Somewhere in the return-to-office debate, being present quietly became a moral category. The person at their desk by eight is assumed to be committed. The person working from home is assumed to be coasting, or at least to care a little less. It is an old instinct, and a lazy one. Attendance is easy to observe, so it gets treated as a signal of loyalty. The trouble is that it signals almost nothing about whether a person is actually engaged in the work.
The proxy problem
Managers reach for presence as a loyalty measure for the same reason they reach for any proxy: the real thing is hard to see and the proxy is not. You cannot directly observe commitment, judgment or discretionary effort. You can observe a filled seat. So the seat stands in for the commitment, and over time the substitution hardens into a belief that the two are the same. They are not. A visible worker can be quietly checked out, and an invisible one can be carrying the team.
Gallup (2025) makes the gap concrete. Even as offices refilled, global employee engagement fell to 20 percent in 2025, its lowest level since 2020, down from a peak of 23 percent in 2022. Engagement dropped while presence rose. If attendance were a reliable index of allegiance, the two would move together. Instead the building filled and the commitment thinned, which is exactly what you would expect if presence and engagement are separate things that a proxy conveniently blurs.
The cost of the confusion is not abstract. Gallup puts the price of that disengagement at roughly 10 trillion dollars in lost productivity worldwide, about 9 percent of global GDP. A firm that reads its full car park as evidence of a committed workforce is reading the wrong instrument, and the misreading is expensive. The chairs it is counting tell it nothing about the discretionary effort it is actually losing.
What loyalty actually responds to
If devotion is not manufactured by attendance, what does move it? The research on high-functioning teams points somewhere the mandate cannot reach. Edmondson (1999), in a field study of 51 teams inside a manufacturing firm, defined team psychological safety as the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, and showed it was associated with learning behavior, which in turn carried through to performance. It is a cross-sectional study of one company, so it maps a mechanism rather than proving a law, but the mechanism is telling. What binds people to a team is not being watched. It is feeling safe enough to speak, question and admit error.
A loyalty test built on attendance actively corrodes that. When presence becomes the currency of standing, the smart move is to be seen rather than to be candid. People optimize for visibility: the late departure performed for the boss, the reply-all sent at midnight, the calendar packed to look busy. None of it is engagement. It is the theater a presence proxy rewards. Meanwhile the quieter behaviors that actually predict commitment, raising an inconvenient risk or flagging a mistake early, earn nothing from a policy that only counts bodies.
There is a deeper irony in using presence as a loyalty gauge. The behavior it rewards, visible conformity, is available equally to the devoted and the disengaged. Anyone can sit at a desk. What cannot be faked is the willingness to speak up when it is uncomfortable, and that willingness depends on the very safety a monitoring culture destroys. So the proxy does not merely fail to measure loyalty. It suppresses the conditions under which loyalty would show itself, leaving the manager to read attendance precisely because the more meaningful signals have gone quiet.
The signal workers send back
Employees understand this ranking perfectly, and a large share refuse it. In the December 2024 wave of the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, only 44 percent of American workers said they would comply with a fully in-person policy, the rest saying they would quit or look elsewhere (Bloom, Davis and Barrero, 2025). A workforce that treated attendance as the measure of its own loyalty would not answer that way. These workers are drawing the distinction their employers refuse to: showing up is not the same as caring, and being asked to prove the second by performing the first is an insult they will price into their decision to stay.
The practical read
The leaders who win commitment do not confuse it with compliance. They define what good work looks like, measure whether it happened, and build the safety that lets people tell the truth about it. That is harder than reading a badge log, and it does not produce the reassuring image of a full room. But it is the only approach that distinguishes the engaged from the merely present.
A useful discipline is to ask, of any attendance policy, what it would actually detect. If two people deliver identical results, one from a desk and one from a kitchen table, does the policy reward them equally? If not, it is measuring location and calling it loyalty. The organization that wants allegiance should stop counting who is in the building and start noticing who is doing the work, who is raising the hard questions, and who is helping the team learn. Those are the signals of commitment. A full chair is not one of them.
Sources
- Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025. Engagement fell to 20% in 2025 even as offices refilled, showing presence and commitment move independently. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659610/state-global-workplace.aspx
- Edmondson (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Team psychological safety, not surveillance, drives the learning behavior and candor that bind committed teams. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2307/2666999
- Bloom, Davis and Barrero (2025). Return to office? Not everybody is doing it (SWAA/NBER). Only 44% of workers would comply with a fully in-person policy, evidence they reject presence as a test of loyalty. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/03/return-to-office-not-everybody-is-doing-it