This is an article I wrote for LinkedIn in March 2025, published here for posterity.
The pandemic years upset a lot of long-held practices around office work, the most significant one being the use of the office itself. Even as most of society was returning to normal, companies found themselves with vast, barely populated office spaces as workers had become accustomed to not spending hours of their lives commuting, instead working from spaces set up to their own preferences. Today, this privilege is still in effect for some, while many others have seen their employers pull them back in.
I spent those years at perhaps one of the most progressive companies in Sweden in terms of culture. It boldly declared that Working From Home was here to stay – in fact, it was now Working From Anywhere. Like everyone else, I was a huge fan. Even though I occasionally missed the vibe of the old office, my team and I did some of our best work ever during that time. Eventually, I found myself moving on and as of recently, my present employer is the latest in a string of companies issuing return-to-office mandates. You’d think I’d be upset.
I’m not. In fact, I fully believe this is the right choice, because while I can still see what makes remote working so attractive to the individual – let’s face it, everybody hates commuting and open-plan offices – I see now that without a company culture that enables it, the downsides outweigh the upsides, both at an organizational and individual level. I can already hear the angry mob approaching, torches and pitchforks in their hands, so I’ll try and keep this brief.
I firmly believe there are three prerequisites for a successful remote-first setup:
- Getting a reply on a communications tool (e.g. Slack, Teams) is almost always as fast as asking someone in person.
- Discussions and decisions happen primarily in writing, in open forums and documents, not DMs.
- Teams have ample opportunities to meet in-person for events that are social first, work second.
If you do not do this then sorry, your company is better off with everybody working from the office. Don’t jump on me all at once, there are good reasons for this.
Those reasons are shortening the feedback loop when collaborating, increasing the speed at which information moves around the organization, compensating for the lack of organic information sharing that naturally happens when people share spaces, and compensating for the complete lack of inclusion and belonging that is the result of teams only getting to know each other in brief sessions through tiny windows on a laptop screen. Yes, you’re going to get to take some of that money you saved on office space and stick it in the travel budget.
Companies that stick with traditionally in-person ways of working, emphasizing in-person communication and meetings as the primary forum for decision making – while still allowing workers the perk of working from wherever – will struggle. These organizations may still be successful in a business sense, but the frictions are a direct toll on productivity and retention, as more skilled and productive employees will be the first to become frustrated and seek new opportunities elsewhere.
Productive? Really? I see software engineers argue how being away from the office allows them to work undisturbed, being “in the zone”, getting more done. I will argue this is really a net negative. Very little work is truly carried out by only one person at a time. While they might feel productive in their “zone”, there are likely others waiting for their input. We can argue the drawbacks of open offices all day long, but if you need hours of deep focus trying to solve a problem without involving your peers – you are doing it wrong.
So how do we get the best of both worlds? Hybrid approaches only staunch the bleeding. While return to office mandates are a solution, they also do not come cheap, as many workers have come to feel a sense of (more or less justified) entitlement to the perks of working remotely. However, I do not believe there is a better way for organizations that are unwilling to adopt, at every level of leadership, practices that actually support productive remote work.