Offices in Silicon Valley are emptier this summer than their counterparts around the country: San Francisco office attendance averaged just over 45% in June, according to data from the city. (In the weeks leading up to the pandemic, the rate was always above 90%.) San Jose offices were even emptier, with attendance averaging under 39%. That’s compared to averages of around 59% in Austin and roughly 50% in Los Angeles and New York.

As tech companies have grappled with how to get often-resistant workers back into offices, tactics like badge tracking and attendance performance metrics have been met with petitions, letters to the C-suite, and anti-RTO Slack channels.

Perhaps the secret to enticing tech workers back to the office has a very Silicon Valley answer.

“The world freaking changed, and Silicon Valley has been living in a little bubble for a while, thinking all those perks would attract the best talent,” Honghao Deng, CEO and co-founder of body-heat sensing tech company Butlr, told Tech Brew. “It used to be some kind of signature thing that a tech company had all this fancy stuff, but only ideas attract the best talent, nothing else.”

Deng, a trained architect whose sensors are used to help infer the presence of humans in a building, said companies should be thinking about their offices as another product.

“With a tech product, you need to understand how users use it, and also based on the usage data, improve it,” he explained. “That’s why apps evolve every day.” Offices, on the other hand, haven’t followed that path, he said.

“It’s really about…making the workplace a user experience–driven product,” Deng said.

So, how can offices become idea-generating products that tech workers actually want to use?

A tech solution for a tech problem?

“The primary lens through which we look at hybrid [work] is how to make sure that a person is most effective wherever they are. And that, of course, from our perspective is a technology question,” HP Chief Commercial Officer David McQuarrie told Tech Brew, and employers are playing catch-up when it comes to enabling workers to feel like they can be effective in today’s offices.

“The majority of workers still say that the tech in the office is not adequate for what they do, compared to the tech that they now have at home,” he explained. (HP, of course, makes…office tech. But even HP isn’t demanding that all of its workers schlep back to their cubicles: It doubled down on a commitment to hybrid work with a $3.3 billion acquisition of workplace collaboration tech company Poly.)

Few companies have a founding story that’s more quintessentially Silicon Valley than HP, which was started out of a Palo Alto garage.

HP's RTO policy is a hybrid, context-based one, and McQuarrie said work in Silicon Valley is unlikely to ever be the same. “Hybrid is here to stay, we think not just for us but for the world,” McQuarrie said. “It’s a long-term shift, arguably the greatest shift that any of us have seen in our working lives.”

Other Bay Area tech leaders, all of whom have their own take on Deng’s theory of “productized” workspaces, agreed that better tech is a key piece:

Remote work made Zoom a household name, but Alana Collins, the company’s head of real estate and workplace, said transforming physical spaces has become a competitive advantage.

“No matter what policy is in place or how often employees are in the office…it’s critical that business leaders prioritize transforming their offices now and equip their spaces with the right technology,” Collins told Tech Brew via email. “Otherwise, they risk getting left behind.”

ServiceNow Chief People Officer Jacqui Canney said 98% of her company’s global workforce is made up of remote or “flexible” workers. At the same time, the company is opening two new buildings in Silicon Valley, she added. The ServiceNow approach includes things like “Team Tuesdays,” but has also included reimagining certain spaces.

“On some floors in buildings at our Santa Clara headquarters, we replaced traditional cubicles with soft seating and movable whiteboards to allow for creative brainstorming sessions and larger group meetings,” Canney said in an email. “We’ve also bolstered our Zoom capabilities in conference rooms to be inclusive of both in-office and remote teams.”

At Dropbox, a “virtual-first” approach means the company no longer views the office as a “center of gravity,” and instead focused on optimizing its existing spaces for “planned gatherings and collaboration,” Chief People Officer Melanie Rosenwasser explained in an email. That’s essential to maintaining a “level playing field” for workers around the country and the world, including for talent the company has invested in outside traditional tech hubs, she said.

Last summer, the company announced its move to “reimagine” the office experience, converting offices into “Dropbox Studios”—collaborative spaces focused on “connectivity, creativity, and community-building.”

“We understood from employees that their WFH setups were more suited for focused/solo work,” Rosenwasser said. “This means that the primary reason our employees come to our Studios is for in-person collaboration and the space is designed to support that.”

Deng, who said he wants his employees in an office for the “sparks” and “random serendipities,” thinks an overhaul of how the tech industry thinks about offices might actually help Silicon Valley get back to its roots.

“There’s this Starbucks idea, kind of cliché, where people get together and just have random chats,” he said. From an architectural perspective, Deng wants to make team spaces more casual, with a focus on reconnecting and exchanging ideas, as opposed to individual work.

“I think the Starbucks idea…it’s a Silicon Valley story, right? Stuff happening in Starbucks. How do we bring that back to the office?”