Nik Froehlich is the CEO and Founder of Saritasa, an Information Technology and Services company, since 2005.getty​Over the last few years, I’ve watched fellow CEOs roll out return-to-office (RTO) mandates with the confidence that they were solving an obvious problem: Get everyone back to their desks and the productivity, culture and energy of the pre-pandemic office will follow. ​What I’ve seen play out instead is quieter and more expensive: Senior people leave, and many of the ones who stay show up physically and check out mentally. You can require attendance, but you can’t require participation. In tech, that distinction is the whole game. The goal of in-person work isn’t to fill seats, but to align teams for stronger collaboration and better performance. When senior management imposes RTO policies to do the former, the people you can least afford to lose hear something else: that the work they delivered remotely doesn’t count, and that leadership trusts what it can see more than what it can measure. Senior engineers, product leaders and high performers update their resumes, and recruiters do the rest.​Tech leaders keep framing this as a question of how to get people back to the office. The harder, more useful question is how to build an office worth coming back to.​That’s the difference between imposing a mandate and building gravity.​Why RTO Mandates Backfire At Tech CompaniesEngineers and experienced tech workers are in high demand, which means they have leverage in how they sell their expertise. Professionals accustomed to working autonomously and meeting outcome-based key performance indicators (KPIs) have already proven they can deliver results working remotely. When a company shifts from supporting remote work to mandating an in-office environment, it sends a message that it doesn’t trust employees unless it can see them, which rankles remote workers who have already demonstrated their value.​Compliance is cheap to produce and easy to mistake for commitment. People will show up, badge in, sit through the meetings and spend the rest of the day doing exactly the work they could have done at home, all while quietly returning recruiter messages between meetings.This hidden cost of employee attrition is never spread evenly. Junior staffers will comply with the in-office mandate because they need to build their resumes, while senior employees have more options, and the more who leave in search of better opportunities, the more the organization suffers.​The cost to replace senior engineers isn’t only paying recruiters. It includes the time lost filling the gap, getting new engineers up to speed and making them productive team members. You can’t easily replace institutional knowledge. ​Senior engineers also mentor junior developers, raise the bar on code quality, weigh architectural trade-offs and translate customer needs into systems that hold up over years. None of that shows up cleanly on a productivity dashboard, and none of it gets rebuilt overnight when a senior person walks out the door. ​​RTO is an operational decision with operational consequences. There are real reasons people work better together in person. The mistake is assuming a mandate is what gets them there. Gravity is a design problem, and building it takes the same kind of intentional product thinking we apply to anything else we build. ​Create A Work Environment That Attracts​​Instead of a mandate, tech CEOs should consider a more practical approach:• Run a “why come in” audit to identify work that is better done in person.• Pilot gravity days, starting with a few purposeful in-person days each month for planning, design reviews, cross-functional alignment and other collaborative activities.• Invest in friction reducers, such as a comfortable workspace, reliable AV equipment, food, parking and things that make coming to work easier. • Measure outcomes that matter, such as employee retention, engagement, meeting reduction, cross-team alignment and delivery quality. • Iterate based on feedback, just as though the office were a product. Test, learn from the results and improve the work environment accordingly. ​As you rebuild your in-office work culture—and create the kind of gravity that pulls employees back to the office—keep these principles in mind:​1. Working in the office should be easier. That means encouraging activities that benefit from proximity, such as planning meetings, architecture discussions, design reviews and complex problem-solving. The work environment must be better than working from home.2. Human connection is essential.And that doesn’t mean performative team building or mandated happy hours. People should connect naturally over shared lunches, informal demos, learning sessions, team rituals (like a weekly breakfast) that are seamlessly integrated into the regular workday and moments of recognition so employees feel glad they came to work that day.3. Different teams work differently. Engineering, product marketing, design, sales and operations all have different collaboration rhythms. Even within the engineering department, there will be different approaches to coding, design reviews and debugging. Allow teams to define why they are coming into the office. 4. Don’t ask employees to come in to do the same work they can do remotely. Schedule in-person activities on in-office days, and allow employees to start a little later or leave a little earlier to ease commuting. Don’t waste people’s time.​The role of the office has changed, and tech companies that recognize that and design accordingly will spend less time managing attrition and more time shipping. A mandate can get people through the door, but gravity is what makes them glad they walked through it.​Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?