Few workplace topics have generated as much debate over the past few years as the return to the office (and we’re now a good few years in!!!).
Almost every week there seems to be another headline announcing that a major employer is increasing office attendance requirements. At the same time, research continues to show that flexibility remains one of the most important factors people consider when choosing whether to stay with an organisation. According to the CIPD, around 1.1 million UK workers have changed jobs because they couldn’t access the flexibility they wanted.
It’s easy to see why the conversation has become so polarised.
Some argue that collaboration, innovation and culture can only really flourish when people spend more time together. Others see flexible working as a fundamental shift in how work should operate and worry that organisations are undoing years of progress.
Perhaps the problem is that we’re asking the wrong question.
Instead of debating where people work, maybe we should be spending more time thinking about what work actually feels like.
The office isn’t the experience
It’s understandable why office attendance attracts so much attention. It’s visible, easy to measure and relatively straightforward to write a policy about.
Employee experience is far less tangible.
It isn’t created by a building or a location. It’s shaped by hundreds of everyday interactions that influence whether work feels productive, meaningful and manageable.
Two employees might both spend three days a week in the office and have completely different experiences.
One spends their time collaborating with colleagues, making decisions quickly, learning from others and feeling connected to their team.
The other spends the day on video calls from a meeting room because the people they need to work with are based elsewhere. They lose hours commuting only to complete exactly the same tasks they could have done at home.
The difference isn’t where they worked.
It’s what their work enabled them to do.
Flexibility is often about something bigger
When people say they value flexibility, it’s tempting to assume they’re simply asking to work from home more often.
Our experience suggests it’s usually more complicated than that.
Flexibility often represents something much broader. It signals trust. It gives people greater control over how they balance work with the rest of their lives. It allows them to manage caring responsibilities, reduce stressful commutes or simply work at the times when they do their best thinking.
In other words, flexibility isn’t just a workplace policy.
It’s part of the overall experience of work.
That’s why removing it can have such a significant impact, particularly if employees struggle to understand the reason behind the change.
Location won’t solve poorly designed work
Whether people work from home or in the office, many of the frustrations we uncover in client work remain remarkably consistent.
People still navigate overly complicated processes.
They still attend meetings that don’t need to happen.
They still struggle with disconnected systems, unclear priorities and unnecessary bureaucracy.
Changing the location doesn’t automatically change the experience.
We’ve worked with organisations where people were delighted to return to the office because it genuinely made collaboration easier, accelerated decision-making and strengthened relationships.
We’ve also worked with organisations where office attendance highlighted existing frustrations because employees found themselves travelling significant distances simply to spend the day on Teams calls.
Neither outcome was really about the office itself.
It was about whether the work had been designed to make that time together worthwhile.
The question isn’t where people work. It’s why.
Perhaps one of the most overlooked aspects of the return-to-office debate is purpose.
Employees are generally far more willing to embrace change when they understand why it’s happening and can see how it benefits both them and the organisation.
Coming together to solve complex problems, build relationships, innovate or learn from one another feels very different from attending the office simply because policy requires it.
The location may be exactly the same.
The experience is entirely different.
Designing work people want to be part of
At People Lab, we spend a lot of time helping organisations improve employee experience. Interestingly, conversations about office attendance rarely stay focused on office attendance for very long.
Instead, they quickly move towards questions about management, communication, technology, workload, collaboration, decision-making and culture.
That’s because these are the things that shape how work feels every day.
They’re also the things that influence whether people can do their best work.
Perhaps that’s why the return-to-office debate has proved so difficult to resolve.
We’re treating it as though it’s a question about location, when in reality it’s a question about work itself.
Looking beyond the debate
There probably isn’t a single answer that will work for every organisation.
Different sectors, roles and teams have different needs, and that’s unlikely to change.
But as organisations continue to review their approach to office attendance, it may be worth asking a different set of questions.
Instead of focusing solely on where people are working, how often do we stop to consider whether work has been designed in a way that helps people succeed?
Because whether someone is sitting at a kitchen table, a corporate office or somewhere in between, the fundamentals remain the same.
People want to do meaningful work. They want clarity, trust, good relationships and the ability to make progress. They want their time and energy to be spent creating value rather than overcoming unnecessary obstacles.
Perhaps that’s the conversation we should be having more often.
Not whether work happens in the office or at home.
But how we can create work that people genuinely want to be part of, wherever it takes place.
