Return-to-office mandates have delivered exactly what they promised and nothing more: bodies in buildings. The badge data looks healthy, the floors are busier, and executives can point to attendance as evidence that something has been fixed. What the mandate cannot do is change what happens after someone walks through the door, and that is where the entire investment either pays off or quietly evaporates. Tamar S. Cohen, co-author of Hosted, Not Hired with Rana Bonfa, who has led workplace experience at the LEGO Group and Accenture, argues that most organizations have spent years deciding where people sit and almost no time deciding how the tools and systems around them help the work. The gap shows up in behavior long before it shows up in a survey, and leadership is usually the last to read it.
The Difference Between Showing Up And Showing Up Willingly
The clearest signal available to any executive is not what employees say in engagement surveys. It is why they come in at all. Research from Maptician and WORKTECH Academy found that 56% of financial services employees come into the office for the experience, compared with 43% who come in because they were told to. That split is a diagnostic. One group has found something in the building worth the commute. The other is complying, and compliance has a shelf life.
What makes the second group expensive is not their attendance but their arrival. “The people who show up out of obligation walk into the same friction they had at home, plus a commute and discomfort,” Cohen says. The office, in that scenario, is a tax rather than an asset. It adds travel time, adds noise, adds the hunt for a room, and returns nothing the kitchen table did not already offer. Leaders reading attendance dashboards see a trend line going in the right direction. The behavior underneath it – people arriving late, leaving early, booking rooms they do not use, and defaulting to video calls from desks ten feet apart – is telling a different story that no mandate addresses.
Nobody Owns The Moment Someone Walks In
The structural reason for this is mundane and almost universal. Responsibility for the workplace has been divided among functions that each own a slice and none of whom owns the result. “Facilities owns the space, IT owns the tools, HR owns onboarding, and operations owns the process,” Cohen says. “Nobody owns the moment a person walks in, how employees move around the office, technology to book and manage conference rooms, whether there’s enough light, or if people can work quietly or collaborate when needed.” Every component has a budget holder. The experience those components are supposed to produce has none.
Cohen’s framing of the remedy is hospitality, which she defines with more rigor than the word usually carries: the discipline of anticipating what people need before they have to ask, so they can accomplish their work. That is a process definition, not a décor one, and leaders appear to understand the distinction already. Maptician and WORKTECH Academy found that 57% of leaders rate services above amenities in driving the workplace experience. The framework Cohen and Bonfa set out organizes the work into five lenses: Space, Service, Welcome, Journey, and Systems. Amenities occupy one of them. The remaining four concern people and process, which is precisely where the friction accumulates and where ownership is most often absent.
The Price Of Fragmentation And The Order Of Operations
The cost of this arrangement is real, it is large, and it is nearly invisible because it never lands on a single line. Atlassian’s State of Teams 2026 puts the price of organizational fragmentation at $161 billion a year for the Fortune 500 alone. That number does not stay inside the building either. MIT CISR research by Dery and Sebastian found that companies in the top quartile for employee experience earn roughly twice the customer satisfaction. Internal friction does not get absorbed by employees out of goodwill. It travels, through slower responses, lower-quality handoffs, and the accumulated drag of people spending energy on coordination instead of output. Workplace hospitality, in Cohen’s reading, is the operating layer that connects the workplace, the employee, and the customer, and most companies have left that layer unstaffed.
This is also where the current enthusiasm for AI needs a hard look. Cohen is not skeptical of the technology; she treats it as the infrastructure that makes anticipatory service possible at scale. “A good host notices the visitor standing at the wrong door, but no host can watch every door at every site,” she says. Her framework gives AI three jobs: uncovering signals by pulling together HR records, IT tickets, facilities requests, visitor registration, desk systems, sensors, and customer feedback to find where internal friction is leaking into customer sentiment; prediction, meaning forecasting attendance patterns, recommending space setups by meeting type and team makeup, and adjusting environmental conditions in real time; and returning time to people by automating repetitive administrative work, so workplace and people teams can spend it on the high-empathy moments that move engagement.
The sequencing is the part most organizations will get wrong. “The $161 billion Atlassian figure is the cost of coordination failing to keep pace with AI-accelerated work,” Cohen says, “so a faster tool pointed at an unowned experience adds speed to the same confusion.” That is the warning worth taking seriously. Buying intelligent systems to manage an experience nobody has defined and nobody owns does not solve fragmentation, it accelerates it. Her instruction is sequential and deliberately unglamorous: decide what the experience should feel like and who owns it, then point the AI at it. Companies that skip the first two steps will have better data about a problem they still have not assigned to anyone.
Follow Tamar S. Cohen on LinkedIn for more insights on workplace hospitality, employee experience, and the systems that connect them.
