Three Days in the Office? You’re Starting With the Wrong Question.

Three days in the office. Why three? Why not two? Or four? Or five? More importantly: what are we trying to achieve during those three days?

I find much of the return-to-office debate frustrating because I think we’re starting with the wrong question. We’re asking where the person should be. I’d rather start by asking what the work actually is – and where that work is best done.

It's also on its way to becoming a legal discipline, not just a cultural one. The government has confirmed that from 2027 employers will have to show a refusal is reasonable and explain their reasoning before saying no. Good. If a three-days-in-the-office policy can't survive being written down, it probably isn't a business case – it's a habit.

Clearly some work requires physical presence. You can’t deliver the post from your spare bedroom. You can’t stack supermarket shelves remotely. A nurse caring directly for a patient needs to be with the patient.

Although even here, technology keeps moving the boundaries. Twenty years ago, how many of us imagined doctors routinely consulting patients through a screen, surgeons participating in operations from another country, or ordering everything from groceries and cooked meals to sofas and large electrical appliances from a phone? So I’m always slightly wary of declaring that something has to be done a particular way forever.

I absolutely believe there is enormous value in people being together. Last year alone I was away from home 17 times, often running workshops across different countries to design processes and systems. Being physically together mattered. We were putting things on walls, challenging assumptions, reading the room, solving problems and sometimes working across language barriers. The activity justified getting people together.

But that’s very different from travelling somewhere simply because Tuesday happens to be an office day. I’ve watched people commute into central London, at considerable cost in time and money, only to sit wearing headphones on Teams calls all day – sometimes with people who are actually in the same building.

What business problem did the commute solve?

And none of this is particularly new. When I worked at Canterbury City Council around 2010, we had data-entry and call-centre colleagues working remotely. This wasn’t an informal arrangement based on whether somebody appeared to be working. We understood the work, measured the output and had clear expectations around productivity. From memory, part of our remote-working arrangement was that productivity was expected to be around 10% above the equivalent office-based level.

And there is published evidence from Canterbury that predates even my time there. The council began trialling homeworking within its customer-service operation in 2006. It subsequently reported 15–20% improvements in staff performance and productivity and a 30% increase in calls handled. That was nearly 20 years before today’s return-to-office debate.

Perhaps there’s a lesson in that.

We knew what the work was. We knew what good performance looked like. And we measured the outcome rather than the chair.

Today’s evidence is more nuanced, but equally interesting. ONS found that 28% of working adults in Great Britain hybrid worked in early 2025. CIPD found that 65% of organisations operating hybrid arrangements require minimum workplace attendance. Yet 41% of employers said increased home/hybrid working had improved productivity or efficiency, compared with 16% who believed it had reduced it.

A large randomised controlled trial involving 1,612 employees provides another useful piece of evidence. Employees allowed to work from home two days a week had one-third lower attrition, greater job satisfaction and no measurable reduction in performance ratings, promotions or output compared with colleagues working in the office five days a week. That doesn’t prove every job should be hybrid. It proves why blanket assumptions aren’t particularly useful.

And there is another contradiction I’ve been thinking about. Organisations are becoming increasingly sophisticated about analysing work for AI and automation. We’re asking what tasks a job actually contains, which of those tasks require judgement, which are repetitive, which could be automated, which need a human being, and which could be augmented by AI. And yet sometimes the same organisation makes a blanket decision that the human doing all those different activities needs to sit in a particular building three days a week.

If we’re sophisticated enough to ask which activities require a human, surely we’re sophisticated enough to ask which activities require a building?

Understand the work first. Then decide where it is best done.

Because perhaps the question isn’t how many days somebody spends in an office.

Perhaps the question is what we’re trying to achieve by having them there.

Sources

• Canterbury City Council homeworking case study, reported by Call Centre Helper
• Office for National Statistics – Who has access to hybrid work in Great Britain?
• CIPD – Flexible and hybrid working practices in 2025
• Nature – Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance