Google is a big company, it's very difficult to generalize about what the expectations are universally - and my statement was just about my little corner of it.

Google is a big company, it's very difficult to generalize about what the expectations are universally - and my statement was just about my little corner of it. Speaking for myself, I don't care at all whether people are in the office or not, and since I work in a totally different location from 80%+ of the team, I wouldn't know anyway unless we have a meeting together. I know that other peer managers I work with feel similarly. I've also been managing people in distributed locations for more than 20 years at this point, so perhaps I have more experience with it than others. I'm sure there are teams that handle things the way you describe - but I don't run one, and I won't work on one. For myself, I enjoy being in the office because I have small children at home and I find it more challenging to concentrate unless I lock myself away in my bedroom, and if that's what I'm going to do, I'd rather be in-office. That being said, I'm WFH tomorrow and Friday because I have some personal things to take care of that are easier to do from home. I also want to emphasize that we started off with a fully "you do you" philosophy, and we even pushed the managers on the team to make sure that they worked from home a few days a week at minimum to demonstrate that it was okay and model the behavior we wanted to encourage. My preference would be to keep it that way. As I said in my original post, though, after a few months we asked people what THEIR preference was, and they (by a significant majority) wanted more structure on when to be in the office. Not to HAVE to go to the office, but to know when to expect to find other people in the office, because people didn't like going to the office only to discover that only two people from a team of 10 were in the office, but 5 of the others had been in the day before. Some teams had already informally started agreeing on "default in-office" days on their own. We went to great lengths to try to emphasize that there is no obligation or expectation, but that if all other things are equal, these are the days when people should expect to find others on their team in office. Some teams (AFAIK) still pick one or two days a week to focus on in-office for themselves.