Return to Office? How About Leaders Level up Instead.

I do believe, all things equal a knowledge-working team generally performs better when co-located vs remote. Collaboration is indeed easier in a hi-fi environment.

The problem is, I don’t think C-Suites admit that all things are not equal. They employ whole persons, not perfect automatons, and any office advantages are negated by downsides…

• long, draining commutes
• little time for life outside work
• distracting or suboptimal environments

If the whole team…

• lives close to the office
• has no obligations that require them to be at home
• has their ideal individual work environment set up there
• works well verbally

Then by all means, an office will probably produce better results! I’d happily go into that kind of office to avoid the Zoom calls.

Problem is that’s an unrealistic ideal for most teams.

I also think part of RTO is driven by outgoing, extroverted execs who cannot work in isolation and need to “manage by walking around” or by verbal means instead of long-form async writing.

MBWA was perfectly valid in the office days, but there are way more ways to stay informed now. I feel like managers are refusing to learn how to actually manage remote teams - both performance and culture.

The answer doesn’t have to be “return to office”.

It could be “do the work to get good at managing a flexible distributed team because that’ll lead to healthier/happier employees that will do better work”.