We love the idea of returns. The return to normal. The return to the office.
But beneath the nostalgia, something important gets overlooked: we’re not actually going back—we’re mythologizing a past that was never as stable, structured, or universal as we now pretend.
Before the pandemic, most offices weren’t full five days a week. Travel, client meetings, personal flexibility, and quiet “work-from-home” Fridays were already widespread—just less formalized. The average desk was occupied less than half the time, according to JLL. Mondays and Fridays? Largely ghost towns in many knowledge-based industries.
So when headlines declare the “return of the five-day office week,” it’s worth asking: return to what, exactly?
Office attendance was under 60% in 2019. Today’s modest bump—a 3% uptick in foot traffic according to Placer.ai from 2024 to 2025—isn’t a comeback. It’s a plateau. And more importantly, it doesn’t signal a cultural reset. It exposes the fragility of the office model we thought we had.
You can’t return to something that never truly existed.
A Workweek Built for a Factory, Not a Team
The five-day, in-person workweek has roots in industrial-era scheduling. When Henry Ford introduced it in 1926, it made sense—people clocked in, produced tangible output, and clocked out. But knowledge work doesn’t move on assembly lines. It moves in cycles of deep focus, collaboration, autonomy, and iteration.
Even before COVID, tech firms, creative agencies, consultancies, and product teams operated on looser rhythms. What’s now called “hybrid” was then called “traveling for work,” “heads-down time,” or “not in today.” The point is: flexibility wasn’t invented in 2020. It was simply made explicit.
The pandemic didn’t break the five-day office model. It revealed how flimsy and fictional it already was.
The Real Return: Executive Nostalgia
So why are some leaders still trying to claw back the old model?
Part of it is habit. Physical presence has long been misused as a proxy for productivity. If we can see people, surely they must be working. The logic is comforting, even if flawed.
But there’s something deeper at play: a longing for familiarity. The structured cadence of office life—the 9 a.m. meeting, the chance hallway conversation, the buzz of “everyone here”—felt like control. And in times of volatility, control feels like leadership.
But reasserting control doesn’t create clarity. It creates compliance. And that’s a poor substitute for performance.
According to Stanford’s WFH Research, only 12% of executives with hybrid teams plan to increase in-office requirements in 2025. The rest aren’t compromising—they’re evolving. They’re done chasing a mirage.
The Future Is Coordinated Hybrid
Structured hybrid has become the buzzword. But even that can feel too small.
We’re not just picking office days anymore. We’re redesigning how time, place, and team coordination fit together. The best companies aren’t asking “how often should people come in?” They’re asking “what’s the most valuable way for our teams to align?”
That looks different depending on the work:
- Designers might benefit from quarterly co-located sprints.
- Sales teams may anchor around Tuesday/Wednesday pipelines.
- Engineering squads might adopt asynchronous-first cultures with monthly meetups.
What binds these together isn’t location. It’s intentionality. The office becomes one tool in a kit—used when useful, skipped when it slows things down. Welcome coordinated hybrid.
Dropbox doesn’t even call its offices “offices” anymore. They’re “studios”—on-demand collaboration hubs. Atlassian encourages distributed work, then brings teams together for high-impact offsites. GitLab has never had offices. And guess what? They ship.
The companies leading this shift aren’t managing attendance—they’re engineering velocity.
What’s Actually at Stake
Trying to rebuild a five-day office week doesn’t just waste time—it misallocates energy. Talent leaves. Culture stagnates. Leaders obsess over compliance instead of outcomes.
And while we argue over badge swipes, the real challenges—AI disruption, cross-border growth, climate resilience, generational shifts—keep accelerating. These won’t be solved by increasing office snacks or mandating Tuesday through Thursday presence.
They’ll be solved by companies that are fast, focused, and flexible. Ones that know where work actually happens: in aligned minds, not just shared rooms.
Time to Let Go of the Fantasy
The five-day office week was never real. And that’s not a loss—it’s a liberation.
We don’t have to re-create a fiction to move forward. We get to design something better: workplaces that prioritize trust, intentionality, and outcomes over optics.
The companies that thrive won’t be the ones who pushed hardest to bring everyone back. They’ll be the ones who knew it was time to let go.
Want to design a work model that reflects how your teams actually perform best? Book a demo with our hybrid experts and let’s build it together.
