What Is an Office Day Actually For?

I know of work environments where someone commutes into the office, shuts a door that has no glass panel in it, and spends the entire day on Zoom calls with people who are working somewhere else. The firm paid for the desk and the employee paid with time and gas, yet nobody on the team learned anything from being in the same building. If the policy exists to get people together, that day accomplished the opposite, and the policy still counts it as compliance.

A cousin of that problem shows up when teammates come in on different days. Everyone meets the requirement on paper, but each person has only changed their scenery, because the colleagues they were supposed to work alongside are at home on the days they are in.

Both situations come from the same place. Firms have moved back toward some form of hybrid arrangement, and the versions I know of are usually a fixed number of days: Tuesday and Thursday at some firms, four days with Friday as the accepted flexible day at others. A day count is easy to write and easy to check, which is why it gets chosen, but it says nothing about what anyone is supposed to accomplish once they arrive.

The old office did its work by default

People romanticize the days when everyone was in the office, and the part worth missing is that you had to talk to each other to get things done. Nobody planned that. You could look over someone's shoulder, overhear a conversation, and see whether a person was struggling with something basic or playing on their phone. Clients and teammates now sit in other places, so the person you were supposed to learn from may be on video with the door closed all day. What the office used to supply for free now has to be arranged, and big staff meetings and in-person meetups are the kind of thing that justifies the trip, along with any over-the-shoulder learning a firm sets up on purpose.

The trip also has a price. For someone with a one-hour commute each way, an office day costs two hours before any work begins, and if the task in front of them could have been done at home in that time, the better call was to stay home. Accountants call this opportunity cost, and it applies to time the same way it applies to money.

Enforcement tells you whether the policy is a tool or a time clock. The firms that treat people well flex when someone's car breaks down, when they have an appointment, or when they need to be at a client site, and nobody expects them in that day.

Seniors owe a different style of management

Public accounting used to put everyone in one room, and if someone was struggling you could read it on their face. That worked as training wheels for people who were not yet strong on their first few jobs. When covid moved everyone out of the room, those wheels came off, and neither employers nor employees had realized they were there. The staff who communicated well and managed themselves well did fine. The ones who never said how much help they needed, or what they needed help with, got far less done, and nobody could see it happening.

Importing a trial balance into audit or tax software shows how this plays out. Someone who has done it before should finish in 10 to 20 minutes, and in person you would notice if it was running long. Remotely you notice only if you set the expectation and follow up, so I say how long I expect a task to take when I hand it off, and when it runs over I get on a call and walk through it. I did this during covid, and some of the people I worked with that way are now at the manager level.

The employee's side of the math

This part feels a little hypocritical to write, because at a senior level I like hybrid and remote work, since if you know what you are doing you get more done. Earlier in a career the in-person time pays off more, and some people want the office as their social time, particularly if they are young, their hobbies are mostly solo, and work is where they meet people. If that describes you, acknowledge it, and ignore what anyone else says about remote work, because you are the one doing the math.

Employers should be doing that same math. Before you commute, decide what you are going in to get, whether that is a specific skill or time with a particular person, and face time with someone senior counts as a fair answer too. When you are remote, the burden of visibility shifts to you, and I covered the specific habits in How to Be a Good Remote Employee. Some remote employees leave their teammates asking what they do all day, and if you are not being seen working, you should be heard working, or your work product should speak for itself.

Flexibility has limits. Working odd hours that land on your teammates moves a cost onto them, and a four-day commute through unpredictable traffic that costs someone sleep and personal time is a cost to the employee. Taking a job also means accepting its distance, so that tradeoff belongs in the decision before you sign.

A sick day or a remote day is fine when it nets out in the team's favor, and a commute is worth it on the same terms. A firm that cannot say what its office days are for is asking people to pay a commute for something nobody can name, and the people paying usually figure that out before leadership does. A rule without an objective behind it is a net loss to the team, and the team is the one carrying it.