The ones who get most people back are not counting days

Having your home-office days taken away does not feel like an administrative adjustment. It feels like losing something you had — and that is precisely why office mandates land so badly.

DNB is ending fixed home-office days from October. Nordea is considering the same. An NHO survey shows that 41 per cent of managers with staff working from home now want them home less, against 18 per cent two years ago. The pendulum is swinging back towards the office. But the research does not point to mandates as the way there.

The organisations that actually get most people back to the office are not the ones with the strictest rules. They are the ones that stop counting days and ask what people are there to do together.

The question is not how many days — it is what people meet for.

Who decides matters more than how many days

Sintef published a survey this year of 68 organisations, most of them Norwegian and Nordic. The movement back towards the office is real, but only four of the 68 had reinstated five fixed days. Hybrid work is still the norm.

More interesting was who decided. The organisations that let the decision be made close to the work, in teams and departments, often had more people physically present than those with strict central rules. Clear expectations and trust appear to fill an office at least as well as mandates do.

That fits what the systematic review from STAMI found. The studies reporting higher productivity at home concerned mainly complex work with little need for collaboration. For routine work and collaboration-intensive tasks, the effect was not the same. Place should follow the task, not the calendar. Three office days are worth little if your colleagues pick three different ones.

Why the mandate costs more than it looks

A mandate turns something chosen into something imposed. The number of days may be identical — but the sense of control is gone, and with it much of the reason people had to give their best. That transformation, not the day count, is what an employer should worry about.

A recent Swedish study followed employees over time after hybrid work was introduced. Job satisfaction rose, in line with earlier findings. But the systematic reviews have consistently pointed to something else as well: the boundary between work and private life becomes blurrier. Flexibility is not free. Somebody has to set the framework — but setting a framework is not the same as removing the choice.

A better place to start than the mandate

You do not have to start with a quota. You can start by mapping which tasks need people in the same room: problem-solving, training new colleagues, the creative work that happens when someone draws on a whiteboard and someone else says «wait, what if». Those are the days you meet.

Focused work, of which there is a great deal in technology companies, is done best where people actually concentrate best. And one rule should stay fixed, because it is the clearest finding in the whole literature: working from home outside working hours is not flexibility, it is overtime. It must not become the norm.

A Norwegian debate with American origins

The office mandates now spreading come from American finance, a culture of long hours and hierarchical management. Norwegian working life is built on trust and co-determination. Sintef's research suggests that this is precisely what left Norwegian organisations well prepared for hybrid work. It would be odd to answer an American debate by dismantling a Norwegian advantage.

The hybrid debate is also a dress rehearsal. In a few years a far larger change in how we work is coming, driven by AI. It will raise the same questions of place, time, trust and control, only more intensely. Organisations that meet it with mandates and quotas, without asking what should be done together, will make the same mistake on a larger scale.

So, before you take the home office away from people: do not count days. Ask why you want them back, who needs to meet, and what they will do when they come. Watch whether it worked. Adjust.

It is less efficient than a mandate in the short run. But it is how you build organisations people stay in.

Lise Fløvik is a psychologist, researcher and AI founder. She co-authored STAMI's systematic reviews on working from home.