Ask why the office matters and you will get two answers wearing the same coat. One is about the work: the whiteboard, the fast question answered across a table, the new hire learning by osmosis. The other is about the hierarchy: the corner office, the reserved parking space, the visible confirmation that some people are summoned and others do the summoning. Return-to-office arguments almost always invoke the first and quietly serve the second. Separating them is the whole game.
Two very different buildings
As a tool, the office is judged by output. You bring people together when being together produces something that distance cannot: a hard design session, a delicate negotiation, the onboarding of someone who does not yet know what they do not know. Used this way, presence is instrumental and occasional. It flexes with the task. Nobody defends a whiteboard on Tuesday if the work that needed it finished on Monday.
As a symbol, the office is judged by legibility of rank. Its value is that it makes status visible: who has the window, who is seen arriving early, who can require others to be present. This office does not flex with the task because the task was never the point. It has to be permanent and populated, because an empty status symbol signals nothing. When a leader insists on a full floor regardless of what the day's work demands, they are defending the symbolic building, whatever the memo says.
Lee and Edmondson (2017) give the distinction its spine. Managerial hierarchy, in their synthesis, is useful for the reliable execution of known tasks but reinforces differences in status and tends toward rigidity. The instrumental office is the tool version of coordination. The symbolic office is the status-reinforcing version, and it is rigid by design, because a status marker that bends to circumstance stops marking status. The confusion between the two is not accidental. The symbolic case is easier to feel and harder to admit, so it borrows the language of the instrumental one.
The history of office design is largely a history of this second building. The corner suite, the executive floor, the graduated desk sizes were never about getting work done more efficiently. They were about rendering the org chart in architecture, so that rank could be read at a glance. Remote work threatened that legibility, which is part of why its reversal feels so urgent to some leaders and so pointless to their staff. The people defending the symbolic office are defending a language of status that distance made illegible, and they experience its loss as a loss of order.
How to tell which building a leader is defending
The test is simple: does the presence requirement track the work, or does it track the hierarchy? A policy that says come in for the two days your team actually collaborates is defending the tool. A policy that says be here five days because that is how a serious company looks is defending the symbol. The first adapts to what is being built. The second adapts to nothing, because its function is to be seen.
The cost of conflating them shows up in the exits. Ding and Ma (2024), using distributional synthetic controls over 260 million résumés, found that rigid mandates at Microsoft, SpaceX and Apple caused disproportionate senior departures, with the effect scaling by strictness. This is a working paper, not peer-reviewed, but its causal design is the best available. Read through the tool-versus-symbol lens, the finding is pointed. The most senior people are the least willing to rearrange their lives around a symbol, because they have judgment about which meetings need a room and the leverage to act on it. Defend the symbolic office hard enough and you lose the people best able to tell the difference.
That loss compounds quietly. The senior people who leave take with them the tacit knowledge of when colocation actually helps and when it is ritual. What is left is a workforce more inclined to treat every day in the building as equally necessary, because the colleagues who knew otherwise are gone. The symbol thus becomes self-reinforcing: it drives out the judgment that would have questioned it, and the office grows more ceremonial as the people who used it as a tool depart.
The practical read
The engaged workforce that any of this depends on is not abundant. Gallup (2025) puts global engagement at 20 percent, the lowest since 2020, with an estimated 10 trillion dollars in lost productivity worldwide. Spending that scarce engagement on a status display is an expensive way to feel important. People give discretionary effort to work that respects their time, not to a policy whose main output is a photogenic floor.
So the useful discipline for any leader writing an attendance rule is to name the building they are defending. If the goal is to get specific people in a room for work that genuinely needs it, say so, scope it, and let the rest flex. If the honest goal is to reassert rank, at least know that is the trade, and know its price in senior departures and drained goodwill. A desk you use is a tool. A desk you must be seen occupying is a message, and the message most employees now read is that the company confused looking like work with doing it.
Sources
- Lee and Edmondson (2017). Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing. Hierarchy reinforces status differences and tends to rigidity, distinguishing the instrumental office from the status-symbol office. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Ding and Ma (2024). Return-to-Office Mandates and Brain Drain. Rigid, status-driven mandates caused disproportionate senior exits, the people best able to judge which work truly needs a room. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.04352
- Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025. Global engagement at 20% and 10 trillion dollars in lost productivity make spending goodwill on a status display costly. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659610/state-global-workplace.aspx