We Wanted People in the Office, So We Made It Worth Showing Up
By Kenny Mendes, Chief People Officer, Superhuman
The moment I said "ways of working update" in an all-hands, I knew what was coming.
The jokes in the Zoom chat about in-office life started within seconds. "Double-decker desks." "Megadesk." "One big picnic table." That particular brand of nervous humor that tells you your audience is bracing for something. And then one person said, "I need these jokes to help me navigate the anxiety I feel waiting for the point of this conversation."
She was right to feel that way. For two years, companies had been announcing return-to-office policies that felt identical. They were mandates dressed up in language about culture and collaboration, with no real acknowledgment of what it actually costs for people to show up. We had made mistakes of our own. If this time was going to be different, we had to earn it.
We had an airport problem
We didn't want to create yet another mandate, so we brought in Jon Levy—a behavioral scientist and one of the foremost researchers on how trust actually forms in teams—to help us think through the problem from the start.
As of mid-2025, a majority of Fortune 100 employees were experiencing a full-time office mandate, up from 5% two years prior, and the average required in-office days per week rose from 2.6 to 3.9. But showing up isn't the same as being connected. Jon calls this the airport problem: people passing through the same space every day without ever connecting, like travelers in the same terminal. The consequences are measurable: mandates that feel disconnected from how work actually happens reduce intent to stay by up to 10% and increase quiet-quitting behaviors by up to 19%.
We had learned about those consequences the hard way. Our earlier attempts to bring people back, particularly in our Engineering, Product, and Design organization, were uneven. But in the moments when people did come in, we saw something: decisions were made in an afternoon that would have taken days async. Energy noticeably shifted, with sparks of brilliance that made us want more.
Jon's research helped us understand why. Trust doesn't build through compliance; it builds through connection loops like small moments of vulnerability, someone stepping in, or closing a loop on a complex problem. Those loops can happen remotely, but in person they happen constantly, in the margins of the workday that never show up on a calendar.
We had been trying to solve a trust problem with an attendance policy. With this new understanding, the question wasn't how to get people into the office—it was what would actually make them want to come.
We led with honesty
We went back to our team and told them the truth. We believed that more time together would make us more successful and more connected, and that the rhythm of in-person work is genuinely hard to replicate remotely. We said those things out loud, not as a preamble to a policy announcement, but because we wanted to be honest about what we believed. And then we listened.
What we heard wasn't reluctance to connect. It was friction: showing up to an empty office; commuting logistics; childcare; and housework. They voiced the compounding weight of daily life that doesn't pause because your calendar says "in-office day." People weren't avoiding the office because they didn't value time together. They were avoiding it because we hadn't made it easy enough to show up.
Then we removed the friction
We built a program designed to close that gap, not as an incentive play, but as a genuine attempt to remove the barriers between our people and the kind of in-person connection we all knew mattered.
The core idea was opt-in, not mandates: people choose a level of in-office commitment ranging from two to five days a week, and the benefits they receive scale accordingly. For our San Francisco hub, that means company-paid transit and parking, dedicated desks for those coming in three or more days, a monthly commuter stipend, and a lifestyle and wellness reimbursement budget covering childcare, cleaning, and meal prep. Plans vary by hub, and every team member has access to a baseline wellness stipend regardless of how often they come in.
In practice, people have used these benefits to cover a Waymo into the office, splurge on an e-bike, stock the fridge so weeknight cooking doesn't feel like a chore, or cover childcare on the days when the commute wouldn't work otherwise.
The framing mattered just as much as the benefits. We stopped calling in-office time a requirement and started calling it what it actually is: a commitment to your teammates. We ask teams to coordinate which days they come in together, so that when you show up, your people are there. We don't treat attendance as the metric; we watch for the signals that actually matter: stronger collaboration, faster onboarding, clearer decisions, sustained engagement.
And we stayed committed to our full team throughout. Superhuman has nearly 1,500 people across 35 states, 12 countries, and 10 time zones, and roughly a quarter don't live near a hub at all. So we invested in company-wide collaboration hours, distributed rituals, dedicated on-sites, and a baseline stipend for everyone, everywhere.
What’s happening now
About 76% of North American hub–based team members opted into regular in-office work in Q1. And we were genuinely shocked a third chose a four- or five-day plan. This was from a team that, not long ago, wouldn’t come in two days a week.
We’re also seeing qualitative results. For example, a sales rep caught a product demo over lunch and walked away with context that changed how they talk to customers. A cross-functional hallway conversation unlocked something a Slack thread never could. An engineer and a designer who had only ever worked together asynchronously sat down and figured something out in twenty minutes. Unlike our first attempt, this wasn't confined to one part of the organization—it was the whole company sharing a space.
We're still iterating: game nights, shared breakfasts, switching from catered individual lunches to buffet-style service. Not all of it sticks, and that's fine. What matters is paying attention to the outcomes that don't show up on a productivity dashboard but do show up in how a team feels.
Which brings me back to that all-hands. After the Megadesk jokes ran their course, the chat shifted: "Wow." "Amazing." "Data-driven and science-backed decision-making at its finest." And then, from someone who had been deep in the jokes just minutes earlier: "'RTO' wishes... This is Ways of Working."
People are coming to the office because it's worth it to them, which is what we were after all along.
Interested in Superhuman's ways of working? Check out our open roles.