Getting Our Team to Show Up And Love It: What We’ve Learned from Thousands of Office Days

We believe laughter belongs in your workday.

And so does connection, creativity, and the occasional Bingo board. At Industrious, we don’t just help other companies create flexible, joyful workplace experiences—we’re living that experiment ourselves, every week, with our own team.

Hub Days started as a simple idea over two years ago: what if we gave people a low-pressure, high-reward reason to show up to the office once a month? What we found was that just a little structure, plus a fridge full of snacks and a trivia game or two, makes a big difference. So now, we’re upgrading. New rituals, new insights, and yes… more Bingo.

Here are the details.

 

In May, we decided to move Hub Days from a once-a-month moment to a weekly ritual across all markets. 

If Hub Days were a product, I would say our v1.0 was largely a strong start. It was how we redefined working together in person in a post-pandemic world. And the data told a clear story—when we established a ritual for coming into the office, even occasionally, our engagement and culture scores improved dramatically, with big spikes in belonging and collaboration.

 

We all know the workplace isn’t just physical infrastructure; it’s a product with users, experience metrics, and iterative development cycles. So, like any good product, after two years it was time for an upgrade. 

Transitioning from monthly Hub Days to weekly ones isn’t meant to signal a push for a full return to the office (we’ve already seen enough of those headlines). There are no other mandates on how many days Industrious employees need to be in the office. We’re intentionally not enforcing attendance. Our philosophy is that people will want to come in, especially when they know that others will be there. That’s why we anchor team events, like All Hands meetings on Hub Days and spontaneous things like group lunches, trivia sessions, and other games. Our executive team is often present, too, including outside of Wednesdays, using it as time to walk around and connect in ways that are not possible virtually.

 

What does our space look like?

Our NYC hub office, where we have the most teammates, is at Tower 49 in Midtown. Our workspace there includes multiple floors and a mix of spaces—from quiet rooms to heads-down zones to large collaboration rooms—and our team uses all of it. It showcases the full range of Industrious in action. Outside of NYC, corporate teammates in each of our 12 Hub markets have a dedicated office, a budget, a captain to organize programming, and all the equipment they need to help them feel empowered to do their best work. That’s right—we want people in the office together even if they don’t work on the same team!

The launch of weekly Hub Days on Wednesdays marks a new evolution for Industrious. We are equally excited about how it sets us up to ask our team questions we haven’t before on a large scale, and more importantly, share those findings with you. It’s impossible to understand a member’s experience if we’re not engaging with the product in the same way they do. We plan to gather even more feedback, and bring more rigor to what we’re measuring with our own team, to help shape how we evolve our own product.

That includes qualitative tracking: Are you happy you came in today? Did you laugh? Did being in the office help you get work done better than if you’d stayed home? We’re also working on ways to quantify those trade-offs, like how far someone’s willing to commute based on how meaningful or joyful the experience is. Think: a matrix of commute time versus experience desirability. We’re not just testing work models—we’re also testing hypotheses.

Simply put, being an expert in creating a great workplace experience requires doing the work ourselves.

How are we hoping to boost attendance rates without a mandate? In June, we had a month-long Bingo competition with epic prizes, new programming, and surprise & delight treats for everyone. The Bingo competition included challenges like visiting an Industrious location you’ve never been to before, taking a walking meeting, working as a Coworking Access Member for a day, and more. If one of our employees completed a full board, they received special swag and extra raffle entries for a Grand Prize trip to any Industrious location of their choice (even though we’re not in Hawaii yet). 

We first piloted a version of this Bingo competition with our members over a year ago, and thousands participated. It was a March Madness-style board full of joyful, simple actions: try a sparkling water from the Bevi machine, talk to someone you didn’t know before, show up a certain number of days. People loved it. That spirit of low-stakes fun paired with quirky prizes continues to be surprisingly motivating. Perhaps that’s why, according to an April 2025 survey of over 300 Industrious members spread across the U.S., 75% said they felt happier by coming to work at Industrious and 85% of respondents said they’ve made at least one new friendly connection by working here. \

As we keep iterating on Hub Days, we’ll share what’s working, what’s surprising, and what we’re learning about how real people connect, collaborate, and laugh together IRL.

Stay tuned here for new insights on what we learn and discover along the way.