A lot got written about hybrid working, office days, and whether remote teams are as productive as in-person ones. Less got said about the quieter shift underneath all of it: management since Covid has had to run on a fundamentally different amount of trust than it used to, and a lot of businesses never actually rebuilt their management approach to match.
What actually changed
Before, management could lean on visibility. You could see who was at their desk, see who stayed late, get a rough sense of effort just by walking the floor. That's mostly gone now, not because people are working less, but because the visibility management used to substitute for trust simply isn't there anymore. What's left is a much more direct question: do you actually trust your team to do the work without watching them do it.
Why am I even here?
According to Remit Consulting's ReTurn report, UK office attendance has stayed above 40% every week since early January. People are going back in. But turning up isn't the same as buying in, and the question most employees are quietly asking is a fair one: why am I here? Not for the free fruit or the table tennis table. If the answer is "so I can sit on Zoom calls I could have taken from home," resentment is the predictable result. An office needs a reason to exist beyond habit, one that's actually worth the commute.
What this looks like without one
We worked with a tech client who wanted their teams back in the office. The instinct wasn't wrong. The execution was: it went out as a blanket corporate email, no context, no reasoning, sent to everyone at once. What came back was a wave of individual requests to keep working from home, for every reason imaginable. Not because the team was being difficult, but because nobody had been given a reason to say yes. There was no purpose attached to being in, and no management structure holding anyone accountable to a shared goal once they were there. Left unmanaged, that's exactly when mediocrity spreads: people do the minimum because the minimum is all that's being measured.
The purpose and ownership gap
Getting people back into an office, or getting hybrid working properly, rarely succeeds just by setting a policy about which days people attend. It works when there's an actual purpose for being there, ownership of what happens in that time, and a clear action attached to it, not just presence for its own sake. "Be in on Tuesdays" without a reason attached is a rule. "Be in on Tuesdays because that's when the team plans the week together" is a purpose, and people respond very differently to the two.
Why this is a management skill gap, not a policy problem
A lot of the friction around hybrid work gets treated as a scheduling problem: which days, how many, enforced how strictly. It's usually not. It's a management capability problem, whether managers actually know how to set clear outcomes, check in on progress without hovering, and hold their team accountable to something specific. That skill was less necessary before, and a lot of managers simply never had to build it.
Presence isn't the same as performance
Showing up is one thing. Achieving the team's actual goals is another. You can't manage the second by watching the first, and you can't hold anyone accountable to a goal that was never made concrete in the first place. Before attendance can mean anything, the team needs to know exactly what they're being measured against: what "done" looks like, by when, and who's checking. Skip that step and it doesn't matter whether people are in the office five days a week or working from home. Nobody's accountable to anything, and mediocrity runs riot in every department.
What's actually worth fixing
Not the office policy itself. The underlying management habits: clarity on what success looks like for each role, a genuine mechanism for checking progress that doesn't depend on physical presence, and concrete goals set before you ask anyone to change their routine to hit them. Businesses that fix that tend to find hybrid and office arrangements settle themselves out naturally. The ones that only ever debate the policy are usually still debating it.
If your team's structure could do with the same kind of honest look, book your Leak Check and we'll go through it together.