Trust, not tracking: Inside the L.A. company that got workers back to the office
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- Riot Games scrapped its three-days-a-week office mandate for a much more flexible model, and attendance and productivity at its Los Angeles campus have climbed.
- Many employers double down on rigid return-to-office rules, surveillance and gimmicks, even as workers fight back with coffee badging, ghost bookings and other quiet rebellions.
- Giving employees and teams freedom to pick when and how to work together reinvigorated the office, the company said.
Los Angeles video gaming company Riot Games abandoned its return-to-office requirements in January, and surprisingly, more of its employees have been showing up at work.
Two years of dictating that everyone commute into work on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays was hurting the morale as well as the productivity of many. Riot decided on a radical revamp of its policies to allow more flexibility, said Riot President Hoby Darling.
“The company-wide cadence was too rigid and didn’t reflect the different ways teams work and didn’t bring people together for the moments that could have the most impact,” he said. “Our goal was never to create rules for their own sake. It was to create the environment where Riot is the best place to make games.”
Even as managers across the U.S. say there’s been a jump in the number of people working from the office again, attendance in California is still less than half of what it used to be.
The company pivoted from a three-days-per-week requirement to a roughly three-days-per-month expectation, with each team leader deciding when more attendance is mandatory depending on when people need to be in person with their team.
More than seven months into the new policy, the results have been impressive, the company said. Attendance and productivity have risen.
The Los Angeles metropolitan area and other big California population centers are below the national average in office attendance, according to Kastle Systems, which tracks badge swipes. L.A. office attendance was 47% at the beginning of the month, less than the national average of 53% and far below the 73% recorded in Austin.
While some companies are adding incentives to come into the office, others are doubling down on requirements by adding restrictions and punishments, as well as finding more ways to monitor whether employees are actually showing up.
“Offices aren’t being abandoned; they’re actually just being redefined,” said Paul Morgan, global chief operating officer of real estate management services at brokerage JLL.
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Years into trying different carrots and sticks, many companies are finding out that they need to offer more than free donuts to get employees to embrace long commutes in places like Los Angeles.
“The stick doesn’t really work well long term,” said Morgan. “People have tried various carrots like free-bagel Wednesdays, and those kind of things didn’t go over real well.”
There has been an ongoing war between some employees and companies to circumvent the intent of return-to-office mandates.
Employees are still coffee badging, the practice of swiping into the office and sticking around long enough to have a cup of coffee before heading out to finish the workday at home or elsewhere. Another ruse is called ghost booking, which entails an employee booking conference rooms or workstations online to suggest they are in the office.
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A recent report by JLL estimates that more than a third of bookings these days are made by people who don’t use them.
Meanwhile, some managers are using big-brotherish tracking methods such as following the locations of employees’ Wi-Fi connections or their company-issued mobile phones while also trying to make being in the office more appealing. Some are even tracking keystrokes at the office computer.
Riot Games has gone all out to create a workplace that is intended to attract and retain talent on-site.
Riot — the maker of “League of Legends,” one of the world’s biggest multiplayer video games — has long tried to make its offices as appealing as possible. Its 2,600 Los Angeles employees have access to a fully subsdized commissary and an endless supply of cereal, packaged snacks and other prepared fare at small food stations scattered throughout the sprawling campus on Olympic Boulevard.
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One of its hot spots is Bilgewater Brew, an elaborate coffee bar named after a fictional port city in “League of Legends.”
An increasing number of companies are using the power of coffee to get employees to come and stay in the office, said Steve Quick, chief executive of North America for ISS S/A, a global facility management and workplace services company.
“The amount of time and money they’re spending on the coffee experience is insane,” Quick said.
These perks are particularly important in Los Angeles and other metropolitan areas where many are stuck in more than an hour of traffic to and from work.
“It’s blindingly, flashingly obvious that the more onerous the commute is, the lower the occupancy rates,” Quick said.
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Riot is trying to go above and beyond to make its office space an attractive place to collaborate. It sponsors a hackathon called Thunderdome where employees build passion projects.
As it slashed its office attendance requirements this year, it introduced what it calls “Red Talks” (a play on TED Talks) where company leaders and outside experts talk about their perspectives and creative processes that sometimes go deep into the craft of making games.
Giving employees and teams more freedom to choose when they would meet in the office has led to more people showing up, with 2026 attendance trending 15% above the average of prior years.
“This year, more Rioters are working together from our L.A. office than at any point since we returned in 2022,” said the company’s president, Darling, using the company’s nickname for Riot employees. “But more important is how that time together is being used. We’re seeing teams using that time with greater intention.”
