Recent reporting suggests UK office attendance has settled at its highest level since before the Covid pandemic. Average office attendance has been over 40% every week since early January, with 44.2% in the week ending 13 February.
For many organisations, that will feel like a sign that things are returning to normal. After several years of debate about remote work, hybrid policies, and flexible arrangements, the question of where people work is no longer top of the agenda.
But from an IT leadership perspective, even if more people are back in the office, the technology environment hasn’t gone back to 2019.
And it won’t.
The last five years didn’t just change working patterns. They accelerated a change in how organisations operate.
Irrespective of whether someone is sitting at a desk in an office, working from home, or travelling to a satellite office, these changes have reshaped the IT environment. While the people have returned to their desks, traffic patterns, security risks, and application dependencies have not returned to the server room.
Which means that even as office attendance increases, the complexity of supporting modern work doesn’t disappear.
The debate about office versus remote work often framed technology as a supporting player.
If everyone returned to the office, the thinking went, things would become simpler again. But most IT leaders know that isn’t how their environments work today.
People will still collaborate across locations, teams, and time zones. Cloud platforms continue to underpin core business applications, even with some cloud repatriation. Devices still move between office networks, home and public Wi-Fi, mobile hotspots and client or partner networks. While at the same time they’re accessing everything from M365 and internal systems to SaaS applications and third-party platforms. And crucially, security still has to protect identity, data, and access everywhere, wrapping around the IT estate.
In other words, the challenge was never about location. It was about whether the IT environment supporting the business could keep up with how work actually happens.
From a networking perspective, the "Head Office" has fundamentally changed its identity. In the past, the office was the hub where all data lived. Today, for many organisations, it is effectively just a very large branch office connecting to the cloud.
IT leaders are discovering that their legacy MPLS setups or hardware stacks - originally designed to keep traffic internal - are buckling under this "inside-out" flow. When 500 people return to the office only to jump on individual 4K video calls via the cloud, the network often performs worse than it did when they were at home. This kind of technical debt is the silent killer of the modern office experience.
Today’s IT leaders are being asked to solve a much broader set of problems.
They need to ensure employees can work productively wherever they are.
They need to keep collaboration tools reliable and easy to use.
They need to ensure the office experience is no worse than the home experience - due to poor legacy office Wi-Fi or restrictive VPNs.
They need to protect data in an environment where identity has become the new security perimeter.
They need to control rising technology costs.
And increasingly, they need to prepare their organisation for AI - or make sure the environment can support the AI tools teams are already using.
None of those pressures disappear because more people are back in the office.
When organisations get the environment right, people rarely think about the technology at all. Work simply flows between places, teams, and time zones.
An employee might start their day in the office, join a meeting with colleagues dialling in remotely, and continue a project later from home. Someone else might be travelling between sites, using time on the train to review documents or prepare for a client conversation. Another team might be collaborating across offices in different countries, handing work between time zones as the day progresses.
All of that should feel normal.
Joining a meeting should be straightforward whether you’re sitting in a conference room, working from home, or connecting from a laptop in an airport lounge. Documents should be available without people emailing copies around. Conversations should continue naturally between meetings, messages, and shared workspaces.
At the same time, the environment has to remain secure.
None of that should create friction for the user.
When modern work environments are well designed, security and productivity support each other rather than competing. People can move between offices, networks, and locations without disruption, while IT teams still maintain visibility over devices, identities, and data.
The result is something every organisation is looking for: a workplace experience that feels consistent and reliable, wherever work happens.
This is why the discussion about modern work has shifted. It’s no longer about where people sit. It’s about whether the environment supporting them is built for how organisations actually operate today.
The return to the office may signal the end of one debate. But it doesn’t signal the end of modern work.
Modern work is about whether the environment supporting the organisation is:
Those fundamentals matter regardless of where people sit. And for many organisations, that’s where the real opportunity lies.
When the workplace environment is stable, secure, and well governed, IT leaders can spend less time firefighting and more time helping the business move forward.
That’s ultimately what modern work was meant to enable all along.
Explore Your Modern Work Environment
If the workplace environment now determines how well your organisation collaborates, communicates, and protects its data, it’s worth understanding how well your current tools are supporting that.
A Modern Work Assessment provides a clear view of how your Microsoft 365 and workplace technologies are configured, adopted, and used across the organisation. It highlights where collaboration can improve, strengthening governance, and ensuring your environment is ready for the next wave of AI integration.
The result is a practical set of recommendations to help your workplace technology better support productivity, resilience, and the way your teams actually work. If you’d like to understand how well your current environment supports modern work, we’d be happy to talk.