Making the office worth the commute

People don't weigh the office against nothing. They weigh it against their kitchen table, no train fare and an extra hour in bed. That's the real competition. When someone decides whether to come in, they're running quiet maths on time, cost, travel and everything waiting for them at home.

You won't win that maths by pretending the commute is a treat. It isn't. Nobody enjoys a delayed train or an hour in traffic. But you can change what sits on the other side of the journey, and that's where the decision is actually won or lost.

The journey is mostly out of your hands. You can't shorten the Central line, add trains or knock money off a season ticket. So the useful question isn't how to fix the commute. It's whether what greets people at the end of it feels worth the effort of getting there.

That's where a business has real room to act. Four things sit squarely within your control. The comfort of the space, its temperature, air, light and noise. Room to focus and room to gather. The food and drink on offer. And the small signals that show someone actually cared. None of these need a full refit. All of them shape how a day in the office feels.

It's easy to file comfort under soft stuff, the sort of thing that's nice but never urgent. The numbers argue otherwise. The British Council for Offices found that improving thermal comfort, air quality and lighting can lift office productivity by 2 to 3.5% a year, worth between 30% and 75% of a company's annual property costs [1].

Sit with that for a second. The return on getting the basics right rivals a large slice of what the building itself costs to run. A room that's too hot, too stuffy or too loud does more than irritate people. It drags on how much they get done and how they feel about being there. Comfort is a genuine business input.

Of everything you control, refreshment is the cheapest and the most repeated. People don't use the breakout space every hour. They do reach for a drink several times a day, every working day, without fail. It's the touchpoint with the most repeats on the clock.

And the quality gap is wide. Leesman's workplace research shows refreshment satisfaction reaches 74% in the best-performing workplaces, against 59% in average ones [2]. That's a big margin on something people use constantly. It also tends to score low across the board, which makes it one of the easier things to noticeably improve. When the base is average, better is felt quickly.

Coffee is the sharp end of this. It's daily, usually more than once. It's shared right across the building, the same machine for everyone. And a bad cup announces itself the moment it hits your tongue. There's no hiding a thin, burnt, lukewarm brew behind nice branding.

Fix the coffee and you've improved the part of the day people repeat most. It's a small change that gets noticed many times over, by everyone, at no great cost. Few things you can do to the office work that hard for that little.

Making the office worth the trip comes down to the ordinary things people meet every day, done properly and kept that way. No grand perks, no shiny refit required.

Our guide goes deeper on the four things you control and where a small budget lands best. It's called "The office is part of your employer brand now. Here's the bit you can control." Have a read if you're working out which change would be felt fastest.

• [1] British Council for Offices and LCMB, "The Productive Workplace", 2019. https://www.lcmb.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/BCO_LCMB_Productive-Workplace_2019-1.pdf
• [2] Leesman, "Power of Place", 2024. https://www.leesmanindex.com/publications/power-of-place/