Over the few weeks after the holidays, I have worked at the office surprisingly much: up to four days a week. For me, that is quite unusual. Normally, I spend maybe one day per week at our office or at client’s, sometimes even less.
The reason for my recent office-heavy life is information security. A laptop provided by one client can only be used inside secured, access-controlled premises. So, I go to the office. I do not mind doing this. In some projects, client’s requirements simply dictate where the work must happen.
My work weeks vary a lot. In one week, I might visit two different client sites and my own company office. Other weeks, I work almost completely from home. That is typical in consulting. Projects change, teams change, and the most practical place to work changes as well.
In most of my projects, I am the only CGI consultant based in the Helsinki area. The rest of the team and client stakeholders are often located elsewhere. Because of this, going to my company office does not put me in the same room with the people I daily collaborate with. I simply join the same Teams meetings from a different location.
This is why the current debate about returning to the office is interesting to follow. I am definitely not against working from the office. However, I think organizations should focus more on what they actually want to achieve with office presence instead of just counting days.
Why Organizations Want People Back
Before the pandemic, I spent almost every working day either at the company office or at client premises. Going somewhere was simply part of working. Then the pandemic forced a very large remote-work experiment, and many knowledge workers discovered that a surprising amount of work could be done elsewhere.
Now organizations are trying to find a new balance, and there are understandable reasons for wanting people back.
Many of these reasons are easy to understand from an employee perspective as well. A company culture easily fragments if people never meet face to face. New team members need to connect with colleagues and learn how daily work actually gets done, including the informal practices that are never covered in onboarding slides. Quick, spontaneous chats help share information across teams. Managers also need genuine contact with their people outside of scheduled video calls.
For consultants, there is also another issue. If one spends years working closely with one client but rarely sees anyone from their own company, it is quite easy to become more connected with the client than with the employer. From the employer’s point of view, that is hardly ideal.
Then there are reasons that are more understandable from the management side than from the employee side.
Some organizations still struggle with remote leadership and consider office presence as a tool for control and visibility. I have even been told that it is smart to “show your face” at the office during uncertain times, because visibility might protect your job. There might be some practical reality behind this thinking, but I think it is a poor justification for demanding people to be at the office. Good management should know what employees actually deliver and achieve without needing to see them sitting at a desk.
The office is also sometimes treated as a general solution to problems related to culture, collaboration, or engagement, as if bringing people into the same building would automatically improve them. It can help, of course, but only if something useful actually happens there.
And then there is the office itself. Companies have invested considerable amounts of money in buildings, meeting rooms, services, and other facilities. Empty offices are difficult to justify, especially if the utilization rate is visible somewhere in management reporting.
So, there are some good reasons for bringing people together, at least from the management’s point of view. But these reasons are quite different from each other, and they do not automatically justify the same solution.
Counting Days Is the Wrong Thing to Measure
Hybrid work is often reduced to a simple number, whether it is a strict mandate or a recommendation: two days at the office, three days at the office, or maybe even four or five.
I understand why. A specific number is clear. It can be communicated in one slide, included in a policy, and measured afterwards. Badge data can tell exactly how many times you have entered the building.
The problem is that physical presence is only an input. It says very little about what happened during the day. A single number also generalizes across very different roles and types of work within the same organization. The reasoning behind the number can therefore be surprisingly thin. Often it seems to be based more on general assumptions about collaboration, culture, or productivity than on how people actually work.
One reason for this may be that senior management has a surprisingly limited view of what employees actually do during their working days and what their work requires. In a large organization, that is understandable to some extent. But it is still a weak basis for defining general, detailed rules on where that work should happen.
Take one of my typical workdays. I may have several online client meetings, some architecture modeling to do, and a document to write. If everyone I work with is somewhere else, going to my employer’s office changes very little. I commute there, find a desk, put on noise-cancelling headphones, join several Teams meetings, work on my deliverables, and commute home. The work is still remote. It just happens from the office.
An open-plan office can also be a rather poor environment for some expert work. Architecture analysis, concentrated writing, or six virtual meetings in a row do not automatically improve because there are more people talking about their own stuff somewhere nearby. But home is not automatically better either. For someone with limited space, children at home, or other distractions, the office may be the best place for concentrated work.
The situation is completely different when the right people are present at the same time. In some assignments and proposal cases, I work with a local CGI team. We sometimes arrange shared office days and workshops. These can be genuinely useful. We can look at the same material, discuss things without booking another meeting, draw something on a whiteboard, and occasionally discover that people have interpreted the same matter in three different ways.
The same applies to client workshops. Some things are just easier to solve around the same table.
This is the distinction I would like to make. An office day with shared work can create real value. An office day without shared work can easily become a remote workday with an added commute.
So, instead of starting with the number of days, I would start with the work. What do we need to accomplish? Who needs to be involved? And which location supports that work best?
Sometimes the answer is the office. Sometimes it is the client site. Sometimes information security makes the decision for you. And sometimes the best place is a quiet room at home.
Make Your Office Days Work
Employees do not usually get to choose the policy. If your employer requires two or three office days and monitors attendance, arguing endlessly against the policy is probably not the most productive use of anyone’s time. But you can still try to make those days worthwhile.
First, coordinate with the people you actually work with. Random office attendance creates random encounters. If possible, agree on common days with your team or other people you need to meet. Being in the same building becomes considerably more useful when someone relevant is also there.
Then move the right work to those days. Workshops, proposal work, architecture reviews, onboarding, mentoring, difficult discussions, and planning sessions are obvious candidates. Even one proper working session can make the trip worthwhile. The whole day does not need to become an eight-hour collaboration exercise. That would probably create a fairly strong demand for remote work again.
Use the informal opportunities as well. Have lunch with colleagues. Go for coffee with someone you have worked with online for months. Ask the small question that has not been important enough for a meeting invitation. These are minor things, but this is exactly the kind of interaction an office can provide much better than Teams.
At the same time, be realistic about the rest of the day. There will still be virtual meetings and individual work. Find a quiet room if possible. Do not schedule your most concentration-heavy task for an afternoon in a noisy open office if you can do it somewhere better the next day.
If the office requirement works particularly badly for your role, explain the problem in terms of the work. Saying that you simply prefer working from home may be true, but it is not necessarily a very convincing business argument. Saying that your required office day consists of six virtual client meetings while the rest of the project team works in other cities describes the situation much better.
The same applies to client requirements and information security. My current situation is easy to explain: I need to use a client computer on access-controlled premises. That is a concrete reason for being there, and it is directly connected to the work.
If attendance is monitored, I would generally follow the policy and then try to influence how it is applied. Discuss common team days. Point out conflicts with client work. Suggest exceptions when there is a real reason for one. Bring concrete examples instead of a general complaint about commuting.
A mediocre company policy can still result in reasonably sensible working practices if teams and managers apply it with some judgment.
And if the organization mainly cares about the badge statistics, then at least make the trip useful for yourself. Meet people. Take the lunch. Have the conversations. Get the free coffee (if it is good). There is little benefit in spending an office day alone behind headphones simply to produce one more green mark on somebody’s dashboard.
There is also a limit to how much energy it makes sense to spend adapting to a policy that simply does not fit your work or life. If the requirement feels unreasonable, you have raised the issue, and there is little room for flexibility, it may be worth considering whether another employer would suit you better. Sometimes changing the company is easier than changing your ways of working that already work well.
The Office Is a Tool
For me, the best hybrid-work model is based on purpose.
Some weeks, I may work almost entirely from home because my work consists of analysis, writing, and virtual collaboration. During another week, I may visit several offices because I have client workshops, team meetings, or information-security requirements. Both can be completely sensible ways to work.
The people closest to the work usually have the best information for making these decisions. The employee understands the tasks. The team knows when collaboration is needed. The client has its own requirements. The manager can coordinate these needs with the wider organization.
A top-down, company-wide policy is often decided by leaders who sit far away from daily reality. They understand the organization chart, but they do not know what my typical Tuesday looks like.
Organizations have good reasons to encourage people to meet in person. At the same time, employees have good reasons to value flexibility. These two goals do not need to contradict each other.
The office is just one work environment among many. It works very well for certain activities and poorly for others. We should use it when it brings real value. And when we do commute to the office, the day should be worth the trip.
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👨💻About the Author
Eetu Niemi is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author.
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Books: Enterprise Architecture | The Senior Expert Career Playbook | Technology Consultant Fast Track | Successful Technology Consulting | Kokonaisarkkitehtuuri (FI) | Pohjoisen tie (FI) | Little Cthulhu’s Breakfast Time
Web resources: Enterprise Architecture Info Package (FI)