What Makes an Office Worth the Commute?
Summary: Workplace technology alone will not drive office attendance. Organizations that successfully attract employees to the office focus on creating experiences that deliver value, support human behavior, and make the commute worthwhile. Industries such as hospitality, retail, and restaurants provide valuable lessons for designing workplaces people actively choose to visit.
Heather Long, Red Thread’s Workplace Technologist & Technology Market Development, shares lessons from InfoComm 2026 on creating experiences employees choose to attend.
I hadn’t been to a Vegas InfoComm since before COVID. Walking into the hotel last week, I remembered immediately what I’d forgotten. Design dopamine is real. The scale, the light, the way those spaces are choreographed to make you feel something before you’ve consciously registered any of it. I was joking with colleagues about them pumping caffeine into the air. But it was more than that.
It turned out to be the thread I pulled on for the rest of the week.
InfoComm is the kind of show where you can spend several days looking at technology and never run out of things to see. AV, collaboration tools, AI-powered rooms, ambient sensing, frictionless everything. The ambition on the floor and on the main stages was genuine and, in a lot of cases, impressive. But the question I kept returning to wasn’t about the technology itself. It was about what the technology is actually in service of, and whether we’re asking the right questions to get there.
The Office Has to Earn It
Cisco’s keynote put something into words that I think a lot of us have been sensing. They shared a formula one of their own engineers built when the company was navigating its return to office: Return on Commute equals office value divided by commute pain.
Office value includes connection, career growth, better work, better experience. Commute pain includes time, cost, stress, and life tradeoffs. It’s a simple framework, but it names something the industry has been dancing around for years. People are doing this calculation every morning, whether they articulate it that way or not. And right now, a lot of offices aren’t coming out ahead.
A Microsoft Places session put the same challenge in different language. There’s a measurable sweet spot around 70% occupancy where a space actually feels alive, where the energy justifies being there. Below that threshold, it doesn’t matter how good the technology is. The room feels empty and the commute doesn’t pay off. Getting to that sweet spot, and staying there, isn’t primarily a technology problem though, it’s a behavioral one. Change management, social norms, the gradual and unglamorous work of building new habits around how and why people show up. A good reminder that features don’t move people, experiences do.
The Instant Rice Moment
The line that stayed with me longest came from Ilya Bukshteyn’s Microsoft keynote. He was talking about AI and the fear that surrounds it, and he reached for a historical analogy. When instant rice was introduced, there was genuine concern it would end the restaurant industry. If cooking at home became easy enough, why would anyone go out? We know how that story ended. Convenience didn’t kill restaurants, it raised the bar for what made a meal worth leaving the house for. Restaurants got more creative, more experiential, more intentional about what they were offering and why it couldn’t be replicated at home.
His point was specifically about AI and human connection, that making things faster and easier doesn’t eliminate the desire for meaningful experience. It clarifies it. And I think that’s exactly right. But it also pointed me somewhere else.
The Playbook Already Exists. We’re Just Not Looking at It.
There’s a reason hospitality has been showing up more deliberately in workplace design and operations over the last several years. It’s not aesthetic. It’s structural. Hospitality, retail, and restaurants never had the luxury of mandating presence. They had to compete for it, every single day, against an ever-expanding set of alternatives. That pressure built disciplines around understanding human behavior, earning emotional response, and designing for the full experience of being somewhere, not just the function of it.
Retail learned that technology doesn’t save a bad story. A panel I sat in on said it plainly: if you’re not telling a good story to begin with, technology isn’t helping you. The operators who are winning aren’t the ones with the most screens or the most sophisticated AI. They’re the ones who understood what they were trying to make people feel and built everything else in service of that. One panelist put it well: experience is a verb, not a noun. You’re not building a monument, you’re running a program.
“If you’re not telling a good story to begin with, technology isn’t helping you.”
Restaurants learned that convenience is not the enemy of experience, it’s the clarifier. When the easy option exists, what remains has to be genuinely worth it. That’s a higher bar, and it produces better outcomes for the experiences that clear it.
Hospitality learned that service is the experience. Not a layer on top of it. The moment someone walks through the door, every detail either earns their presence or quietly loses it.
Workplace is arriving at this reckoning now, in earnest, and possibly for the first time. The hybrid era didn’t just change where people work. It changed the relationship people have with the office itself. It’s no longer a default. It’s a choice. And choices require justification. The industries that figured out how to justify presence, without being able to require it, have a lot to teach us. We should be studying them more deliberately than we are.
What I’m Taking Away
The technology I saw at InfoComm this week is genuinely exciting. Smarter rooms that respond to the people in them, ambient AI that handles the friction so people can focus on the work, data and sensing that gives organizations real visibility into how their spaces are actually being used. The industry is building the right things.
But the most important question isn’t what we’re building. It’s whether we’re building experiences worthy of the people we’re building them for. Retail, restaurants, and hospitality figured that out the hard way, over decades, with no safety net. We have the benefit of their example.
It was also Steelcase’s first year exhibiting at InfoComm, and the energy around it was hard to miss. When the company that understands how people actually use space shows up in a room full of people building the technology for those spaces, the conversation gets better. Time spent with partners including Spaceti, Crestron, Logitech, and many others only added to it.
The next 12 to 24 months will be telling. The ingredients are all there. Smarter technology, better data, a growing awareness that human behavior is the hardest and most important variable in all of this. The question is whether we have the discipline to put it together the right way. Based on what I saw this week, I think we do.
About the Author: Heather Long
Heather Long | Workplace Technologist, Technology Market Development
617.291.3023
hlong@red-thread.com
With 15 years of experience in sales, client strategy, and workplace technology, Heather brings a strategic vision and a passion for driving growth and innovation. She has a strong track record of launching new solutions, expanding market presence across multiple channels, and building lasting partnerships—consistently delivering results that exceed expectations.
Heather joined Red Thread in 2025. She has held impactful roles at AT&T, Steelcase, and startups like VergeSense, where she helped scale SaaS and hardware solutions, led transformative sales initiatives, and supported Fortune 500 clients in reimagining their workplaces with advanced technology.
