Hybrid Work Policy: A Template Built on a Year of Our Own Office Data

If you’re writing or rewriting your company’s hybrid work policy, the number of office days is the line everyone reads first. Our own policy asks for 8 days a month, a floor of roughly 40%. Desk utilization in our office ran at 73.3% on Mondays and 36.2% on Fridays.

This guide explains what that gap means for your policy, and gives you a template with a default value for every clause.

Let’s go!

What a hybrid work policy has to decide

A hybrid work policy is the written agreement on how often employees work in the office, which days, and how they plan those days with their team.

If your company is still deciding whether to go hybrid at all, start with what hybrid work looks like day to day. To make the case to leadership, use the main advantages of hybrid work.

Eligibility, equipment, and security belong in it too, and they’re all in the template further down. 5 decisions shape how the policy holds up once people start living with it:

The rest of this guide explains each default, starting with what happened when we applied them to ourselves.

What happened when we asked for 8 days a month

We run our Sofia office on OfficeRnD Workplace. Between August 2025 and August 2026, the team there made 13,024 desk bookings, and every one of them required a check-in.

The figures below cover 232 typical working days. Weekends, public holidays, closure days and the window around our May 2026 office move are excluded. The office had 54 desks, then 60 after the move. Colleagues in the US, UK and Australia aren’t in this data.

Our policy asks for 8 office days a month. Desks can be booked up to 2 weeks ahead, and a booking cancels itself if nobody checks in.

4 things stood out:

1. Monday through Thursday ran far above the floor. Wednesday, the quietest of the 4, was still at 64.6%.
2. Friday sat almost exactly on it. At 36.2%, Friday drew about half of Monday’s attendance.
3. People decided week by week. 76.2% of attendance came from one-off bookings rather than recurring ones. People booked around colleagues, meetings and projects.
4. Teams built their own neighborhoods. Nobody assigned zones, yet people booked next to their team in both the old office and the new one. When 2 marketers booked a Wednesday, the rest of marketing tended to follow.

If people treated the policy as a box to tick, they’d spread their 8 days evenly and every weekday would sit near 40%. However, our week has a different shape.

The policy set the floor, and Friday shows what the floor looks like on its own. Every other day was set by people choosing to be where their team was.

For your policy, this means the number of days is the least interesting decision in it. Coordination fills the busy days, and the busy days are what you size the office for. You’ll find the full weekday breakdown and the method in the full write-up of our office data.

This is 1 office of 54 to 60 desks in Bulgaria. Treat it as a worked example of what booking data can show, not as a benchmark for every company.

Nobody comes in the office on a Tuesday because of our policy. They come in because the colleagues they need are already there, and because the best conversations we have are the ones that happen naturally. People Team’s job is to make that visible, not to police the count though the snack shelf being empty by 11am is a fairly reliable indicator too. – Demira Adzhikova, Sr. People Partner, OfficeRnD

Choosing a hybrid work model

Most policies use 1 of 4 models. They differ in who picks the days and how much the office fills on each one. Each model can run on several weekly patterns, and our guide to hybrid work schedules walks through them.

Size changes the answer. At 80 people on 1 floor, fixed days can work, because the whole company fits in the building at once. At 2,000 people across London, New York and a European hub, company-wide fixed days collide with time zones, and the Tuesday peak can exceed the number of desks you have. For how large employers have set their models, see hybrid work models at 5 big companies.

We’d start with team anchor days and leave the company-wide mandate out of launch day. A company-wide day count announced on day 1 is the rule we see customers roll back most often. Team days hold up better because they give people a reason to come in on a specific day.

For other early missteps, see the hybrid work mistakes worth avoiding.

Our own office combines a monthly minimum with team coordination. The minimum keeps Fridays from emptying out completely. Coordination does the rest.

Let teams pick the days

Gallup surveyed 17,660 US employees in May 2025 for its report on how hybrid work is holding up. Among remote-capable employees, schedules split roughly 3 ways: 34% set their own, 35% have them set by their manager or team, and 31% have them set by their employer or leadership.

Fairness followed control. 91% of employees whose team set their schedule saw their hybrid work policy as fair, the same share as people who set their own. When the employer decided, that fell to 73%.

Team-set schedules also beat individual ones on a second measure. Employees who set their own schedule were 76% more likely than those with team-set schedules to name burnout or fatigue as their biggest challenge at work.

When everyone chooses alone, colleagues rarely overlap, and the office days that were supposed to be for collaboration become solo days at a different desk. For ways to make shared office days count, see how hybrid teams collaborate well.

What this looks like in practice:

• Ask every manager to name 1 or 2 anchor days within 2 weeks of launch.
• Publish anchor days where people book, so nobody has to ask in chat.
• Let people show who’s coming in on which day, so someone deciding about Thursday can see who else will be there.
• Revisit anchor days every 6 months. Teams grow, merge, and move projects, and a day that worked in January can be empty by June.

Eligibility and exceptions

Every policy needs to say who it covers. Roles that have to be on site every day, such as reception, facilities, lab or IT support staff, follow their team’s on-site schedule instead.

The harder part is exceptions, because HR hears about them in week 1. Plan for these before launch:

• Caregivers. School runs, and care schedules make some days impossible. Let people swap days within the month instead of asking for a permanent exemption.
• Long commutes. Someone driving 70 minutes each way will push for fewer, longer office days. A monthly minimum makes room for that.
• Disability and health. Adjustments are decided case by case. The University of Warwick’s policy gives a useful example: in a hot-desking office, it may ring-fence a fixed desk for someone who needs specific equipment.
• Part-time staff. Pro-rate the minimum. Someone working 3 days a week would owe about 5 office days a month under an 8-day policy.
• People in other time zones. Anchor days should fall where the team’s working hours overlap, which may mean different anchor days for different offices.

We’d ask new joiners to come in more than the minimum during their first 4 weeks, on their team’s anchor days plus 1 extra day a week.

Some templates exclude new hires from hybrid work during probation. New joiners learn the most from sitting near their colleagues, so we’d give them more office time on their team’s days and treat it as onboarding.

Write down how an exception is requested, who decides, and how fast. A 10-working-day reply is a reasonable default.

Employment rules differ by country, state and contract. Before you put an office requirement into contracts or tie it to any consequence, check it with your employment counsel.

Booking, check-in and the Friday problem

A policy that lives only in a PDF tends to be followed for a few weeks and then drift. The booking tool is where the policy shows up every day, so set it up to match what the policy says.

If you haven’t yet chosen between first-come desks and booked desks, start with how hot desking, hoteling and desk sharing differ.

The settings I’d configure before launch:

• Office-day rules for each team, matching the anchor days managers chose. In OfficeRnD Workplace, you can set office-day rules for each team and send people reminders when their week is light.
• A booking window of 2 weeks. That’s how our office runs, and it’s enough to plan around a team day without holding desks for a month.
• Check-in required on every booking, with automatic cancellation if nobody checks in. The released desk goes back to colleagues who are actually in.
• Recurring bookings allowed, with a monthly look at Fridays.

Fridays need that monthly look. In our office, Friday had the highest share of recurring bookings of any weekday, at 28.1%. It also had the highest cancellation rate, 40.8%, against 33% to 34% from Monday to Thursday. Its no-show rate was 11.2%, against 8.0% on Tuesday.

Friday is the most habitual day of our week and the least reliable one. A recurring Friday booking made in spring can be a desk nobody sits at by autumn. If you allow recurring bookings, check the Friday ones every month and ask people to drop the ones they’ve stopped using.

Turn on check-in before you report anyone’s attendance against the policy. Without check-in, the report counts bookings, and on our Fridays about 1 in 9 of those people didn’t show up. A report built on bookings alone will tell HR the policy is working when it isn’t.

If you also run shared desks, pair the policy with desk etiquette rules for shared desks, such as clearing the desk at the end of the day. If people reserve specific desks in advance, add an office hoteling policy as well.

Anchor days fill meeting rooms as well as desks. Plan for the midweek crunch with these meeting room management ideas.

What attendance data is for

Once people book and check in, you’ll have data on who came in and when. Decide what it’s for before launch, and say so in the policy.

Attendance data is good for sizing the office, spotting days that run out of desks, helping teams see when colleagues are in, and checking whether anchor days are working.

It says nothing about how well someone does their job, and it shouldn’t feed into performance reviews. If leadership wants to know whether hybrid work is affecting output, the research on hybrid work and productivity is a better place to look than desk bookings.

Tell employees what you collect (bookings and check-ins), who can see it, how long you keep it, and how it’s reported. We’d report it by team and by day, not by person. Check-ins can come from the app, a QR code, the office Wi-Fi or a badge scan, so list the check-in methods you’ve turned on in that notice too.

If you employ people in the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office covers this in its guidance on employment practices and data protection when monitoring workers. It sets out what employers must and should do before monitoring workers. The ICO says the guidance is under review following the Data (Use and Access) Act, so check the current version. Other countries have their own rules, and your legal or data protection team should confirm what applies.

Hybrid work policy template

Copy this, replace the bracketed values, and cut what doesn’t apply. Each default comes from the sections above.

[Company] Hybrid Work Policy

Effective date: [date]

Owner: [HR contact]

Next review: [6 weeks after launch], then every 6 months

1. Purpose

We work in the office to [plan together, onboard new colleagues, meet

customers] and remotely for focused work. This policy sets how often we

come in and how we plan those days with our teams.

2. Who this covers

All employees in [roles, locations]. Roles that need to be on site every

day ([reception, facilities, IT support]) follow their team’s on-site

schedule.

3. Office time

Full-time employees spend at least [8 days a month] in the office.

Part-time employees spend a pro-rata share. You can spread your days out

or group them into full weeks.

4. Anchor days

Each team picks [1 or 2] anchor days a week and publishes them in

[booking tool]. Plan to be in on your team’s anchor days. Managers review

their team’s anchor days every [6 months].

5. Booking and check-in

Book a desk before you come in, from [Teams, Outlook, Slack, Google

Calendar or the app], up to [2 weeks] ahead. Check in when you arrive.

Bookings without a check-in by [11:00] cancel automatically so a

colleague can use the desk.

6. Working hours

Core hours are [10:00 to 16:00] in your local time zone. Outside core

hours, plan your day with your team.

7. Exceptions

If caring responsibilities, health, a disability, a long commute or

another reason makes this pattern hard, ask your manager or [HR contact]

for a different arrangement. We aim to reply within [10 working days].

Agreed arrangements are recorded with HR and reviewed [every 6 months].

8. New joiners

For your first [4 weeks], plan to be in on your team’s anchor days plus

[1] extra day a week, so you can get to know the people you work with.

9. Equipment and costs

We provide [laptop, monitor, headset]. [Stipend details, if any.] Travel

between home and your usual office is not reimbursed [unless local law

requires it].

10. Security

Follow [IT security policy] wherever you work. [Use the company VPN on

networks outside the office.]

11. How we use attendance data

We collect desk bookings and check-ins to plan our space and help teams

coordinate. We report this data by team and by day. We don’t use it to

assess individual performance. Questions go to [HR contact].

12. Changes to this policy

We give at least [30 days’] notice of changes to required office time.

We review this policy [6 weeks after launch], then every 6 months, and

share what we change.

For a longer guide, download our free eBook on hybrid work guidelines and policies.

What 2 published policies get right

Public universities publish their policies, and 2 of them appear in search results for this topic. Here’s how they compare with the template above:

2 clauses are worth borrowing. York’s hybrid work policy gives 30 calendar days’ written notice before changing an arrangement, which protects people who have built childcare or commutes around it. Warwick’s hybrid working policy treats a fixed desk as a possible reasonable adjustment in a hot-desking office.

Neither policy mentions booking or check-in. Both leave the day-to-day planning to managers and teams, which is where the template above adds the most.

Rolling out your hybrid work policy in 30 days

For the review, pick a short list of hybrid work KPIs to report to leadership. Utilization by weekday and attendance against anchor days are in the workplace analytics reports.

A launch email you can adapt:

Subject: Our hybrid work policy starts on [date]

Hi everyone,

From [date], we’ll each spend at least [8 days a month] in the office.

Every team has picked its anchor days, and you’ll find yours in

[booking tool].

Before then, please:

– Read the policy: [link]

– Book your first desk. Booking opens on [date].

– Check in when you arrive, or your booking cancels at [11:00].

If this pattern doesn’t work for you because of caring responsibilities,

health, your commute or anything else, talk to your manager or

[HR contact]. We’d rather hear early.

We’ll review how it’s going on [date] and share what we change.

[Name]

When you don’t need a formal policy yet

If you have fewer than about 30 people on 1 floor, you may not need a formal policy or a booking tool yet.

A short team agreement on anchor days and a shared calendar will do the job. Come back to this when Tuesdays start running out of desks, or when people say they came in and nobody was there.

Before you lock the number

Run 8 weeks of booking and check-in data before you finalize the number of days. You’ll see your real peak day, how far Friday drops, and which teams already coordinate. Then write the policy around what people do.

Anchor days, booking rules, and check-in all live in OfficeRnD Workplace. To see them working together on a floor plan like yours, book a meeting with our team.