Announced attendance requirements frequently produce partial compliance that settles well below what was stated. The gap opens at the point of enforcement rather than at the point of announcement.
Enforcement lands on managers with divided interests
A policy is set centrally and applied by managers who must confront their own staff, including people they need and cannot easily replace.
Those managers are measured on their team's output, not on attendance, so raising the issue costs them goodwill in exchange for nothing they are accountable for.
The predictable outcome is inconsistent application, with strict enforcement in some departments and quiet tolerance in others.
Inconsistency undermines the requirement itself
Employees compare their situation across teams, and visible variation is read as evidence that the rule is negotiable.
Once that conclusion is reached, compliance becomes a matter of individual manager relationships rather than company policy.
Reasserting the requirement afterwards is harder than establishing it initially, because the second announcement is measured against what happened to the first.
Attendance is easier to measure than the reason for it
Mandates are usually justified by collaboration, culture or the development of junior staff, all of which are difficult to observe directly.
Days in the building are easy to count, so the measurable proxy replaces the objective in practice.
Employees respond by satisfying the count, which can produce offices full of people on video calls to colleagues elsewhere, meeting the requirement while defeating its purpose.
The labour market sets the real constraint
A requirement is enforceable to the degree that employees have limited alternatives, and that varies by role, seniority and location.
Where in-demand staff can find comparable positions with more flexibility, enforcement carries a resignation cost that most managers will avoid paying.
This is why the same policy produces very different compliance across functions within one company, following the market rather than the announcement.
It also explains why mandates are announced more often during periods of weaker hiring demand, when the cost of losing people to a competitor is lower than it was.
Contractual and practical positions differ
Whether an employer can require attendance depends on the employment terms agreed and on local law, and both vary considerably between jurisdictions.
Employees hired explicitly as remote occupy a different position from those whose arrangement was informal or temporary.
Organisations that address the distinction openly, and take advice where the terms are unclear, tend to encounter fewer disputes than those applying a single rule to everyone.