We're an In-Office Company. Here's Why We Think That Only Works If the Office Earns It.

We'll say the unpopular part first. Most people don't actually want to be in an office five days a week. Gallup's 2026 numbers found about six in ten remote-capable workers want hybrid, around a third want fully remote and fewer than one in ten prefer being fully on-site. We're proudly in-office anyway, so we figured we owed everyone an honest explanation instead of a slogan.

The push back to the office isn't slowing down. A ResumeBuilder survey of nearly 1,000 business leaders expected three in ten companies to require five days in person this year, and only 28% said they offer any incentive at all to make coming in worthwhile. That second number is the one that bugs us. A lot of companies are asking people to give up their commute time and their sweatpants without giving them a single good reason.

We don't think a mandate builds culture. We think reasons do.

For us, the reasons are pretty ordinary. The best ideas we've had rarely came from a scheduled call. They came from someone overhearing a pitch and saying "wait, what if we flipped that." New people learn faster when the person who knows the answer is ten feet away instead of three Slack threads deep. And honestly, some of our favorite moments this year only happened because we were already together, like 14 of us on a bus to our Austin retreat, or finding out a coworker had a cannon for an arm on a Rangers ballpark tour.

But we also know those moments don't happen just because desks exist. If you ask people to show up, the office has to be the best version of the job, not the most supervised one. That means real collaboration, real mentorship and enough fun that the drive feels like a fair trade.

If you're a leader weighing your own return-to-office policy, try this question before you set the number of days: what will people get in the office that they can't get at home? If you can't answer it clearly, your team definitely can't.