More Employers Require It. Fewer Employees Would Choose It.

Most people with a hybrid job now go into an office on specific days, and increasingly, those days were set by someone else.

That's a real, measured shift, not a feeling.

What the Data Actually Says

The CIPD's 2025 report on flexible and hybrid working, based on a YouGov survey of 2,050 HR professionals, found that 65% of UK organisations now require employees to be in the workplace a minimum number of days a week or month. That's up from 52% in 2023. Where a weekly minimum exists, three days is the most common (48%), followed by two (32%). It isn't settling either: 14% of employers already say they plan to introduce or increase mandatory office days over the next year.

None of this is being framed as inflexible. In the same survey, 91% of organisations say they offer some form of flexible working arrangement. Both things are true at once: flexibility is common, and the minimum sitting underneath it has been getting higher since 2023. It sits alongside a related attendance pattern we've covered separately: showing up just long enough to be seen.

What It Doesn't Tell Us

It doesn't tell us whether any individual finds their own minimum reasonable, or whether 65% is high or low against what it should be. It's two separate surveys, employers and employees, not the same people asked twice, so nothing here should be read as one group's before-and-after. And it says nothing about wellbeing, productivity, or health. It's a policy statistic, not a verdict on hybrid work.

The Floor Rose. The Preference Didn't Move With It.

Here's the part that makes this more than a policy footnote. The same CIPD survey asked employees, separately, how they'd actually like to split their time. Over the last year, people report spending an average of 57% of their time in the workplace and 31% at home. Asked what they'd prefer, the workplace figure barely changes, down to 55%. The home figure jumps to 53%, a rise of nearly 22 percentage points. People aren't asking for a lot less office time. They're asking for meaningfully more time at home than they're currently getting, at the same time the employer-side minimum has been climbing the other way.

Why 0800Labs Is Interested

We've written before about the gap between how much control people have over how they work and how little they often have over when the day starts and ends, and about how that same gap in control shapes energy across the day. This is the same gap, on a different axis: not when the day happens, or how much it drains, but where it happens.

We're not taking a side on office attendance. We're interested in what stays yours to decide inside a day increasingly set by someone else's floor. What you reach for at that desk, on a day you didn't choose to be there, is still one of the small things that is.

We call the alternative Workday Hydration. It's our own term, not a claim about this survey or about what any drink does. We're building something for that. If that's useful, the waitlist is below.