It is for sure a challenge, especially where people work across multiple teams and each team has a different 'standard' office day. That unfortunate individual is now compelled to come into the office multiple days.

And folks that work across teams like that are often gluing the organisation together in subtle but vital ways, so anything dis-incentivising it is a dark pattern.

I think the important distinction for us is that it isn't "work from the office one day a week". It's work from home unless your team needs you. Our ask is that team leaders work very hard to limit the days that people need to be in the office and that when they ask folks to come in there is a clearly articulated reason and objective. Basically the idea is that we want coming into the office to feel valuable and therefore worthwhile.

In reality most teams don't need people to come in that often... I'm concerned about some long term drift where some teams never come in and others find themselves schlepping into the office a lot, but I think it's something we can manage with good coaching for our team leads.

WFH and working onsite are two polar opposites, and I personally think that hybrid models are bound to lead to either model being used 100% fairly quickly. Either work and communication is structured in a way that it can be done fully remotely, or it’s not. If it is, then what‘s the point of onsite? If it’s not, well then everybody needs to be onsite.

„Your team needs you“ is a far too unspecific constraint to implement btw. That’s an invitation for extrovert team leads to pull in the whole team for minor issues.

As far as I know, no one is mandating that every comes in the same day. So you can reduce the office space by some percentage, assuming people come in on different days and not all at once.

If you have 10 teams of 5 people each in an office, in a 3/2 hybrid setting you can expect you'll have 30 people in the office. You can pad that to go to 40 people in the office on any given day -- this gives you a 20% reduction in required office space.