As RTO mandates have solidified, employees have developed routines for their in-office days.
Nick Lachance/Toronto Star via Getty Images
Every office has them.The employee who treats work like a second home. The one who arrives before sunrise and disappears by lunch. The midweek warrior. The stealth drop-in.As the return-to-office wars have subsided, they've left behind a workplace ecosystem populated by distinct species whose routines are shaped by a mix of company policy and personal preference.Business Insider spoke with a half-dozen office workers about how they navigate workplace expectations around office attendance — and why they've landed on the routines they have:The 5-day faithfulShaohua Zhou is unapologetically pro-office.The engineering manager, based in San Francisco, spent years working remotely until he joined an agentic software development startup about a year ago. The company's guidance was to come into the office as often as possible. Zhou interpreted that as five days a week.While many coworkers came in three days a week and worked from home in the mornings, Zhou was in the office from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. every weekday. The schedule made picking up his kids more difficult, but as a manager overseeing 15 people, he wanted to make sure no one came into the office expecting to find him and discovered he wasn't there.
