not necessarily on the same days. Everyone may be following the model exactly as intended, but they still aren’t there together.
This is why I think we need to be careful about using teamwork as a straightforward argument for more office days. Research suggests that communication and coordination matter, as does how face-to-face and virtual interaction are combined. Hybrid work doesn’t automatically mean weaker team cohesion when good practices are in place.
Perhaps teamwork isn’t so much an argument for more time at the office as it is for being there at the right time, with the right people.
5. How will we know whether it worked?
Let’s say we want better collaboration, so we increase the number of days people spend at the office. Six months later, office attendance is up considerably.
Did it work?
Maybe.
But what we know is that people came to the office. We don’t yet know whether they collaborated more. And wasn’t collaboration the whole point of the exercise?
This is where measurement becomes important. Office attendance is relatively easy to measure. The things we actually hope to achieve, such as collaboration, learning, connection or innovation, are much harder. But if those are the reasons for changing the way we work, shouldn’t we try to find out whether they changed too?
It makes me think of Steven Kerr’s classic article On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B. Kerr described the persistent organisational tendency to reinforce one behaviour while hoping for another.
In hybrid work, perhaps our A is presence and our B is collaboration.
If the goal is better collaboration, we could look at whether people actually feel it has become easier to work together, whether teams are interacting more across boundaries, or whether people are learning more from one another. The right measures will depend on what the organisation was trying to achieve in the first place.
The important thing is not to let the easiest thing to measure become the thing we mistake for success.
So where does that leave us?
I’m not arguing against office mandates, and I don’t think employees should always be able to decide for themselves where they work. Organisations have business needs and ultimately need to decide how work is organised.
What I’m questioning is the leap from:
We need more collaboration.
to:
Everyone should be at the office three days a week.
There is quite a lot happening between those two statements.
We are inevitably working in a different world of knowledge work than we were seven years ago. Technology has changed what can be done remotely and how easily we can work with people who may be hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. But people have changed too. Years of flexible work have shaped expectations about autonomy, flexibility and what people are willing to accept from an employer.
We can’t simply turn the clock back and pretend none of that happened.
My hope is that we get better at making these decisions based on evidence rather than assumptions. Not only asking what technology makes possible, but looking at the work itself, how people actually collaborate, what different environments enable, and how our choices may affect engagement, retention, productivity and our ability to attract the people we need.
The answer may very well be more time together at the office.
But I’d like us to understand why, what we expect to gain from it, and what else might change as a consequence.
So before deciding whether the answer is two days, three days or fifty percent, perhaps it’s worth stopping for a moment.
Hang on…
What do we actually expect to happen when people spend more time at the office?
What else might happen as a consequence?
And how will we know whether we got what we were looking for?
References
Vartiainen, M., & Vanharanta, O. (2024). True nature of hybrid work. Frontiers in Organizational Psychology, 2, 1448894.
Finnish Institute of Occupational Health. Why Come to the Office? Opportunities and Challenges of Self-guided Hybrid Work.
Finnish Institute of Occupational Health (2024). The hybrid work model guide challenges people to experiment with new ways of managing and organising work.
Handke, L., Aldana, A., Costa, P. L., & O’Neill, T. A. (2024). Hybrid Teamwork: What We Know and Where We Can Go From Here. Small Group Research, 55(5), 805–835.
Rouhelo, O. (2024). Team cohesion in hybrid work: Effects of hybrid work and approaches for development. Aalto University master’s thesis.
Kerr, S. (1975). On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B. Academy of Management Journal, 18(4), 769–783.