Why Workplace Events and Hospitality Make People Choose the Office
The Events That Make People Actually Want to Show Up
Nobody has to come into an office anymore. Hospitality and community are what make people choose to, anyway.
Nobody has to be at a desk to get real work done anymore. Email travels just as well from a kitchen table, and a laptop does not know the difference between a corner office and a couch. Which means the question every employer and every operator is quietly answering every single morning is not how do we get people back into the office. It is why would anyone choose to come in at all. Increasingly, the honest answer has very little to do with the desk.
The Office Stopped Being About the Desk
For most of the last century, the office asked one thing of the people inside it. Show up, sit down, do the work. Attendance was not a decision, it was a condition of employment. That changed permanently once hybrid work proved it could deliver the same output, or better, from almost anywhere.
Stanford research has found that hybrid schedules deliver productivity on par with full time, in office work, while cutting voluntary resignations by roughly a third, and actual attendance gains have stayed modest even where mandates tightened. The variable that actually explains the gap is not the policy on the books. It is whether people feel any real bond to the place and the people in it. Someone who knows their neighbors down the hall, who has a standing lunch with another company in the building, who feels like part of something rather than a badge swipe on a spreadsheet, works better and stays longer, not because a policy told them to, but because the workplace actually earned it.
None of that means a strict attendance mandate cannot fill a building. It means filling a building and earning real engagement are two different achievements. Real engagement, the kind that shows up later in retention and referrals, has to be earned fresh every day now. The office is no longer a default setting. It is a choice, remade every morning, and the workplaces winning that choice are the ones giving people an actual reason to make it.
Hospitality Has Become the Competitive Advantage
If attendance is now voluntary, the physical workplace has to compete for it, and increasingly it is competing on hospitality rather than square footage.
The space itself only gets you so far. The relationships people build inside it are what actually keep them coming back.
This is exactly the terrain flexible workspace was built for. A well run coworking or flex operator can offer the kind of hospitality that used to live only in trophy office towers, wellness rooms, podcast studios, a genuinely good cup of coffee, without locking a growing company into a lease that runs ten years.
That philosophy is what inspired UnCommon x Rubicon Point Partners. UnCommon is our hospitality platform, designed to elevate the workplace experience across our portfolio. It brings together flexible workspace, incubators, wellness, podcast production, community programming, and thoughtfully curated amenities under one brand.
Not every property receives every offering. Instead, each asset gets the version that best fits its location, its tenants, and the community it serves. What never changes is the commitment to creating places where people genuinely want to be.
That's the difference. While many portfolios focus solely on the building, UnCommon x Rubicon Point Partners focuses on the experience inside it.
The UnCommon Wellness Studio, one of the amenities members actually use every day.
But amenities are only half the equation. A gym, a coffee bar, and a conference room are things a building has. They become a reason to come in only once something is actually happening inside them.
Coworking operators who study this closely keep landing on the same finding. The relationships formed inside a space matter more than the space itself. 64% of coworking members report making a valuable professional connection through their workspace, and operators overwhelmingly cite member interaction, not amenities, as the most rewarding part of the job. Hospitality, in other words, is not the lounge furniture. It is what happens when people are actually gathered in it.
Events Turn a Building Into a Community
This is where events earn their keep. An amenity is passive. It sits there, available, until someone decides to use it. An event is active. It puts a specific group of people in a specific room at a specific time, with an actual reason to talk to each other. That is the difference between a building full of tenants who happen to share a lease and a building that functions like a community.
A thoughtfully run calendar, networking breakfasts, wellness classes, educational panels and fireside chats, seasonal happy hours, local business partnerships, community lunches, hands on workshops, charity drives, and tenant appreciation events, does something no amenity can do by itself. It gives people a recurring, specific reason to be in the building on a given day, and it puts them in the same room as people from other companies they would otherwise never meet. Multiply that across a year, and an operator has not just built an amenity package. It has built an ecosystem.
"Most landlords think about vacancy rates. We think about whether the businesses in our buildings are actually growing. If they're growing, everything else follows."
Razmig Boladian, Rubicon Point PartnersFirst shared in UnCommon's blog post, The Landlord Who Actually Roots for You.
Six Reasons Events Belong in the Budget
- Higher office attendance. A wellness class or a happy hour gives people a specific day and a specific reason to come in, not just a vague sense that they probably should.
- Stronger tenant satisfaction and retention. Tenants who feel looked after renew. Tenants who feel like a line on a rent roll go shopping for a better deal.
- Real networking and collaboration. The best introductions tend to happen in a coffee line or a happy hour, not in a lease negotiation.
- Better wellbeing and engagement. A midweek reset, even a small one, adds up across a year in ways an engagement survey eventually notices.
- A culture people can point to. Culture is not a value statement on a wall. It gets built one gathering at a time.
- Memorable experiences people actually look forward to. The kind that make a Tuesday in the office feel different from a Tuesday working alone at home.
A Case Study in Small Gestures
A few weeks ago, the team behind UnCommon brought Izzy's Cheesesteaks, a Philadelphia classic reimagined for the Bay, to 50 Rio Robles, a Rubicon Point property in Silicon Valley, for a tenant appreciation lunch. Lunch was on the house. The only thing tenants were asked for in return was a quick word on how things were going, with an entry into a small gift card drawing as thanks for the feedback.
The line at UnCommon's tenant appreciation lunch, 50 Rio Robles.
By the team's own account, the line was out the door.
It is a modest event, by design. No keynote, no elaborate production, just good food and an afternoon set aside to say thank you. But it captures the whole argument in miniature. The lunch gave tenants a specific reason to be in the building that day. It put people from different companies in the same line, trading small talk while they waited. And by pairing the appreciation with a simple, low pressure ask for feedback, it turned a nice gesture into an actual listening exercise, the kind that tells an operator how tenants are really doing long before a lease renewal conversation ever happens.
That is the throughline. Tenant appreciation events are not a courtesy tacked onto the real business of leasing space. Done well, they are one of the more efficient tools an operator has to learn what is working, reinforce what tenants already value, and remind everyone in the building that the relationship runs in both directions.
Shared on UnCommon's Instagram, @go_uncommon_.
Consistency Beats a Single Spectacle
The lunch truck was not an isolated gesture. Across UnCommon's buildings, the same instinct shows up all year in smaller forms. An ice cream social in the Masin Block lobby on a warm summer afternoon. A Halloween happy hour with drinks and treats in a shared amenity space. A chair massage and cookies afternoon, no agenda, just a moment to reset midweek. A fireside chat on conscious entrepreneurship for founders navigating a fast changing industry. A new coffee roaster welcomed into the building with the same care as a new tenant.
View some of our recent activities.
None of these are large productions. That is rather the point. Consistency matters more than scale. A building that runs one spectacular event a year and calls it community is running a marketing campaign. A building that shows up with something worth attending most months, a lunch, a class, a happy hour, a welcome, is running an actual community.
A Reason to Be There, Not an Obligation To
The workplaces winning the attention of hybrid employees right now are not the ones enforcing the strictest attendance policy. They are the ones that made showing up feel like a choice worth making. That distinction, between an environment people are required to visit and one they genuinely want to spend time in, is the entire game.
Square footage is easy to copy. Amenities are easy to copy. What is much harder to replicate is a building where people actually know each other, where there is usually something worth showing up for, and where whoever is running the place is paying real attention to whether tenants are doing well. That is not a perk sitting on top of the lease. It is the product.
In a world where nobody has to come into an office, hospitality and community are what make people want to, anyway. Events are not decoration on top of a workplace. They are one of the few tools an operator actually has to turn square footage into a reason to show up.
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