Return to office: why the leadership pushes workers to come back

One reason top leadership wants workers in the office is that the leadership gets its education from the workers and it is helpful to be in the same room as one's teachers.

White collar workers gain a lot when they work from home. Total flexibility of how they spend their time, working whenever they think best, taking breaks whenever they need to: this is a comfortable and relaxed lifestyle. More so, they can run errands all day, they can pick up the kids from school, they can go shopping while the stores are open rather than running the risk of shopping late in the evening, when some stores might be closed, or when the worker might be tired.

I’ve seen workers take large pay cuts for the sake of working from home. In the region of New York City, I’ve seen workers who could get $160,000 a year, if they were working in an office, trade that job for a remote job that pays only $120,000 but lets them live in a rural area where housing is cheaper. They value the ability to work from home as a perk that is worth at least $40,000 a year. When asked, many of them will point out that the cost of housing, in a major urban area, and the cost of commuting, might easily cost them more than $40,000 a year, so they actually benefit from the lower salary, so long as they are able to work from home and live in a rural area.

Because working from home is so great for workers some of them don’t see why business leaders might want workers back in the office. Some workers have even developed complex conspiracy theories about how the government is pushing “return to office”, or how the real estate industry is pushing “return to office”, or how some other sinister force is pushing workers to work in an office.

However, the entrepreneurs who I know in New York City are renting their offices, so they have no incentive to help the real estate industry. Just the opposite, the entrepreneurs could save a lot of money if they closed down their office and told everyone to work from home. So why does the leadership so often rent an expensive office and ask workers to come in to it?

Here is how some of the entrepreneurs who I know in New York City would respond to this:

the huge amount of time wasted chatting

That time isn't wasted. That is the social cohesion of the company. It is worth a great deal. Without that social cohesion then the company only has a set of mercenaries who have only a transitory relationship with each other and with the company. While any commercial relationship will be, in part, a transactional relationship, the leadership is always hoping that workers will develop a deeper connection with the goals of the organization. And for the most part, this does happen. I’ve often been astonished at the deep loyalty workers have for their company. Many workers will remain loyal to a business even if they dislike their boss. Many workers develop a genuine loyalty to the customers, and the best workers will push back against a dysfunctional work environment precisely because those workers care about the customers. Helping customers gives meaning to the work, and sometimes gives meaning to worker’s lives.

But this social dynamic seems to occur more often when the team assembles together each day at the office, rather than when everyone works from home. With some exceptions, the workers who work from home seem to have less of an emotional commitment to the work. Indeed, freedom from this commitment, freedom from the emotional burden of caring, is one of the things many workers value about working from home.

Also, when people work from home they have to do more of their communication via writing. It’s rare that video chats can entirely replace writing. But writing is difficult for many people. Because I enjoy writing, it took me a long time to learn this, but even well-educated people often dislike writing and prefer to talk. So most workers, most of the time, are at their best in the office, talking, rather than sitting at home and writing.

When you have a team where everyone is comfortable expressing themselves in written form, then it is possible to build something successful with an all-remote team. But obviously this does not scale: the more people you hire, the more people you will have who are not comfortable expressing themselves in written form. This is one reason why some small startups are successful with an all-remote team, but larger companies generally need to get people into the office. Also, we often see the pattern where a small startup grows rapidly for awhile, but then it seems to run into a wall and is unable to grow further. Often the problem is that the kinds of people who were able to help it grow in the early days are no longer sufficient to keep it growing, and completely new ways of organizing the company are needed to maintain the growth. And this often means establishing an office.

When a company needs workers to come into the office, some workers will instead decide to quit, rather than come into the office. To a large extent, those who prefer to work from home are only looking for a job, whereas those who prefer to work at the office are looking for a career.

who cares, if the work is done?

I’ve heard this often, from people who prefer the life at home: so long as a worker can fulfill their obligations, and get done with whatever tasks they were told to do, then why should anyone care if they work from home?

But what work should these workers do? Only in the most authoritarian and top-down approach to leadership does the leader make 100% of the decisions. While it is true that new workers, just out of college, need a lot of guidance, if we are talking about someone with experience, whether they are designers or marketers or software engineers or accountants or lawyers or logistics operatives, typically the manager depends on that worker to offer the manager an education about what is important.

A talented a designer will educate their manager about design.

A talented marketer will educate their manager about marketing.

A talented software developer will educate their manager about software development.

Unless the manager is an absolute dictator, the manager will rely on the worker to offer an education that can shape the goals and milestones. This is, I think, one reason why managers want workers back in the office, because it is easier to get an education when your teacher is in the room with you.

Can a company be run when everyone works from home? Yes, obviously, many companies work this way now. But it does take extra effort from the leadership. And so workers should not be surprised that the leadership will sometimes prefer to get everyone together at the office.

Civilized life depends on workers who are highly specialized. A modern business leader has to weld together a team composed of many specialists, each of whom has a skill that the leader does not have. No matter how hierarchical the organization is, the leader is still dependent on each worker’s specialty, and the worker has to educate the leader if the leader is to do a good job of combining everyone’s talents together.

In a democratic and cooperative model of management (which is the only model of management that actually works) the manager engages in continuous conversations with the various professionals, to figure out what can be achieved, when it can be achieved, and how much each professional will need from the other professionals on the team. Therefore we should not ask "So long as the worker does the work they are told to do, who cares if the worker works from home?" Determining what work should be done is part of the work.

But in these consultations, the manager needs to determine if the professional is acting in good faith: is the professional truly offering advice with the best interests of the company in mind, or is the professional simply trying to collect a paycheck while doing as little work as possible? To determine if someone is acting in good faith, one technique that works well is to ask the professional to be at the office, so that the manager can see them continuously during the day.

Body language communicates a lot of information.

Body language reveals profound truths about a person.

Body language is full of meaning.

Therefore the manager can learn a great deal from pure visual scanning: does the worker look tired, engaged, excited, bored, happy, sad, talkative, morose, angry, annoyed? There is a big difference between this:

And this:

Or between this:

And this:

Or between this:

and this:

Merely being able to carefully observe the worker, throughout the day, is one of the most important ways that a manager can judge the attitude of a worker. By contrast, when workers work from home, the manager only sees them during short video conversations, lasting perhaps 30 or 60 minutes, during which the worker might offer a convincing, but dishonest, performance of loyalty, concern, good faith, hard work, true grit, and sincerity. Being able to watch a worker for 8 hours a day, rather than 30 minutes a day, makes it far easier to discern where a worker’s genuine convictions lay.

For all of these reasons, workers should not be surprised when the leadership pushes to get workers back to the office. Working from home is easy for workers but it is more difficult for the leadership. By contrast, getting people together at the office better enables leaders to actually lead.

Finally: nothing in this essay suggests that workers need to be in the office 5 days a week. But hopefully workers will understand why the leadership often wants workers to be in the office some of the time.

For more on this subject, be sure to read Why Your Boss Is Less Excited about Remote Work Than You Are by my friend Mark Herschberg.