The return-to-office fight is loud again. Just last week, hundreds of California state workers drove into downtown Sacramento and stopped traffic for blocks, protesting a new in-office mandate and asking for a daily stipend to cover the cost of the commute. Banks like PNC have gone to five days a week. Fidelity, Instagram and NBCUniversal have all tightened up heading into 2026.
The companies all say the same thing. Being together builds culture. There is some truth to that. But there is also a growing pile of research showing that when you force the issue without giving people a reason, it backfires. Eight in ten companies admit they have lost talent over their RTO rules. The ones with the strictest mandates see the highest turnover.
So before we talk about getting people into the office, it is worth being honest about why so many of them would rather not be.
Why People Push Back
It is easy to read the resistance as people just wanting to stay home in their pajamas. That is not it.
People who work from home report better work-life balance. The commute is the big one. For a lot of folks it is an hour or more each way, time and gas money that buys them nothing. Then there is focus. Plenty of people get more done at the kitchen table than they ever could in an open office with someone tapping them on the shoulder every twenty minutes. And there is the quiet relief of not being “on” all day, not having to look busy and available every minute.
None of that is laziness. Those are real things people are holding onto, and any honest talk about the office has to start by admitting they have a point.
What the Office Actually Offers
Here is the other side of it, though, and it is just as real.
When you ask people what would actually make them want to come in, the answer is almost never the desk or the building. It is the people. In one Harvard study, more than 80% said the thing that would pull them in was rebuilding team bonds and spending time with coworkers. About 74% said seeing their work friends. The office gives you the hallway chat that solves a problem in two minutes, the new hire who learns by overhearing how things get done, the small moments of connection you just cannot schedule over video.
Here is the catch. None of that happens on its own just because people are in the building. You can fill a room with people and still have everybody sitting there with headphones on, watching the clock.
Making the Day Worth It
This is where the real work is, and it has less to do with policy than most leaders think. If you want people in the office, the day has to be worth what it costs them to get there. Here are a few things that genuinely help:
- Get the right people in on the same days. This one matters more than just about anything, and most companies blow it. There is nothing more deflating than fighting traffic for an hour, walking in, and finding out the three people on your team all stayed home that day while you sit on video calls in a conference room by yourself. Do that to someone twice and they stop seeing the point. Figure out who actually works together, and get them in on the same days.
- Save in-person days for in-person work. Asking someone to commute in so they can put on headphones and do heads-down work they could have done at home is a quiet insult, even if nobody says it out loud. The office earns its keep on the messy, collaborative stuff. Build the in-office days around that, and let people keep their quiet work for home.
- Give people something to show up for. A standing team lunch on Wednesdays. A Friday afternoon where the last hour is just people talking. A morning huddle that is more catch-up than status report. These sound almost too small to matter, but they are the glue. They give people a reason to be there at a certain time, and over the months they turn a group of coworkers into a team.
- Recognize people out loud, in the room. When someone does good work, the in-person day is your shot to say so in front of everybody, in a way a quick message never quite manages. A trophy on a desk or an award handed over in front of the team lands so much harder than a line in a group chat. That is exactly what a thoughtful employee recognition awards program is built to do. People remember the day they got recognized in front of their peers. They forget the Slack notification by lunch.
- Sweat the small gestures. A welcome-back lunch. A thank-you sitting on someone’s desk when they get in. The occasional employee gift that tells people you are glad they came in, not just that you counted them. It does not cost much, and people can always tell the difference between a company that wants them there and one that is just taking attendance.
None of this takes a grand plan or a big budget. It just takes looking at the office from the employee’s side of the commute, and asking whether the day you want them to show up for is actually worth the trip.
You can order people back to the building. That part is easy. Getting them to feel like the trip was worth making is the part that takes some thought, and it is what separates the companies people want to work for from the ones they are quietly planning to leave.