Marc-Antoine is the CEO and cofounder of Planned. He writes about in-person strategy and events optimization.

Throughout the pandemic, workers quickly adapted to life changes ushered in by remote work. With commuting no longer in the picture, they found themselves free to dedicate time to their families and side hustles. In a post-pandemic landscape, many find this freedom hard to let go of. Flexibility seems to be the word of the hour, with even the best talents now pushing back on mandatory office work culture.

While the debate often gets stuck on whether we are more productive at home or at the office, I think the main question is: can companies engage staff and clients in the long run without in-person interactions? Spoiler alert: no they can’t.

79% of remote workers have grown distant from their teams and disengaged from their jobs in 2022, according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report. And it’s not hard to figure out why: it’s more difficult to care and easier to leave when you don’t create interpersonal connections with your colleagues.

Yet two-thirds of workers say they’re prepared to look for work elsewhere if forced to return to the office full-time. And embracing hybrid work puts companies at risk of offering the worst of both worlds: mandatory commute to empty offices.

With 73% of workers saying they need a greater incentive than company expectations to go back to the office full-time, a reframing of what it means to work together is necessary.

Making People Want To Get Back Together

So how do you make people leave their pets and face that commute?

One thing industry leaders are exploring is rebranding the office as a space for employees to connect and collaborate. Companies like L’Oréal are redesigning their office spaces to be agile and hospitable—and finding that employees are happier. At its Paris office, the cosmetics giant started offering on-site services to support its employees’ well-being, including fitness rooms, medical services and nail bars. In Copenhagen, L’Oréal added office spaces for employees to meet informally, resulting in a 7% rise in employee satisfaction levels.

Other organizations have started to focus on in-person events as a way to balance their fully remote work culture. In 2020, Dropbox adopted a “Virtual First” policy while rebranding its offices as “studios” and limiting how its staff could use them. Employees are encouraged to use studios for intentional gatherings, like brainstorming sessions, community-building events and socializing—in other words, events.

Social Is The Name Of The Game

Frequent in-person events are becoming essential to solid company culture. Indeed, 84% of workers say they’d be motivated to head to the office by the promise of socializing with their co-workers, according to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index. After all, it’s easy to treat yourself to great snacks at home, but you’ll never get to bond with your colleagues from your home office.

That is something we’ve observed directly with our clients but also with our own team. Because my co-founder, Emeric Noël, and I wanted to build an in-person company culture, we decided to give our team a budget to organize social events every two weeks. We all take roles to come up with new ideas to gather the team around new activities—inviting stand-up comedians, organizing wine tasting and going bowling. Those gatherings have become a cherished moment for us all, and even a major hiring perk. We’re now getting candidates who are willing to relocate to cold snowy Montreal to work from our office.

And that’s something we’ve seen our clients do too—hosting smaller but frequent team events in a decentralized way.

In-Person Strategies Are Crucial To Incentivization

Building an in-person strategy within your organization is a multifaceted effort. It’s a combination of allocating time and budget, allowing for creativity and decentralization while keeping control over budgets.

Here are my recommendations:

1. Identify the groups that would benefit from in-person collaborations, both internally and externally. This can be harder than it sounds: not everyone needs/wants to be invited to everything, yet you need to account for silo-breaking meetings.

2. Identify the people within your organization that will take charge of event planning. This can be a centralized event team, occasional event planners (team leaders, office managers, client-facing people) or a mix of both.

3. Dedicate internal spaces to small events and collaborative meetings. Go for smaller, more often.

4. Empower event planners to organize out-of-the-box meetings. Things as simple as inviting a third-party speaker from time to time or organizing a small in-office activity can go a long way. In this case, empowering means assigning budgets, guidelines and sourcing tools.

5. Make it clear to your management team that these events are a tool to help bring people together, from clients to staff. Make it part of the strategy.

6. Get in the habit of sharing photos and testimonials after social events to generate buzz among your internal teams.

Hybrid and remote work models are here to stay, and that’s why I predict that 2023 will be a groundbreaking year for corporate events. Companies struggling with disengaged teams can get ahead of the post-pandemic shift in worker attitudes by implementing in-person strategies that appeal to their employees. That simply means making sure your staff can connect with their peers, clients and partners, in or outside of the office. Of course, in-person events won’t solve everything—but bringing people together and reminding them why they are working together can change an office dynamic for the better.

Personally, I’ve always considered that the biggest indicator of engagement in an employee is whether they have friends at the office. It’s about fostering an environment where people will be able to create those connections, exchange ideas and actually want to be together in person.

Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?