5 Ways to Make Your Team Actually Want to Come Into the Office in 2026

5 Ways to Make Your Team Actually Want to Come Into the Office in 2026

Let's get the obvious out of the way: mandating office attendance doesn't work. One in ten UK companies has already seen staff quit after hardening their stance on home working. The research on forced return-to-office is depressingly consistent; it increases attrition, hits morale, and doesn't reliably improve the performance outcomes it was supposed to fix.

But the opposite extreme, a fully remote team that never comes in, has its own costs. Culture erodes slowly. Collaboration gets transactional. New starters struggle to find their feet. And the kind of trust that makes teams genuinely high-performing is hard to build through a screen.

The answer isn't mandates and it isn't abandonment. It's making the office somewhere your team actually wants to be. Here's how.

1. Make in-person time worth the commute

The most important question to ask about any in-office day is: what can we do today that we genuinely can't do as well remotely? If the honest answer is "the same things we do from home, but at a desk we don't own", you've already lost the argument.

In-person time earns its place when it's used for things that genuinely benefit from physical proximity: collaborative problem-solving, creative workshops, complex decisions that need the nuance of a face-to-face conversation, and relationship-building with new team members. When you design in-office days around those things, and communicate clearly why you're doing it that way, people understand the point and are much more willing to make the commute.

The signal you're trying to send is: we're asking you to come in because we've thought about what this time is actually for. Not because attendance is being taken.

2. Build social rituals that people genuinely look forward to

The informal social layer of work is something remote arrangements consistently struggle to replicate. Lunch together, a coffee conversation that turns into a useful idea, a Friday tradition that gives the week a sense of conclusion, these things sound small, but they're often what people miss most about office life, and what pulls them back in.

The important word here is "genuinely". A mandatory team lunch that everyone attends out of obligation is worse than not having one. The social rituals that work are the ones that have been given room to develop organically, or that have been designed around what your specific team actually enjoys.

Good colleague relationships are cited by 25% of UK employees as a key reason for staying in their current role. (New Possible, 2026)

Runway East teams consistently cite the community, the other businesses in the building, the shared events, and the atmosphere as something that genuinely improves their working week. That's not an accident of co-location. It's a design decision.

3. Fix the things that make the office worse than home

Before you try to add positive reasons to come in, audit the negative ones. What are the friction points that make people dread the commute? Poor office acoustics? Insufficient meeting rooms? A kitchen that's perpetually in a state? Unreliable WiFi? Nowhere quiet to take a call?

These things sound trivial, but they accumulate. And they're particularly damaging because they create a direct, daily comparison: my home setup is better than this. Once that thought is established, it's hard to dislodge.

The fixes are often less expensive than people expect. Acoustic panels. High-quality headphones. A couple of decent phone booths. Reliable, fast internet that doesn't require the IT support ticket lottery. These are maintenance investments in the basic dignity of the working environment, and they pay dividends in attendance and morale.

4. Let people have genuine input into how in-person time is used

People are significantly more likely to show up for something they helped design. If the in-office schedule has been handed down from leadership without any consultation, it could be resented, even if the schedule itself is reasonable.

This doesn't mean consensus management or putting every decision to a vote. It means asking the team: what would make coming in genuinely useful for you? What do you want to get out of in-person time? What isn't working about our current setup?

You'll get useful answers, and you'll get a team that feels like their working conditions are something they have some ownership over, which is, incidentally, one of the things the research consistently identifies as a driver of both retention and engagement.

Freedom over where, when and how work is done is the top reason employees stay in their current role. (New Possible, 2026)

5. Make the office genuinely better than their home setup

This is the blunt version of everything above: if you want people to choose the office, the office has to win the comparison. Not on every dimension, people will always have things at home they can't replicate at work. But on the dimensions that matter for the kind of work your team does.

Better technology. Faster internet. A proper monitor and a decent chair. Good coffee that doesn't require cleaning a machine. Spaces for both focus and collaboration. A building that feels alive rather than half-empty. The combination of functional quality and social energy is genuinely hard to replicate at home, and when you get it right, the office stops feeling like an obligation and starts feeling like a resource.

The businesses that have cracked this aren't necessarily spending more money than anyone else. They're spending it more intentionally, on the things that actually change how people feel about being there. Sometimes this is a lot to organise for a founder of office manager, that's where serviced offices come in, pay one monthly fee and get all of the above covered.‍

FAQs: Getting your team back into the office

Why don't employees want to come into the office?

The JLL research is instructive here: UK workers currently spend two days a week in the office, but on average would prefer just 1.5. The gap between what employers expect and what employees prefer is a point of tension, but it's not irresolvable. The most common reasons employees avoid the office are: a commute that doesn't feel worth it, an environment that's worse than working from home, in-person time that isn't used meaningfully, and a sense that attendance is about optics rather than outcomes. All of those are fixable, and none of them require forcing the issue.

Does mandating office attendance increase productivity?

The evidence is mixed at best, and the unintended consequences are fairly well documented. Research from King's College London found that only 42% of UK workers would comply with a full five-day return mandate, down from 54% in 2022. One in ten UK companies has seen staff quit after hardening their return-to-office stance. The businesses that have improved in-person attendance most successfully have done it by improving the office experience, not by issuing mandates.

What are the best ways to encourage hybrid employees to come into the office?

The most effective approaches focus on making in-person time genuinely valuable rather than obligatory. That means designing office days around the things that genuinely benefit from physical presence: creative collaboration, relationship-building, and complex decision-making. It means fixing the friction points that make the office worse than home. And it means building social rituals that people actually look forward to. The short version: give people a good reason to come in, and most of them will.

How do you balance flexibility with maintaining team culture?

The key is being deliberate about which parts of culture require physical presence and which don't. Routine individual work almost certainly doesn't require co-location. Creative collaboration, onboarding, significant decisions, and relationship maintenance generally do. If you protect those moments, and design them well, you can maintain a strong, cohesive culture with a hybrid model. The teams that struggle are usually the ones trying to maintain culture entirely remotely, or the ones mandating presence without purpose

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