If you read the headlines about workplace trends, you’d think that most companies are requiring a full-time return to the office and declaring the death of remote work. If that’s true, workplaces would be full of people busily meeting, collaborating and hanging out with every desk occupied. If you’re in the office today, look around you. Is that what you see?
Not only is it likely you will see a lot of empty desks, it has been that way for a very long time. (See our Evolving Workplace article on the history of remote work.) The assumptions driving a lot of workplace policy are, respectfully, wrong. Here is some data that may surprise you. Real Estate companies such as CRBE, Jones Lang Lasalle, and Leesman all show that long before the pandemic, most offices weren’t maxed out.
- Despite orders to return to the office and threats of firing, space utilization (number of desks assigned vs desks with people sitting at them on any given day) is rarely higher than 50% as of February 2025.
- Regardless of what your CEO thought was going on, or how rose-tinted your memory, it was like that before Covid as well. 2019 figures show that desk utilization and occupancy stood between 40-60% depending on the company.
- There was a brief uptick in utilization and office attendance at the height of the get-back-to-work trend in 2024, but it was never 100% and has now settled back almost to the pre-Covid norm.
What’s going on?
It’s important to look at non-human factors like real estate and facilities because that’s what’s driven a lot of this discussion. The C-Suite has a legitimate concern: why are we paying for space that nobody’s using? It’s perfectly natural to look at unoccupied desks or empty breakrooms and think you’re wasting your money. You might be. Or you might be allocating resources according to models that no longer exist.
According to Brian Elliott at Work Forward, even companies with some of the strictest RTO policies have accepted the reality that they have too much space for the number of people. Companies like Allstate and Zillow are reallocating resources to make more flexible seating arrangements, shrink their footprint, and spend more on events to bring people together. There are a number of factors at play here:
- Automation and technology mean even if you expect the exact same (or greater) productivity as before the pandemic, it takes fewer people, and thus less space, to achieve those goals. Floor plans designed in the ‘90s and the ‘00s are likely outdated and inefficient. Your lease is a bigger problem than your people. But if you shrink your footprint and reduce the number of desks, what’s the impact on your people?
- Recruiting people to a full-time in-office environment is becoming harder than many believed. This is particularly true of middle-upper management jobs. While younger people and those new to the company may experience benefits from being in the office, it turns out that those who have a good track record, who’ve proven they can work independently and understand the business are looking for flexibility and work/life sanity. Policy aside, the reality is that the more draconian the mandate, the harder it is to attract the people you want.
- We are seeing the return of “Stealth Remote Work.” Even before Covid, people realized that many tasks could be done from home or other places. A sick kid or bad weather were no longer excuses for missing a client call or team Zoom meeting. Need to finish a project? Do it offsite where it’s quiet. There was far more remote work going on than was acknowledged (see the stats above) but most of it was negotiated on a team-by-team basis, and the agreements were informal. How many people at your company are aware of the 5-day-a-week mandate and still aren’t there every day? Do your HR and succession planning policies still apply if what’s in the rulebook and what people see don’t coincide?
The impact of these informal agreements and side deals is greater than you think. First of all, it skews the numbers when allotting space and desks. Alice is SUPPOSED to be here every day, so she needs a desk, even if it sits empty half the time. It’s hard to manage money using faulty assumptions.
Just as important, it becomes hard to maintain the appearance of fairness and transparency when some people negotiate side-deals that others aren’t aware of or can apply to their own work. It’s also hard on teamwork. Informal work arrangements mean you can’t really plan time and collaboration as effectively as when you know where people are when.
For leaders, this also creates cognitive dissonance: If policies and schedules assume everyone is in the same place at the same time, and they’re not, how the heck do you plan work and manage the people on your team? Are these side-deals perceived as practical solutions, or just favoritism?
We wind up with distributed (hybrid is not the same thing) teams, even though you’re officially on-site. In other words, even if you have one team member who isn’t in the office with you, you have a remote or distributed team. Leaders need to know how to work in that environment and not rely on skills and habits that only work in a full-time on-site environment.
The skills necessary to manage remotely are just as relevant as they were during Covid but are being disparaged or ignored because “we’re not a remote environment.”
A look at the numbers would argue that point.
A good place to start is the Long Distance Leadership Series. You can learn more here.
0 comments