The office is back open. The new challenge is convincing more people to use it.
Companies that reopened spaces on a voluntary basis in recent months say they have often found the in-person experiences to be underwhelming. Some bosses observed that staffers spent much of their days hunched over laptops wearing headphones on video calls. Other workers arrived only to discover most of their colleagues were still at home, or on alternating hybrid schedules. The spontaneous collaboration offices once provided often didn’t occur, executives say, and some workers who tried returning to offices quickly gave up and settled back into a routine of working at home.