Should I get everyone back in the office?

Effective employee engagement includes one simple human truth: people do different work better in different places.

Okay, here we go again.

Today, Microsoft fell over. On 12 November, 2026 Outlook, Teams and Copilot went dark for millions, and offices everywhere briefly rediscovered the lost art of walking over to someone’s desk. Meanwhile, The Economist is talking up In Person, a new book making the case for getting everyone back under one roof.

So, should you?

Short answer: No.

Longer short answer: Get your people together for the serendipity. Then protect time apart for the thinking. Flexibility isn’t a perk. It’s a performance tool, and a big draw for anyone juggling life outside work.

Why it matters: Get the balance wrong and people walk. When Trip.com gave staff two days a week at home, quit rates fell by a third, with no hit to performance or promotion (Bloom et al., Nature, 2024).

Let’s look at the evidence. It’s older than you think.

Meet Norm

In 1898, Norman Triplett (can I call you Norm?) ran what’s often called the first social psychology experiment. He got 40 children to wind fishing reels as fast as they could. Some worked alone and some raced a rival.

About half sped up when competing. But a quarter actually slowed down, and Norm reckoned they got overexcited. The rest? No difference.

Lesson one: put people side by side and some of them fly.

Then Floyd

Around 1920, Floyd Allport went further. No racing this time. Participants did simple tasks, like word association or crossing out vowels, either alone or around a table with others. No helping. No competing.

The group still worked faster. Allport called it social facilitation: just having other people around gets us moving.

But, and it’s a big but: when Floyd switched to tasks that needed proper reasoning, like writing out a considered argument, the people working alone did better-quality thinking.

Lesson two: the office is great for volume. Solitude is great for depth.

Elton (not Elon)

In the late 1920s, Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger conducted what became known as the Hawthorne Studies. In this study they got factory workers at an Electric plant in the USA.

This time they separated small groups of workers (such as women assembling telephone relays in the Relay Assembly Test Room) from the main factory floor.

They wanted to see how physical changes like lighting, heating, rest breaks, and working different times and for different lengths of time affected performance.

Guess what? Compared to the main factory floor productivity went up no matter whether the conditions were improved or worsened. Elon and Fritz concluded that working in small social settings and getting quality attention from colleagues and supervisors had a far bigger impact than physical surroundings alone.

Yes, you read it right – productivity went up, almost regardless of whether conditions got better or worse.

The researchers’ conclusion: attention, belonging and a close team mattered more than the physical surroundings. (Later economists have argued the effect was overstated. Fair. But the human truth stuck.)

Lesson three: it’s not the building. It’s the people in it, and how they’re treated.

Bloody saboteurs!

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. Change models such as one published in 2013 by Festo – recent history, I know! – score employees on three things: alignment with the organisation’s goals, personal satisfaction and drive (either proactive or reactive).

It’s a model that shows how an organisations needs to think about how the goals they set, and the culture they want to pursue, matches the needs and aspirations of the workforce they have employed.

Get the fit right and you get champions and ambassadors. Get it wrong and you get sceptics, saboteurs, prisoners and passengers. Count them: the negatives outnumber the positives.

People settle into norms. They like how they fit. Order them back five days a week without a reason that makes sense to them, and you’re not building culture. You’re recruiting saboteurs. Enticing them out of those norms means that a brand or business needs to make things – in this case returning to the office – feel easy, attractive, social, and timely (like when Microsoft fails globally!).

So, what should leaders do?

Abandon the assumption that this is office versus home. It’s a design challenge. Behavioural science gives you a handy checklist called EAST:

• Easy: make office days predictable and worth the commute.
• Attractive: fill them with the collaborative, energising work that benefits from company.
• Social: build in the mentoring, feedback and team rituals you can’t get on a video call.
• Timely: pick the moments that matter: onboarding, kick-offs, launches and, yes, the day Teams goes down.

Then protect the quiet time. Noise, by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, shows how much the same person’s judgement wobbles with mood, time of day, even the weather. Environment shapes performance, so let people control theirs for deep work.

That puts two of the levers of engagement, autonomy and belonging, to work together instead of against each other.

The bottom line

Norm, Floyd and Elton all landed in the same place a century ago. Togetherness boosts energy. Solitude protects quality. Attention trumps architecture.

Home or office? Wrong question.

It’s not either/or. It’s yes/and.