How to use elia to make in-office days worth the commute

You've set the days, people are coming in, but the office still feels like a ghost town. And the attendance numbers are fine on the report, but somehow it's not working. The floor just feels… dead.

Consider the costs, though: showing up to the office costs your team a pretty penny (around $55 a day) when you factor in the commute and lunch, versus $18 at home. That's a lot to shell out to sit on a video call next to people you barely interact with, especially if your actual team is only there on different days.

Gensler found out that socializing at work has almost doubled since the pandemic, which kind of says it all. So when someone's team isn't in, they're basically paying to be alone in a noisy office space.

So here's the actual job, once the mandate's set: get the right people in on the same days, on purpose. It's very fixable. Here's how, with elia.

If elia's new to you, it's a workplace operations platform for booking desks and rooms, checking in visitors, and helping hybrid teams line up their office days and see how the space gets used.

  TL;DR

1. Overlap beats headcount. The same 60% attendance can be a full team or a floor of near-strangers.
2. Let each team pick one or two anchor days instead of following a blanket rule set by the company.
3. Make it easy for people to see who's coming in and grab a desk next to them.
4. Design the space so that when people do come in, they have a good time, then keep tuning with the (anonymous) occupancy data.

  Step 1: Count overlap

Attendance numbers don't tell you if anyone actually worked together in the office. Take a 10-person team on a three-day mandate. Same team, same 60% weekly attendance either way. Watch what happens when you coordinate their days:

	Everyone picks their own days	Team anchors Tue-Thu
Weekly attendance	60%	60%
Days the whole team's in together	about 1	3
What the day feels like	working alone, but with a commute	an actual team day

The report can’t tell these two apart, but your employees can. And the ones who keep trekking in to sit alone in a quiet space… well, they're usually your most engaged employees, right up until they're not.

Step 2: Pick anchor days on purpose

Most teams go for a blanket rule, everyone in on Tuesday and Wednesday. It's easy but it ends up being a mess: those two days are overcrowded, the rest of the week goes quiet, and teams that would do better on other days get dragged onto yours anyway.

Letting each team pick its own anchor day is a much better bet. A few simple rules to keep it from getting out of hand:

1. Pick one or two fixed days, not a moving target. Predictable beats clever. People arrange childcare and commutes around it.
2. Build them around work that really needs a room. Planning, reviews, onboarding a new hire, not collaboration in the abstract.
3. Let teams vary. Marketing's Wednesday and the actuaries' Tuesday-and-Thursday can happily coexist.
4. Stagger them. If every team lands on Wednesday, you've just invented a new problem: 300 people and 200 desks.

Two well-chosen days will get a team feeling far more connected than four scattered days, and they are a much easier sell.

Step 3: Make it easy to see who's coming in

None of this survives if lining up a day is a pain. If it's more work than just staying home, people stay home.

In elia, you can see who's already planning to come in on a given day and book a desk right next to them. Grab your spot, pull in a colleague, done. You end up together instead of at opposite ends of the floor.

One national insurer we work with made a big push for this after a merger. They used to be in the office just one day a week and had a 1:3 desk ratio, which left a lot of space unused and people feeling pretty cut off. Once they could see who was coming in, book desks as a group and hold space on their own floor, the office started to fill up in all the right places. Same building, same desks, just a lot more team time.

Step 4: Build a space people use

Getting the right people in is only half of it. The space has to hold up once they arrive, and this is where good intentions can go wrong.

That same insurer is a perfect example. When they redesigned the office they went with the usual soft seating, couches, lounge corners, and waited for people to gravitate over to those areas. But almost nobody did. And it turned out that employees felt weird about being caught lounging on the couch because it looked like slacking. Who knew.

That's why they ended up ripping out the lounges and replacing them with regular desks, closed meeting rooms and phone booths for all the calls and heads-down work. Now those phone booths are by far the most hotly contested spots in the building.

What actually earns the space its footprint:

1. Desks near your team. That's why they came in in the first place.
2. Closed rooms and phone booths. For the calls and focus work that still eat half of everyone's day.
3. A spare overflow floor. So a packed Wednesday never leaves someone without a seat

Here's ROBIC's HR director after they rolled elia out:

"Our team members love the elia platform and adopted it immediately upon launch! The platform is very well thought out; all functionalities are easy to use, without the need for training. Certain functionalities have also helped increase office attendance and in-person interactions. I, therefore, highly recommend elia to any business!"

Catherine Chouinard, Human Resources Director, ROBIC

Step 5: Then watch what happens

You won't get the anchor days or layout right first go, and that's okay. Priorities will shift, teams will grow, and a floor that worked in spring will suddenly feel wrong in fall. When it's all up and running, keep an eye on three things:

• Hot and cold zones. Third floor dead every Thursday? Move a team's day.
• Booth demand. Always full? Add a couple.
• No-shows. If booked desks sit empty, your data's fiction. Auto-release an unclaimed desk after 15 to 20 minutes and it self-corrects.

elia's sensors read all of this anonymously, by space, so you get the real presence, not just who booked what. That's the difference between guessing and knowing: you can see which anchor days held, which spaces earn their footprint, and what to change before the next lease conversation instead of after.

Where to start

This week, just ask one question: are your teams actually landing on the same days, or hitting the number on different ones? You'll usually feel it before you can measure it. The floors that look busy but flat are the tell.

From there it's just a matter of helping each team pick an anchor day, making it easy for them to see who's in and sit together, and giving them a space that earns the drive. Get that right and attendance mostly holds on its own because people keep coming back when their team's there. And if you'd rather not run all of it off a spreadsheet, that's the part elia is built for.

Frequently asked questions

What's an anchor day?

One or two fixed days a week when a whole team comes in together, picked around the work that benefits from a shared room, planning, reviews, onboarding. The trick is letting teams choose their own instead of forcing one company-wide day.

We already mandate two days. Why is morale still flat?

Your days probably aren’t lining up. People hit the number on scattered days, so the building fills but the specific colleagues each person needs aren’t in. Getting teams to share days beats adding another required one.

Isn't this just forcing people to socialize?

No. It’s making the trip pay off. If someone spends $55 and an hour of commuting, the least you owe them is a floor with their team on it. What they do with the day is their call.

Won't "see who's in" feel like spying?

It runs the other way. This is people checking on their own teammates so they can plan to overlap, not managers auditing attendance. The occupancy analytics stay anonymous and count spaces, not names.

Does this work if we've already downsized to few desks?

That’s exactly when it pays off. Tight desk ratios plus uncoordinated days give you jammed peaks and dead troughs. Anchor days smooth the swings, and a spare floor means a full Wednesday never leaves anyone stranded.