Return to Office Is Bad Policy

As part of my consulting business, I often focus on what I call Thank God It’s Monday^TM mindset: instilling a mindset where people want to come into the office on Monday to work on cool stuff with cool people. But then a pandemic happened and we found out that all of the ideas about having to be co-located and physically together weren’t the only way. We found ways to work remotely but still collaboratively – and safely. We began hiring people outside of our geographic boundaries. The need to relocate evaporated. And yet companies still managed to produce products and deliver value to their customers. But now there’s a new trend – return-to-office, or RTO. And it’s bad policy.

Why Return to Office?

Most people, including LinkedIn influence Liz Ryan, question the rationale behind the RTO push. And it really boils down to two words: “fear” and “control”. Bad managers fear not knowing what their people are doing when they’re out of eyeshot. This is why remote work was so frowned upon pre-pandemic (or “pre-pan”, as Station Eleven defined that time for us). But when we were forced out of offices, we found that people could still be very productive without supervision. Shocker! (There is sadly no sarcasm font.)

The problem is that fear and control are strong with bad managers. And there are far too many bad managers. I do believe that many of them don’t want to be bad managers – they just don’t know any better. They were never taught the job of manager, their HR departments have done them a huge disservice by not offering them education and training to know how to be good managers, and their own management team consists of other bad managers setting bad examples.

Fear and Control

I want to be clear: not all of this is driven by bad management. It’s rooted in fear and control. Managers who are uncomfortable in new paradigms are fearful. They don’t understand their own role and they don’t know how to manage. This leads to fear about how effective they are and how well they’re “managing” their team. (The answer is usually “badly”.) And when people are fearful about things, they try to control them. (See my article The Illusion of Control for more discussion.) Feeling like they control their teams helps them be less fearful. But it’s a fallacy and it causes more problems.

Part of how we’ve been raised (at least in the US) is through compliance. Tardy for school? That’s detention. Not doing your assignments? That’s detention. We have learned from an early age that compliance is desired. I see so many posts on Reddit these days about bad managers trying to control their employees and the almost laughable results of those attempts. “If you’re even 5 minutes late…” types of screeds. Is it no wonder that our managers are comfortable trying to control their employees? Without the right education or training, managers are going to emulate the examples they’ve had in their lives – fearful and over-controlling bad managers.

Bad Management

I believe too many companies think their managers should be the best individual contributors. This viewpoint is shored up by bad takes by the likes of Steve Jobs that are shared repeatedly on LinkedIn and other sites. (Please don’t share those anymore.) There’s a belief that to manage creative workers you need to be a creative worker. This is wrong-headed and causes a host of problems. First, you have people doing two jobs – individual contributor and manager. Second, management requires a “manager mindset”, not an “individual contributor” mindset. The two are incompatible.

Individual contributors deliver value. Managers grow their people and manage the system their people work within. Those two responsibilities are not the same. When we force our managers to be experts at technical work, they flounder with either the technical work or the management work. I had many conversations with directors in engineering who worked a full day in an office and then another 5-6 hours at home. It was clear to me – one of those jobs was not their job. Managers who are required to be highly-skilled technical people will either fail to develop their managerial skills or they will sacrifice managerial growth to stay relevant technically. Honestly, it’s unfair to ask them to do both. Unchecked, managers will try to deliver value, which is not what we need them to do.

A New Management Mindset

This was definitely brought to the fore with the development of Management 3.0. Jurgen Appelo, in that book, talked about the role of the manager as a “people gardener” and “manager of the system”. He said,

“Management is too important to be left to the managers.”

We need to evolve the idea of management and managers to meet the needs of the 21st century. If we continue to try to operate in a 1980s-style management style, our organizations will fail. We need to deliver value to our customers faster than ever – and with higher quality. When we dual-task our managers, both of those goals are at risk.

A Hidden Agenda

There is one more possible rationale for some of the tremendous push beyond just fearful managers – corporate real estate. This is the cynical part of this article. The corporate real estate market plummeted during the pandemic. Businesses that relied on a steady stream of corporate worker bees failed in droves. Downtown areas floundered. This is partly why you have NY Governor Kathy Hochul arguing for a return to office: shore up corporate real estate.

Far too many companies invest heavily in commercial real estate for their campuses. We saw drastic cost savings during the pandemic because they didn’t have to heat or cool those spaces. Lighting costs dropped. The only things we really had to keep operating at a full level were our data centers. But companies also saw their partner revenue dry up. Most campuses or buildings have companies that rent space to service the employees. No employees meant no rent. And I wonder how much these companies directly invest in corporate real estate as an investment vehicle. I suspect it’s more than a small percentage.

Regardless, there is an impact of not having people in offices. When we keep people out of buildings, there are impacts. I fear that too many executives see a quick fix to a long-term problem. By bringing people back to offices, those rents and revenues increase. Executive bonuses saved!

Benefits of Return to Office

There are definitely some benefits to being together. SAFe^(R), a framework I’ve worked with for over a decade, strongly encourages in-person planning activities. It can be useful to more easily facilitate collaboration. Pair and mob programming work easier when people are co-located. It can be far faster to just tap someone on the shoulder to ask them something than trying to connect over Slack or other tools.

I’ve worked most of my professional career in physical locations. Most of my experience is through that lens, so I see the benefits. Supervision is easier. Gathering people together for a purpose is easier (like an all-hands meeting). Reinforcing collective ownership and accountability is easier. But it’s wrong-headed when it’s a dictate.

Closing Thoughts

Return-to-office policies should be something that everyone in a team or an organization discusses and evaluates for themselves. The benefits of a distributed workforce, not bound by geography, can be incredibly powerful. You can hire the “right people”, not just “good enough from what’s available”. The team or organization should decide for itself what makes the most sense. As Lyssa Adkins said in Coaching Agile Teams, “Take it to the team”. They’re the ones that should decide. And we should question the rationale of anyone at “the top” who’s mandating it for everyone. Could be that they’re not the right person for that job any longer.