Instead, leaders should create buy-in for the purpose of the return. What is the value of in-person work to this company or this team? If you’re credible in explaining why more in-person time will lead to better alignment, faster execution or more mentorship, it becomes a shared goal, not a top-down mandate.

And then, hold yourself accountable for those goals. If the stated purpose is, for example, bringing new products to market faster – is that actually happening? You have to be transparent and you have to be willing to iterate based on the outcomes.

How can workplace leaders design an RTO policy that is both clear and effective? What key elements should it include?

Start with the purpose. Decide whether this will be one top down policy — less flexibility but more consistent outcomes – or a distributed set of policies across the company – more flexibility, less consistent outcomes. Then write a rational, defensible policy. What will you, employee, see us do better, faster, smarter because of this new policy?

Once the purpose is clear, leaders must set clear expectations. Our own policy at Density includes explicit days and hours to be in-office to maximize in-office collaboration. There’s no point in employees showing up just to be on Zoom with their colleagues.

Related: RTO policies reveal an American workforce at a crossroads

Those expectations apply to everyone. Leaders have to walk the walk; it’s not optional because you have a C in your title. Leaders must model the behavior they expect to set the tone for the rest of the organization.

At Density, our in-office policy is focused on velocity. We believe that we see faster decision-making and product development if our team spends more time together in person. That has proven out: we developed and launched our latest sensor Waffle in record time this year.

We attribute that to two things, better alignment and more collaboration. An employee engagement survey we ran just last month shows an engagement rate of 79% for employees in our San Francisco office, compared to 69% for remote team members.

How can companies balance business needs with employee expectations when crafting their workplace policies like an RTO plan?

Business needs and employee expectations get presented as a zero-sum game but that’s a false premise. A policy and a work environment that help a company succeed also benefits its employees.

But just counting butts in seats helps no one. Leaders should understand and prioritize the drivers for in-person success.

At Density that means creating space for planned and unplanned collaboration: more phone booths, meeting rooms and flex spaces, fewer rows of empty desks. We’ve also adopted core office hours between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m to maximize in-person overlap. Those start and end times make it possible for folks with longer commutes or caregiving responsibility to fully commit to our policy.

What role does workplace design and office space utilization play in creating and enforcing an effective RTO policy?

A well-designed office reinforces the value of being there every day. That’s a high bar. To do so you need to deeply understand real-life work behaviors and patterns so that your workplace is designed to support them.

Measuring how people actually use your space is revealing and sometimes uncomfortable. The best laid designs often go unused, at enormous cost. One Density client discovered that an office was only 27% utilized at its very peak. They decided to bring teams together in one location and saved $1.7M on annual rent costs.

A cost that’s harder to measure is what empty offices do to morale. Employees don’t want to come into the office to sit on Zoom calls or eat lunch alone. Consolidating space or instating core office hours can help create critical mass, that human buzz that gets people energized.

Looking ahead, do you think we’ll see a full return to pre-pandemic office norms, or is a new equilibrium emerging?

The uncomfortable truth is that we are all going back to the office. And that’s a good thing. In our latest data, 55% of companies in our network are making moves to bring people back – upping in-person day requirements or bringing remote teams back to the office.

But make no mistake: the pre-pandemic model is gone. People think that COVID-19 created a real estate catastrophe but in workplace, the pandemic lifted the veil on what was already a deeply inefficient way of working. Pre-pandemic, 41% of offices in the US were paid for but went unused.

In the past years we’ve all become more thoughtful about how and where we work. Successful workplaces will follow suit.