What actually motivates employees to come into the office?
That’s a question organizations should be asking as they develop their in-office policies, but for many, it’s still an afterthought.
Despite bold predictions that 2025 would mean the return of traditional five-day work weeks, foot traffic at offices is actually declining. While some corporations seek to enforce full-time in-office, they’re instead met with resistance, bad press, and high turnover.
In 2025, businesses rushed to get employees back to their desks while forgetting a few critical elements—including desks themselves. When federal workers were required to return to offices earlier this year, many showed up to chaotic environments without space, WiFi, or electricity. Even before the recent wave of RTO enforcement, employees have been asked backed to work without workstations or conference rooms to actually work from.
These factors contribute to a negative workplace experience, making it that much more difficult to get employees to want to come back to office, let alone be productive while they’re on site.
OfficeSpace spoke with hundreds of workplace leaders and employees to understand key drivers for workplace engagement and attendance. We learned that while a lot of organizations have already done the legwork of tracking and quantifying attendance and utilization to develop strategies that make sense for their spaces, getting employees to adopt those policies is still a hurdle.
Even if you have the basics down (like electricity and ample space, for example), getting a desired and predictable rate of attendance comes down to one key factor: a positive, frictionless experience for employees.
What makes a positive workplace experience?
A good workplace experience doesn’t have to include a full espresso bar or an in-office roller coaster (though that probably won’t hurt). Above all, employees need to be able to access resources, coordinate schedules with their coworkers, and be autonomous throughout their workday to feel that they’re getting true value from showing up at the office.
If setting expectations for attendance is the first step, the next is making it easy to engage with the workplace. Simple actions like booking a desk, securing a space for a meeting, and finding colleagues should be just that: simple.
What can help:
Make work days worth showing up for with the Employee Homepage
According to Philip Ross, CEO of UnGroup, “Occupiers now understand the power of experience, and with it, the digital tools to shape that experience like apps and digital workplace platforms. If you get that right, you have a way to personalize that experience at scale for the first time, based on the fact that we’re all carrying our cell phones.”
Workplace technology presents an opportunity for employees to engage more effectively with their workplaces. The new OfficeSpace Employee Homepage was designed to give employees full visibility into their work weeks so they know what to expect before they get to the office. Through the platform, they can see a calendar overview of their weekly commitments, know which of their coworkers will be in and on what days, stay informed about workplace events or disruptions, then quickly reserve a desk or meeting room on select days accordingly.
Below, Beckett Johnson, Product Manager for Workplace Experience, talks about the benefits behind the Employee Homepage and how it works:
Keeping your workplace informed with Workplace Announcements
When employees face unexpected disruptions when they arrive at work—spotty WiFi which could lead to missing virtual meetings with an important client, broken elevators making certain floors totally inaccessible—they’re understandably going to be frustrated. In turn, if employees miss the memo about a happy hour or catered lunch for the team, they might have wished they’d planned their in-office days around those events.
Even if facilities managers and workplace teams send out notifications, there are many reasons these messages get overlooked: Visitors or employees visiting from another office may not be in the right channels to get the messages in the first place. Alternatively, employees will eventually tune out mass emails or generalized messages. In many cases, messages are sent to the right people, but not at the right time—someone may show up to the office before seeing that email about scheduled maintenance.
That’s why OfficeSpace has introduced Workplace Announcements. This feature makes messages highly targeted and visible to employees by leveraging desk booking and presence data to reach people who are on site, as well as filters for sending messages to only those who may be impacted, including specific floors or departments. This not only gets the message in front of the right eyes, it also means employees aren’t fielding irrelevant messages that they’ve gotten used to ignoring.
Below, Beckett walks us through Workplace Announcements and how it can be used for your teams:
An informed workplace is an effective workplace. Talk to our team and learn how we help organizations boost engagement, communication, and connection at the office.
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