“We are like this focused on the destination, the final destination,” Nina Siemaszko told two researchers from the Information Sciences Institute on the fifth floor of the office as she prepared for their free yoga session on a recent Thursday. Sunlight poured into the room as the researchers sat on mats surrounded by foam blocks, pillows, belts and blankets. “It’s about the journey,” Siemaszko continued.
She began with a sermon that could have applied to anything—the institute’s bumpy path to remote work, the long commute most of its employees had taken to get to the office that day—but for her target was about the head, the heart and the breath. “We are really not getting anywhere anytime soon. We are always traveling.”
Information Sciences Institute employees and students were able to fill their schedules by attending the events organized as an incentive to come to the office. Knoblock, embracing Tsipursky’s advice, has instituted “cookie hours” on Mondays and Tuesdays, when employees are invited to the fifth-floor lounge for desserts from the local grocery store and banter. Lunch is served on Wednesdays and Thursdays, when people descend in their hoodies and lanyards for free turkey breast sandwiches and bowls of teriyaki chicken. And there’s yoga with Siemaszko, who reminds them that the afternoon break is worth taking to refocus the body: “Yoga teaches that the brain is the ego, the heart is the intellect.”
Some of these social events were Tsipursky’s ideas to ensure that as employees commute, they are sure to see their colleagues. They won’t be cooped up in offices all day on Zoom talking to teammates who have stayed home. The events often created large crowds, so much so that the institute had to start scribbling people’s names on packed lunches to prevent colleagues from taking each other’s lunch orders.
And with those common benefits for those who commute, Knoblock decided to stop requiring employees to come to the office three days a week in favor of a more flexible approach. The Institute’s return schedule now varies by team. The communications team comes in at least one day a week; a technical research team does three days; and some employees don’t have to come to the office at all. That was a confirmation for some employees, who are able to maintain the control over their time that remote working afforded them. For example, Hussain usually only comes by once a week. “It’s been transformative,” she says.
Most return-to-office experts share Tsipursky’s aversion to mandates, especially those that require employees to come to the office five days a week. “Mandata are a nuke,” Zach Dunn, a founder of the hybrid-work-technology company Robin told me, “when a much less serious thing will work.” Top-down rules from executives leave employees feeling disempowered, and as the job market remains strong — with nearly two job openings for every unemployed person — white-collar workers know they don’t have to accept terms that don’t suit their needs. Company leaders also tend to struggle with enforcing mandates because they don’t know if they should actually punish people for not following them. “I don’t think the mandates have any force,” says Dunn. “Nobody knows if they work or not.”
Many companies have doubled the mandates anyway: Disney, Amazon, Apple, Starbucks, much of Wall Street. According to Gartner, nearly 70 percent of large and medium-sized employers say that employees who can do their work remotely need to be in the office a certain number of days per week. For Tsipursky, these mandates reflect employers who don’t know how to run their teams differently than they did before the pandemic, so they’re falling back on outdated forms of control. “The old dog doesn’t want to learn new tricks,” he says. But the hybrid experts also assure executives that it is possible to bring employees back to the office without dictation. It just requires that you understand what offices are really for.
