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Tuesday and Thursday have become the fixed peak days in many Dutch offices. Employers understandably want to spread that busyness more evenly across the week. But as soon as the solution becomes that employees simply have to come in on different days, a new problem arises: you may solve office occupancy, but you lose autonomy.

Hybrid working has brought us a lot.

No longer automatically going to the office five days a week. More space to work from home with focus. And, for many employees, more influence over how they organise their working week. Yet something remarkable seems to be happening.

According to recent figures from the Center for People and Buildings, 65% of office workers go to the office on Tuesdays and 63% on Thursdays. On Fridays, that figure drops to just 19%.

So the freedom to choose for yourself surprisingly often leads to exactly the same choice. And you notice it.

Full meeting rooms. Busier roads. More people on the train. While on other days, plenty of desks remain unused. For employers, the solution may quickly seem obvious:

Why not simply spread everyone more evenly across the week?

Sounds efficient. But it is not that simple. Because autonomy is precisely one of the benefits.

Autonomy means that employees, within clear boundaries, have influence over how they organise their work. It does not mean that everyone simply does whatever they feel like.

It does mean that you experience room to make choices that fit your work, your team and your personal situation.

And that is exactly where there is still plenty of room for improvement. In the National Working Conditions Survey 2025 by TNO and CBS, 43% of employees say they experience little autonomy.

That makes it remarkable to start centrally planning hybrid working again, especially in an area of work where many employees had actually gained more influence.

Because if flexibility ultimately means:

You may choose where you work, except on the days when we decide you need to be here, then the concept of flexibility becomes rather flexible itself.

Spreading office days does not have to mean prescribing them

Of course, that does not mean employers should do nothing. If everyone comes to the office on Tuesday, a collective problem arises. And collective problems sometimes require shared agreements.

But there is a big difference between:

“Starting next month, everyone works from the office on Wednesdays.”

and: “Tuesdays and Thursdays are very busy. How can we organise this more smartly as a team?”

In the first solution, autonomy is taken away. In the second, responsibility is encouraged. And that difference matters.

Mandatory presence does not automatically make a day valuable

That is why it is also important to look beyond occupancy. An office can technically be 90% full on Wednesday. But if everyone then spends the whole day wearing a headset in individual Teams meetings, you can wonder how much has really been gained.

So the relevant question is not only: How do we get people to the office?

But above all: When does it actually add value for people to be at the office at the same time?

That can differ per team. A creative team may need joint sessions. A project team may need fixed consultation moments.

An employee who does a lot of individual focus work may need far less physical presence. That is why one generic rule rarely works equally well for everyone.

The next phase of hybrid working calls for trust

The first discussion around hybrid working was mainly about permission. Am I allowed to work from home?

In many organisations, that question has now largely been answered. The next phase is more difficult. How do you give employees freedom without everyone ending up working past each other?

And: how do you organise shared interests without locking everything down again?

That, in our view, is the real challenge. Autonomy does not mean that organisations simply step away from the issue. On the contrary. It requires clear boundaries, good team agreements and leaders who explain why certain choices and goals matter collectively. But within those boundaries, room must remain.

Because people take more responsibility when they have influence over the solution than when they are simply handed a new schedule.

Flexibility only truly works when there is still room to choose

So the remarkable thing about hybrid working is not that people all choose the same days. What is interesting is what we then do with that behaviour.

We can conclude that freedom apparently does not work and start steering everything centrally again. Or we can say: the freedom remains, but we need to learn to deal more intelligently with its collective consequences. The second option may be a little more complicated. But it is also much more modern. Because good hybrid working does not require less autonomy.

It requires better agreements around autonomy. So yes, by all means make Tuesday a little quieter. And Thursday too. But spread the working week more smartly without immediately spreading out your employees’ freedom as well. Swap a day. Not your people’s autonomy.

Do you want people to come to the office more often? Then give them a good reason to come. A busier Monday or Wednesday is probably not created by HR adding a new rule to the employee handbook.

It starts with a much simpler question:

Why do you actually want people to come to the office on that day?

If you want a team to be together every Wednesday, explain why. Plan the team meeting, project discussions, brainstorms or moments when colleagues truly need each other on that specific day. Make sure someone driving home that evening can think: today was actually useful.

That sounds obvious, but too often the exact opposite happens. An employee travels to the office, only to spend the entire day from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. wearing a headset in digital meetings. Even the best office cappuccino cannot make that more attractive.

Leaders can also be used much more smartly. Do you want to create more movement towards Monday or Friday? Then schedule MT or leadership meetings on those days. Not because every employee needs to attend, but because directors and managers are then visibly present. An employee can quickly approach an MT member, share an idea or ask a question that would otherwise require three calendar invitations.

Presence attracts presence.

Use that consciously. Turn an office day into something people actually benefit from. An employer has far more options than simply assigning a mandatory day. For example:

• Choose one meaningful team day where meetings, collaboration, coaching and social moments consciously come together.
• Let teams choose different days, so not every department automatically claims the same Tuesday and Thursday.
• Move MT and leadership moments to quieter days, so more natural interaction also arises there.
• Plan knowledge sharing, lunches or inspiration sessions on Monday, Wednesday or Friday instead of stacking everything on the already busy days.
• Make visible who is present and when. People are more likely to come in when they know the colleagues they want to work with will also be there.
• Give teams ownership of the occupancy challenge. Not: “you must come in on Wednesday”, but: “we want to spread the peaks more evenly; how can you solve this as a team?”
  Look at what makes sense per department. A sales, IT or innovation team does not need to have exactly the same working rhythm.
• Protect time for real interaction on office days. If every minute is already filled with online calls, the very reason people come to the office disappears.

That is not only a friendlier policy. It is simply a smarter policy.

Because autonomy does not mean that an employer is no longer allowed to provide direction. It means you take people seriously enough to explain why something is needed and give them influence over how you get there together.

Asking for something extra? Then give something back too. 

Flexibility does not have to be a one-way street.

Suppose you ask employees to structurally come to the office one extra day because this demonstrably improves collaboration, knowledge transfer or team development. Fine. But then also look at what you, as an employer, can give back. That can start small: more freedom in start and end times, a fixed focus day without meetings, space to occasionally work from another place or giving teams more influence over their own planning.

But you can also think bigger. Why should extra shared presence at certain moments not go hand in hand with more location freedom at other moments?

An organisation could, for example, offer employees the opportunity to work from another destination for up to two weeks per year. Not as a disguised holiday, but as an organised Workation in which work, personal development and a concrete business goal come together.

When several colleagues travel together, an employer can also contribute part of the costs within a properly structured HR, employment law and tax framework. This creates an interesting principle:

we ask you to consciously come together at certain moments — and at other moments, we consciously give you more space.

That feels very different from simply making more office days mandatory.

From presence politics to a more human way of organising

And this is where the topic touches on something bigger.

In his recently published 2026 book Menselijke Revolutie, organisational psychologist Sven Rickli asks a fundamental question: do we mainly organise companies around systems, efficiency and control, or do we truly put people at the centre?

Rickli warns that ‘people-centredness’ can easily become a nice term while processes are still mainly designed for the organisation. His message is not that results are unimportant, but that organisations must keep asking themselves what their way of organising does to people.

That fits surprisingly well with the discussion around hybrid working. You can solve an occupancy problem with a schedule. Or you can use the same problem to think more carefully about leadership, trust, collaboration and reciprocity.

Work on that human revolution within your own company. Ask people to come to the office when being together truly adds something. Then make those moments valuable. Let teams think along about how to spread busy days. And when you ask for some of their freedom at one moment, look at where you can give them more freedom at another moment.

Maybe even literally a few thousand kilometres away. Because in our view, the future of hybrid working is not about more home or more office. It is about a better agreement between employer and employee:

you take responsibility for what the company and your team need. And we give you the space to work in a way that works for you and gives you energy.

That is autonomy with responsibility. And that is exactly where flexible working becomes truly interesting.

At theWorkationers, we therefore look more broadly at that question: what do people need to work and live with more energy, enjoyment and focus?

Do you want to discover how to combine more autonomy and conscious flexibility within your organisation?

Discover how theWorkationers can also help your company organise work in a smarter, more human and more future-proof way. Feel free to contact us.