Spoilers: it’s not about whether remote or office work is better.

The prevalence of return to office mandates has provoked much discourse and strong opinions. For good reasons. Return to office mandates can tear teams apart by pushing out people who cannot relocate, at huge cost.   

Working physically together, in the same space, as a whole team, can be extremely enabling. Supporting a joyful environment. Sadly, too many offices were (and remain) environments hostile to collaboration. Return to those hostile environments has been imposed on many.

It makes me sad to see people…

…forced to return to offices that are noisy, cramped, illness-spreading, collaboration-killing environments. 

…conversing over video chat from across the same open-plan office, because while they’re in the same space it’s not set up to help them collaborate.

…excluded from teamwork because the rest of the team is in another location.

…stuck waiting on pull request reviews from people they are sat right next to.

Most of all I get sad when I see ineffective teams with no ability or motivation to improve—whether remote or co-located.

For many teams there can be huge advantages to co-located working, but these aren’t it. Different approaches better support different people, different teams, different contexts. 

Return to office mandates can destroy the effectiveness of teams who have uncovered better ways of working by going remote.

Tearing your teams apart and undermining their ways of working are tremendously damaging. Fabled watercooler serendipity will not make up for this.

You’ll cause harm by forcing RTO on teams with cultures that benefit from remote. Please, instead, help your teams craft their best environment. 

Remote isn’t always Best

Many people are very passionate about remote work. Remote can bring inclusion benefits. Offices can bring communication bandwidth benefits. 

This claim crossed my feed this week:

“Every successful company needs to have the most talented people. The most talented people no longer live in, or want to live in the same place.” 

This suggests that “acquiring” talented people is a zero-sum game. It’s not.

Rather, successful companies maximise what their people can achieve. One factor is indeed how talented the people who join are. Another is their pre-existing skills. Even more significant than these is the extent to which the organisation amplifies & accelerates, or impedes their abilities.  

Different organisations, and different ways of working, are more or less suited to make different individuals the most effective.  

Don’t Compromise

Mediocre teams compromise on their ways of working to avoid conflict; sacrificing their team’s potential on the altar of individual autonomy. 

Effective teams find ways of working that give themselves an advantage. They shape their environment to maximise their effectiveness. 

Hybrid work policies can easily result in the downsides of being anchored to an office location, with none of the benefits that could come from having everyone together.

It doesn’t just happen with location. Individual preferences for working exclusively in certain parts of the codebase can result in nobody working together towards the same mission. People who feel they get more done if left to their own devices for days or weeks are often right, and it can also be true that the team as a whole is less successful.

It’s easy to avoid conflict and get stuck in mediocrity. Optimising for individual happiness can result in less of the joy that people find in teams that achieve great things together.

If only effective collaboration had such an easy answer as asking everyone to come to an office. 

If you want to build up your teams rather than undermine them, start with curiosity about how they w