It's Not About Where People Work.It's About the System They're Working In.
Something interesting happens when organizations start debating return-to-office policies.
The conversation almost always becomes about location. About days in the office. About visibility, presence, and proximity. Leaders find themselves arguing over numbers — two days, three days, full time — as if the right integer will solve whatever isn't working.
But location isn't the real problem. It's a proxy for something more complex.
The question isn't where your people are working.
It's whether the conditions exist for work, relationships, learning, and performance to actually thrive.
That's a systems question. And systems questions require a different kind of thinking.
What the Evidence Actually Shows
There's now a meaningful body of research on remote, hybrid, and in-office work. The findings are more nuanced than most RTO debates suggest.
Fully remote work offers real advantages — flexibility, autonomy, broader talent access, and often higher individual engagement. But it also creates risks that compound quietly over time: social isolation, weakened cross-functional networks, harder onboarding for new people, and a gradual erosion of the informal learning that happens between people who are physically present together.
Mandatory return-to-office, on the other hand, has limited evidence of improving organizational performance. What the research does show, fairly consistently, is that blanket RTO mandates increase turnover risk, particularly among employees who've built their lives and rhythms around flexibility.
Hybrid work — when it's designed intentionally — shows the most consistently positive outcomes across productivity, retention, and employee experience. But the keyword is intentional. Poorly designed hybrid arrangements create their own problems: coordination complexity, proximity bias, and ambiguity that quietly erodes trust.
The research is clear on one more thing: the quality of leadership, team norms, communication practices, and organizational design explains more variance in outcomes than physical location alone. Location matters. But it's rarely the primary variable.
Why the Debate Keeps Missing the Point
Here's what I notice, working with leaders navigating these decisions: the RTO debate often becomes a displacement activity.
Organizations are experiencing something, disengagement, slower collaboration, culture drift, performance gaps, and the visible, controllable variable is where people are sitting. So the problem gets framed as a location problem, and the solution becomes a location policy.
But location is rarely the root cause. It's a condition. And conditions interact with other conditions — role clarity, leadership capability, communication norms, decision rights, trust levels, team cohesion, and the informal webs of relationship that sustain organizational life.
When a system is struggling, the presenting problem is almost never the real problem.
It's a symptom. The question is always: what pattern is this a part of?
That's an organization development question. And it tends to get crowded out when the conversation narrows to days per week.
The Variables That Actually Matter
If you're a leader thinking through a work arrangement decision, whether you're setting policy for the first time, revisiting a mandate that's generating friction, or trying to understand why hybrid isn't working as well as you'd hoped, here are the questions worth sitting with.
1. What does the work actually require?
Not all work benefits from proximity. And not all work benefits from quiet, uninterrupted focus. The useful question isn't "how many days in the office", it's "what does this particular work require, and are we creating the conditions for it?"
Relationship-building, strategic alignment, complex problem-solving, onboarding, and cross-functional collaboration tend to benefit from physical co-presence. Deep focus, analysis, writing, and individual contribution often don't.
A well-designed hybrid approach creates intentional rhythms around both, not a compromise, but a structure that serves each type of work appropriately.
2. What agreements does your team actually have?
One of the most consistent findings in the research: effective hybrid teams have explicit working agreements. Not policies handed down from above, but shared understandings about how the team communicates, when they're available, how decisions get made, and what they expect from each other.
In the absence of these agreements, people fill the gaps with assumptions. Assumptions diverge. Trust erodes. And the frustration gets attributed to remote work, when it's actually a work design problem.
3. Is office time worth the commute?
People will support coming in when there's a clear reason to be there. When office time is filled with the same meetings that could have been virtual, or when the physical space doesn't enable the kind of interaction it's supposed to, presence starts to feel like compliance rather than value.
The design question is: what can happen in person that genuinely can't happen remotely? Those are the moments worth protecting.
4. Are you managing outcomes or visibility?
Physical presence is a tempting proxy for performance. It's visible, measurable, and culturally familiar. But proximity to a leader has never been a reliable indicator of contribution.
Organizations that manage outcomes, results, quality, collaboration, customer impact, tend to navigate work arrangement decisions with more clarity. Those that default to visibility as a performance signal tend to generate resentment, particularly from high performers who know they're being assessed on the wrong thing.
5. What's happening to your weak-tie networks?
This one rarely comes up in RTO conversations, but it's one of the most important systemic risks of prolonged remote work.
Weak ties — the casual relationships across functions, levels, and teams are how information flows, how ideas cross-pollinate, how people find mentors and opportunities and allies. They're also the first relationships to atrophy when people stop encountering each other informally.
Leaders who are thinking systemically about hybrid work ask: how are we intentionally creating the conditions for cross-functional connection? Communities of practice. Mentoring programs. Project structures that mix people across silos. These don't happen by accident.
6. Who is proximity benefiting — and who is it not?
In hybrid environments, the people who are physically closer to decision-makers tend to get more visibility, more informal feedback, and more development opportunities. This is proximity bias, and it operates below awareness most of the time.
Leaders who are paying attention actively examine their promotion decisions, their development conversations, and their informal influence networks. Not because proximity is wrong, but because unexamined, it systematically advantages some people over others.
What This Means for Leaders
If you're navigating a work arrangement decision right now, the most useful reframe I can offer is this:
Treat this as an organization design decision, not a cultural belief or a managerial preference.
That means looking at the whole system, not just the location variable, but the roles, the norms, the leadership practices, the communication structures, and the conditions for learning and performance.
It means asking what the presenting problem is actually a symptom of. It means designing working agreements rather than issuing attendance mandates. It means making office time purposeful rather than mandatory-by-default. And it means building in the mechanisms for weak-tie connection that remote and hybrid work tend to erode.
None of this is simple. But it's the level at which sustainable solutions actually live.
This is the work that interests me.
Not deciding where people should sit, but helping leaders see the system clearly enough to make decisions that hold. If your organization is navigating a work arrangement question and you're sensing that the conversation is circling without landing, I'd be glad to think through it with you.
See Flux. Shift Patterns. Set Flow.