The Absurdity of Return to Office

The modern workplace has achieved something remarkable: it has made physical presence increasingly unnecessary, then turned up at its house with a clipboard to check why it isn’t coming in. After decades spent making information portable, organisations are insisting that employees transport themselves instead. The document can cross the Atlantic in a millisecond. Apparently, someone must still accompany it on the Northern line.

We have cloud computing, video conferencing and software that allows teams on different continents to work together. Having assembled this machinery, the corporation has reached a peculiar conclusion: everyone needs to be back at their desk by nine. Progress, it turns out, was mostly about giving us better things to complain about on the commute.

The office had a job

The office was an excellent invention. Information lived on paper. Documents needed filing cabinets, signatures and people who knew which cabinet contained the thing somebody important had lost. Bringing everyone together solved a practical problem. You went where the work was because the work weighed several tonnes and required its own floor.

Then we digitised it. Email replaced correspondence, shared drives replaced cabinets and laptops replaced the need to remain within reach of a particular plug socket. The pandemic forced organisations to discover how much of their indispensable infrastructure was optional. Many responded with the enthusiasm of a cathedral discovering that prayer worked in the car park.

None of this means offices are useless. Workshops, training and difficult conversations can benefit from physical proximity. But somewhere between “people should sometimes meet” and “everyone must attend on Wednesday”, a sensible observation acquired a lanyard and became policy.

The importance of looking employed

The most revealing defence of compulsory attendance is its vocabulary. Culture. Connection. Spontaneity. These things matter, but invoking them does not settle the argument. A company requiring three days of spontaneous collaboration should explain how spontaneity became so reliable that it could be entered into Outlook.

One less comfortable explanation is that offices make activity visible. A person at a desk, looking mildly distressed beside a spreadsheet, is recognisably working. A person who completes the same task at home and then empties the dishwasher presents a philosophical emergency. The work is finished, but they appear to have benefited.

There is research behind this suspicion. A 2010 study of passive face time found that simply being seen at work could prompt judgements of dependability, while being seen outside normal hours suggested commitment. It examined perceptions, not whether every manager confuses attendance with output. Still, an eight-hour performance of having a job can apparently receive favourable reviews.

A randomised trial involving 1,612 Trip.com employees, published in 2024, gives the argument firmer ground. Working from home two days a week reduced quitting by a third without damaging measured performance. This was hybrid work at one Chinese technology company, not proof that every job belongs at home. It does make blanket certainty about office attendance harder to justify.

The little kingdom

The office also supplied an elaborate architecture of status. There were corner offices, bigger desks and meeting rooms you could enter only if your salary contained a particular digit. An organisation chart is informative, but nothing communicates authority quite like having better carpet than the people outside your door.

Video calls flatten some of this. The director and the graduate occupy roughly equal rectangles. One controls the budget; the other has found the button that stops the microphone echoing. Both contributions are suddenly quite visible.

It is easy to imagine why someone whose career brought friendships, opportunities and eventually a door might remember offices fondly. Someone else might remember paying twelve pounds to travel somewhere they could be interrupted. That is an interpretation of the attachment, not a research finding about an entire generation. Neither experience creates a duty to preserve the other person’s preferred furniture arrangement.

The travelling laptop

Consider the transaction. An employee gets up earlier, pays to travel, buys lunch and arrives at an expensive building. They open a laptop, connect to a remote server and join a call with colleagues in other locations. In the evening, they carry the laptop home. We have invented a daily migration whose principal beneficiary appears to be the laptop.

The time cost is measurable. The ONS reported in November 2024 that people working at home saved an average of 56 minutes that day by not commuting. For someone whose daily return journey takes ninety minutes, 220 commuting days would consume 330 hours. That is an illustration, not the national average, but still a substantial contribution to an employer’s preferred seating plan.

These hours rarely appear in discussions of productivity. They belong to the employee, which makes them wonderfully affordable from the company’s perspective. A business that would scrutinise a £40 software subscription can requisition hundreds of hours of human life under the heading “a bit more togetherness”.

Culture, available on Tuesdays

Culture becomes a particularly convenient explanation when nobody is obliged to say what it means. Ask what attendance will accomplish and the answer is collaboration. Ask how that will improve and something intangible has been lost. The employee’s costs are itemised; the benefits arrive as a feeling.

The counterevidence deserves attention. A study of 61,182 Microsoft employees found that company-wide remote work made collaboration networks more siloed and communication more asynchronous. It studied the pandemic shift to remote work, not a planned hybrid arrangement. It supports taking coordination seriously; it does not establish that three compulsory office days are the universal cure.

There is also something optimistic about strengthening culture by demonstrating that employees cannot be trusted. People notice when an organisation’s commitment to their wellbeing ends at the station barrier. The free fruit struggles to repair that particular breach.

An expensive building needs an audience

Offices sit inside a larger economy. Landlords, cafés, transport operators and city centres depend on commuters. A permanent change creates real difficulties. But the existence of a business model is not, by itself, an obligation to keep participating in it.

An expensive lease may also exert psychological pressure. Empty desks make the decision to acquire them look questionable. Filled desks make it look purposeful. Unfortunately, occupying an asset does not establish that it was worth buying. Otherwise, the solution to every regrettable exercise bike would be compulsory cycling.

Companies understand this elsewhere. They automate processes, close inefficient operations and replace equipment. Yet suggest reducing office use and the language changes from efficiency to belonging. The building has somehow become a member of the family.

Even the machines work remotely

The enthusiasm for artificial intelligence supplies a useful thought experiment. Imagine buying software agents to work with less supervision while insisting that experienced adults remain within walking distance of a supervisor. The machine gets an objective. The human gets an attendance requirement.

This does not prove that every job should be remote. It does suggest that location is an increasingly poor substitute for evaluating contribution. If a company can assess whether software has produced something useful, it might attempt the same courtesy with Janet.

The office could become better once it stops being compulsory. Smaller spaces, deliberate gatherings and a reason to make the journey would give it a useful job again. People could arrive expecting to do something together, rather than hoping the person they came to meet had also been instructed to attend.

Offices were built to support work. Increasingly, work is being rearranged to support offices. Somewhere, an employee is commuting ninety minutes to put on noise-cancelling headphones and join a Teams call. Above them, a senior executive surveys the occupied desks and declares that collaboration has been restored. Nobody hears him. They are all on mute.