As hybrid work programs continue to grow in popularity and full-time office work declines, many leaders and companies are still struggling with a tough question: What are the right patterns for getting people together?

Free-for-all approaches that depend on individuals and managers to self-organize hybrid work norms don’t succeed — the coordination tax is just too high. I’ve seen this up close in my work with dozens of organizations. These ad hoc models result in people showing up to quiet offices, retreating to conference rooms to be on Zoom all day, and commuting home with a bubbling resentment about having traveled in for no clear reason.

What does work, then? While headlines make it sound like it’s a battle to get people out of their home offices (even if the office is a closet), three years of data from Future Forum shows that the vast majority of people want to gather together, anywhere from a few days a week to once a month — but they want that in-office time to be purpose-driven.

So instead of leaning into broad return-to-office (RTO) mandates like requiring everyone to show up at the office three days a week, innovative companies are avoiding a negative employee response by focusing on moments that matter.

These selective moments are built around activities that blend business work with social time. They’re most successful when they’re designed around specific workplace goals and events that include team development, onboarding and training, new-team formation, project kickoffs, and specific times for function-specific roles, such as sales. The benefit? Companies get the upsides of deeper connection and engagement without all the downsides of RTO mandates.

Office Attendance Doesn’t Equal Engagement

To be clear, five days a week in the office isn’t just dead in practice — it’s dying in policy, too: While 49% of U.S. companies had full-time in-office policies in the first quarter of 2023, only 31% did as of the second quarter of 2024, according to Flex Index. (These numbers are, of course, way down from before the pandemic, when an in-office policy was the default almost everywhere.) What’s growing fastest are structured hybrid work programs. The most popular varieties are two-or-three-days-a-week guidelines or policies.

Mandates to be in the office “just because” have faced a lot of employee resistance. Blanket policies increase the risk of losing top talent and a diverse workforce, disproportionately cause women to leave, and negatively impact productivity. We’re seeing that one-size-fits-all approaches don’t work for the majority of teams that are now distributed across cities and even countries, and they don’t fit the distinct team rhythms in realms such as sales, finance, or engineering. As a result, leaders have generally been loath to go hard on enforcement of RTO policies.

Pre-pandemic, designing in-person gatherings that would support both work time and personal connection between colleagues was a challenge for the few teams that were spread out across cities. But remote workers are now the rule, not the exception. Zillow offers a typical example: In 2019, 99% of Zillow employees lived within a 50-mile radius of an office; today, fewer than 50% do. The company is responding to the challenge with its shift to what it calls Cloud HQ. This includes a commitment to come together on occasion as the company embraces dispersed work. As Corina Kolbe, Zillow’s vice president of talent success, put it to me, “If we’re going to be distributed, we will always also prioritize in-person connection.”

Leaders are being forced to grapple with a fundamental question: What’s the purpose of the office, anyway? Employees’ answers tend to be similar regardless of whether the research comes from Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Microsoft, or even real estate companies. For example, in a survey conducted by Cushman & Wakefield covering 2020 to 2022, employees cited socialization, team collaboration, and separating work from home as the top purposes for going to an office.

Successful hybrid leaders creatively craft what happens when employees do come together — making sure that the time includes socialization along with work. I’ve seen this in practice at companies ranging from Allstate to Zillow, across a span of industries.

Moments that matter happen at both the companywide and the team-specific levels. These moments follow tempos that build engagement, reinforce friendships, and inspire employees to dig into projects side by side. To the employees, there are clear reasons to be in the same room.

Discovering the best moments for deep collaboration — where the purpose behind coming together in person is clear — takes effort by leaders and teams. In its research, BCG found that teams who set their norms together were much more likely to feel productive as well as engaged compared with teams where the boss set the norms or people were left to figure them out individually.

Bringing distributed teams together drives important bonds and works best if leaders focus on moments that matter. What was once the minority — teams spread across geographies — is now the majority. The opportunity in front of all of us is to rethink how offices can become collaboration hubs. Leaders need to better imagine how we’ll support teams and functions to figure out what their own moments that matter look like. As we do so, we’ll solve for connection and engagement for the entire organization.