Leaders Share How to Set Fair In-Office Norms in Hybrid Work
Hybrid work has forced organizations to rethink what fairness means when some employees are in the office and others are not. Getting this balance right requires clear policies that focus on outcomes rather than arbitrary attendance rules. This article brings together insights from workplace leaders who have successfully implemented in-office norms that respect flexibility while maintaining team cohesion.
Define Purpose, Not Presence
The fastest way to lose people on office expectations is to write one rule for everyone and call it fair. Sales does not work like engineering. A team mid-launch does not need the same week as a team in steady state. When you flatten all of that into a single attendance mandate, people do not read it as consistency. They read it as a leader who does not understand the work they actually do.
So I stopped setting the rules around location and started setting them around purpose instead.
The guideline that changed things was simple. We do not come in to be seen. We come in for the work that is genuinely better in person. Each team names what that work actually is. The decisions that need real-time tension. Onboarding a new hire who is still finding their footing. The messy early thinking that quietly dies over a screen. Then they protect time for it together. The rhythm differs by team. The principle does not. That is what makes it feel fair instead of arbitrary. Everyone is answering the same question, even when they each land in a different place.
The routine underneath it is a quarterly check, not a memo. Each team revisits two things out loud. What was the in-person work that earned our time this quarter, and did our schedule actually reflect it. Most teams discover their pattern had drifted. They were gathering out of habit on days that did not need it, and scattering on the days that did. Naming it resets the rhythm without a new policy handed down from above.
The leaders I work with tend to find the same thing once they try this. Their problem was never flexibility versus consistency. It was that they were enforcing presence instead of defining purpose. The moment the purpose is clear and owned by the team, the consistency takes care of itself, because people follow what they helped build.
So here is the question worth sitting with before you write your next office policy.
Are you asking people to show up, or have you told them clearly what is worth showing up for?
Most expectations fail on the second half. People will meet a standard they genuinely understand. They resist one that was handed down to them without a reason they can actually feel.
Group Roles and Publish Anchor Days
I've learned that if you want people to follow office expectations, you can't run it on vibes. I start by grouping roles, not individuals, and set rhythms by that: some roles have two fixed "anchor" days in the office for collaboration, others come in twice a month for deeper working sessions, and a few stay mostly remote. The routine that's worked best is simple: each squad has declared "team days" on the calendar months ahead, tied to real work like planning or retros, and leaders show up first before asking anyone else to.
Give People a Real Say
We do our best to make sure that everyone has a say in what they need. As a company that has people working in the office, at home, and out for service calls every day, it doesn't make sense for us to not offer flexibility. Flexibility helps ensure that nobody is at a disadvantage because they are being forced to work in a way or at a place that's not conducive to what they need. Since we don't always know what is best in that regard for every individual person and team, that's why giving our employees a say in what they do is so important and helpful.
Judge Outcomes Over Hours at Desks
I set clear, fair office expectations by defining role-specific in-person needs and documenting the follow-up and communication standards each team must meet. One guideline that helped balance flexibility with consistency was a simple, documented follow-up routine that spelled out response-time expectations and standard client handoff scripts. That routine let people work remotely when appropriate while ensuring staff who needed hands-on guidance were present during agreed overlap windows. We judged performance by reliability and client outcomes rather than by hours at a desk.
Earmark High-Value Onsite Moments
The key is setting expectations around outcomes and collaboration, when you have different teams with different working styles, rather than applying the same schedule to everyone. At uKnowva HRMS, we've learned that flexibility works best with clear guidelines and consistent communication.
What worked was to earmark specific days or situations where in-person collaboration is most valuable, such as team planning sessions, workshops, or project kickoffs, and leave the rest up to team discretion.
This provided enough flexibility for different teams but also consistency and predictability across the organization.
Enforce a Floor for Joint Meetings
Dane Maxwell, founder of Paperless Pipeline, a SaaS bootstrapped since 2009. We have operated as a distributed team for most of our company's history, and we have navigated the hybrid office expectations question with multiple internal teams that have different rhythms.
The approach. Team-level expectations rather than company-level expectations, with clear documentation of why each team's rhythm is what it is.
Company-wide office mandates typically fail because the optimal in-person rhythm is dramatically different across roles. Engineering teams doing heads-down work benefit from concentrated in-person sprints separated by long remote stretches. Customer success teams handling distributed customer accounts benefit from staggered in-office days that maintain coverage. Leadership teams making cross-functional decisions benefit from frequent half-day in-person sessions. Forcing all teams onto a single rhythm produces expectations that nobody follows because the rhythm makes no sense for what they actually do.
Team-level expectations let each team's lead define the rhythm that genuinely serves the work. The expectations are clearer because they map to the actual work pattern. Compliance is higher because the expectations make sense to the team.
The reasoning matters because it makes the cadence defensible across the company. Other teams can see why the engineering team has a different rhythm than the customer success team, and the answer is rooted in work patterns rather than favoritism.
The one guideline or routine that balanced flexibility with consistency.
The guideline. A floor on the percentage of in-person time for collaborative meetings, set at the team level rather than at the individual level.
We require that 70 percent of explicitly collaborative meetings (defined as meetings where the agenda involves shared problem-solving rather than status reporting) happen in person. The floor is at the team level. Individual members work out their own schedules within the team's rhythm. The floor produces consistency on the collaboration outcomes the office is actually meant to enable, without producing rigid individual mandates that ignore real-life constraints.
Mandate Principle, Delegate the Schedule
With teams that need different in-person rhythms, what worked was setting the principle centrally and the schedule locally, rather than mandating one office policy for everyone.
The company sets the why, we come together for collaboration, mentoring, and the work that's genuinely better in a room, and each team decides the specific days that serve that purpose for them. A sales team and a deep-work engineering team need different rhythms, and pretending otherwise produces a policy everyone games. The routine that made it stick was teams publishing their in-person days in advance and framing them as commitments, so "in the office" reliably meant the people you came to see were actually there, which is the thing that makes the commute worth it.
The failure mode to avoid is a blanket "three days a week" with no coordination, where people come in to sit on calls alone.
The substantive principle: mandate the purpose, delegate the schedule. In-person time works when it's coordinated around why you're gathering, not enforced as a uniform quota.
Tie Location to the Work
I run a small ecommerce team rather than a large company, but the split you describe is sharp at my scale too. Some of what we do has to happen in one place, because picking, packing and checking a faulty cable cannot be done from a kitchen table. Other work, the marketing, the buying guides, the supplier emails, can be done anywhere. So I stopped pretending one office rule could be fair to both and tied the expectation to the work instead of the person.
The guideline that has held is simple. If your job needs the stock and the bench in front of you, that is where you are, and we are honest about that in the hiring conversation so nobody feels singled out later. If your job does not, I do not care where you sit as long as the work lands and you are reachable in the hours we agreed. Fairness here is not everyone doing the identical thing. It is everyone understanding why the rule is different for different roles, which removes the resentment that builds when one person thinks another is getting an easier deal.
The routine that made it stick was a short fixed window each week when everyone is present or on a call together, whatever their normal pattern. We keep it to one slot, around 2 hours, for the things that are clearly better face to face, sorting a problem order, walking through a new product, the human catch-up. The rest flexes. Protecting that one shared point gives the flexibility a backbone, so people follow it because they can see it is built around the work rather than around watching them.
