The One Return-to-Office Mandate I Would Defend Belongs to Epic.

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There is a carousel on the ground floor of the building that houses Deep Space. I rode it last week at Open@Epic, Epic's conference on its campus in Verona, Wisconsin, and there is a picture of me standing on it. Around it were more attractions with an amusement park theme. Downstairs, Deep Space seats more than 11,000 people. It was not built for guests. It is where Epic holds its monthly staff meeting, with an overflow auditorium for the rest of the company. I was sitting in the room Epic's own people fill every month.

Every meal that week was restaurant quality, served buffet style, with no expense spared. I still remember a braised beef, tender and moist, that fell apart. I have been going to conferences for more than thirty years, and nothing has come close. What I felt was awe and wonder. It is easy to be jaded about a corporate world that puts profit above everything else. Judy Faulkner started Epic in a basement in 1979, she still runs it, and she has held to the same mission the entire time. The campus has not stopped growing; there was construction equipment on site building more.

I have built a public position on this: return-to-office is usually a control mechanism wearing a culture initiative's clothes. In July I wrote about a campus I was not permitted to name, the one case that changed my mind on return-to-office. Thousands of people colocated, with no offshore teams and no consultants filling the gaps. Food and everyday services priced at cost. Turnover close enough to zero that it came up before I asked.

That campus was Epic. In July I saw it with a small group. Last week I saw the same thing at the scale of a full conference, and it is all real. None of it is for show. Other than Disney, I have never seen anyone go to this level of detail and world building. Epic is the only case I have seen with my own eyes, and I doubt we will ever see anyone do anything remotely close.

Most return-to-office plans look nothing like this. Every technical leader who has sat through a return announcement knows the package: a refreshed break room, catered lunch on Tuesdays, a foosball table, bean bag chairs, and jeans on Friday. The perks are supposed to make the case for the commute. The culture is supposed to follow the people back into the building.

Epic works the other way around. People sit near the people they actually work with, and from the stage the company described individual offices, no cubicles anywhere, and shared space for collaboration. There is plenty of room for any meeting bigger than two. The values were set at the start and held no matter what, and the campus makes them physical: its buildings are themed worlds built with care, not dollar store decorations and platitudes. Epic is employee centric because that is how it fulfills a mission of being patient centric. The office serves the mission, so the office was designed around the work.

This is what I call Culture as System Memory: culture is the set of expectations people form from what the system repeatedly signals, rewards, and tolerates, regardless of what leadership says it intends. Culture is not a plaque on the wall, and the level of detail in Epic's facilities tells employees exactly what is expected of them. Repeat that signal every day for decades, and it becomes who the people there see themselves as.

A mandate is announced once; a building signals every day. The perk package sends the opposite signal. The mandate comes first and the decorations come after, so nobody rearranges who sits near whom. People commute in to take headset calls with teammates in another building, and the values on the poster lose to what the building actually says. The best people leave first, because they are the ones with options. Output drops, and leadership reads the drop as proof the team needs more oversight. That is the Overcompensation Loop I wrote about in July, starting over in a nicer break room.

Anything short of Epic's level of dedication undermines the mandate. Decide what the building is for before you decide who has to be in it. Before you mandate a return, decide whether you are willing to build what Epic built: seat people by who they work with, make enough room for the work that needs a room, and make the values physical, then hold them for decades. If you are, the office becomes the place the right people choose. If you are not, stop the mandate. A half-built version costs you the people you most wanted back.

Walk your own office this week and ask one question at every desk: does this person sit near the people they actually work with today? Count the ones who do not, the people who come in only to take headset calls. If that is most of the floor, you do not have an office problem to solve with perks. You have a mandate that brings people in to do remote work in a more expensive building.

I send a short daily email to technical leaders on exactly this kind of design question; today's was about why the building decides whether a return-to-office mandate holds, long before the perk package does. Get the next one here: https://technicalleader.coach/daily-email