Is Your Office Worth the Commute?
There’s a phrase floating around HR right now that I hadn’t heard until recently: “commute worthy workplace.”
Once you sit with it, it makes a lot of sense.
We’ve all watched the return-to-office fight play out. The common approach has been carrot and stick — mostly stick. Come in five days a week or you’re fired. Come in or your pay gets cut. Come in or you’re not a serious employee.
There’s another way to look at it: what am I doing to create an environment that is actually worth the commute?
Be Honest About What You’re Asking
Coming into the office costs your employees real things. Time in the car. Gas. Work clothes they stopped buying. Lunch out.
People are most protective of their time and their money — and you’re asking them to spend more of both to do the same job they were doing at home.
When you frame it that way, the pushback isn’t entitlement. It’s arithmetic.
You can say people got spoiled during the pandemic. Maybe. But the world shifted, and a lot of our people learned they could genuinely do their jobs from home. That knowledge doesn’t un-learn itself.
So Give Them a Reason
Instead of “come in or lose your job,” build experiences people actually want to show up for:
Lunch with leaders — real access to people they’d otherwise only see on a screen
Development sessions — bring in a speaker on something worth learning
Team lunches — the relationships that don’t form over video
Genuine collaborative work — not just team-building exercises, but the actual work, done together
Start by asking the honest question: why do we need people here? Then build the days around that answer, instead of requiring attendance and hoping value shows up on its own.
Look at the Space Itself
Make sure where people sit and what they do all day is genuinely interesting. If someone is commuting 45 minutes to sit in a dark cube built in 1985, they will resent every mile.
It doesn’t have to be extravagant. It has to be somewhere a person would choose to work.
Don’t Forget Your Introverts
Here’s something we learned that I think gets missed: a lot of introverts loved working from home because they could finally be somewhere quiet. The office, for them, means constant people and constant noise.
Are you creating spaces where people who need quiet can actually get it? They got used to having that at home, and asking them to give it up entirely is asking a lot.
The Goal Is FOMO, Not Fear
The question I’d put to your leadership team: is there anything happening at our office that makes people think, I want to be there — and I’ll miss something if I’m not?
That’s a very different motivator than fear of losing your job. It also produces very different employees.
We’re working through this with clients right now. If you’d like help thinking it through, grab a free 30-minute session with one of our HR experts — no pressure, just a clear next step.