Why the Office Still Matters
- Rediscovering the Value of Space, Relationships, and Learning After Remote Work
The pandemic proved that a great deal of work could be performed without an office. However, being able to complete tasks is not the same as having a healthy, well-functioning organization. While working through screens reduced commuting time and increased individual autonomy, opportunities to learn through observation and conversation, relationships with colleagues, and a sense of belonging to the organization gradually weakened. What is needed now is not a choice between office work and remote work, but an accurate understanding of the functions the office has performed and a redesign of how work is done.
[Key Message]
* The true value of the office lies not in attendance itself, but in relationship building, knowledge sharing, observational learning, and collaborative problem-solving.
* Remote work can enhance individual focus and autonomy, but it may weaken long-term organizational learning, trust, and culture.
* Onboarding, mentoring, and career opportunities are more effectively supported through informal encounters and repeated face-to-face interaction.
* Hybrid work is not a simple compromise, but a complex operating system that requires careful coordination of schedules, spaces, meetings, evaluation, and fairness.
* The workplace of the future should be designed around the purpose of work by aligning time, space, and relationships, rather than focusing on the number of office days.
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The World’s Largest Remote Work Experiment
The 2020 pandemic brought companies and employees into the world’s largest remote work experiment. Working from home, which had long been permitted only in certain occupations and companies, rapidly became a widespread way of working. Organizations introduced videoconferencing and collaboration tools, while employees set up workspaces in their homes. It became clear that people could send emails, hold meetings, and write reports without commuting to the office.
Initial assessments were generally positive. The large-scale disruption of work that companies had feared did not occur, and some employees found that they could concentrate better at home than in the office. Commuting time was reduced, and companies gained the possibility of recruiting talent without regard to the distance between a person’s home and workplace. Expectations also grew that office rental costs could be reduced. The long-established assumption that organizations should be run around office attendance began to face a fundamental challenge.
However, it was difficult to interpret this early success as evidence of the long-term effectiveness of remote work. Relationships and organizational cultures formed before the pandemic were supporting the initial performance of remote work. Employees already understood their colleagues’ personalities and working styles, and they knew whom to approach with particular questions. They were collaborating through screens on the basis of trust and experience accumulated in the office.
As remote work continued over a longer period, the situation changed. New employees joined, while existing employees transferred or left the organization. Colleagues who had never met in person had to work together on projects, and the shared memories and relationships underpinning the organization gradually faded. Working arrangements that had initially functioned smoothly began to reveal different problems over time.
A distinction must be made here between an individual’s ability to perform assigned tasks and an organization’s ability to continually develop its overall capabilities. Remote work can be effective when an experienced employee who already understands the job needs to concentrate alone and complete a report. By contrast, face-to-face interaction becomes more valuable when training new employees, solving complex problems together, and combining knowledge from different departments.
Satisfaction with remote work is not perfectly aligned with job performance either. When commuting disappears and people gain more control over their daily lives, employee satisfaction may rise. Yet a working arrangement that feels comfortable for an individual is not always equally beneficial to colleagues’ learning, team collaboration, or the organization’s long-term capability development. Evaluating a working arrangement requires consideration not only of individual convenience but also of its effects on the organization as a whole.
The Organizational Functions Lost Beyond the Screen
An office is not simply a place filled with desks and computers. It is a form of social infrastructure through which the information and relationships necessary for an organization continuously flow. A vast amount of knowledge that cannot be conveyed through scheduled meetings or formal reports moves through corridors, break areas, lunches, and conversations before and after meetings.
In a remote work environment, every conversation needs a clear purpose. To ask someone a question, an employee must send a message or request a video call. If the question feels too trivial, the employee may postpone reaching out. If the employee does not know whom to ask, the problem may be handled alone. When people work in the same space, however, they can overhear a nearby conversation or ask a passing colleague a brief question and solve the problem quickly.
These accidental encounters may appear inefficient on the surface. Conversations unrelated to immediate tasks take place, and someone’s question may interrupt another person’s concentration. From the organization’s perspective, however, such loose interactions broaden the pathways through which information travels. They help employees understand what is happening in other departments and discover experience and expertise that do not appear on the formal organizational chart.
Innovation is not produced solely through planned meetings either. New ideas emerge when different forms of knowledge and different perspectives meet in unexpected ways. Online meetings are useful for sharing information and reaching conclusions according to a predetermined agenda, but they have limitations when it comes to exploring possibilities beyond that agenda. As speaking turns become structured and silence feels uncomfortable, conversation naturally narrows toward immediate tasks.
During a video meeting, participants must assess one another’s reactions mainly through visible facial expressions and voices. It is difficult for several people to speak at the same time, and subtle gestures or shifts in atmosphere are not easy to read. When the meeting ends, everyone immediately disappears from one another’s screens. After an in-person meeting, someone might ask while leaving the room, “What did you mean by what you said earlier?” In an online setting, such brief follow-up conversations are easily omitted.
Trust is also built differently. Trust is not created merely by verifying someone’s professional competence. It develops through repeated observation of how the person behaves under pressure, whether promises are kept, and how the person responds when colleagues face difficulties. When informal encounters decline, people are more likely to perceive one another not as fully realized individuals but as accounts exchanging tasks or faces on a screen.
Organizational culture works in a similar way. Culture is not communicated solely through internal regulations or statements of core values. Employees learn it by observing which behaviors are genuinely recognized, how managers handle mistakes, and how colleagues resolve disagreements. Because online environments mainly expose formally curated versions of people and events, it becomes more difficult to understand the organization’s implicit norms.
This does not mean that every interaction occurring in an office is positive. Unnecessary meetings, excessive reporting, hierarchical cultures, and distracting noise are clear problems associated with office work. The important point is not to idealize the office itself, but to identify the relational and learning functions that a shared space can provide. Requiring office attendance merely to preserve outdated working practices is likely to increase employee resistance.
The Invisible Losses in Onboarding and Career Development
New employees beginning their organizational careers are among the groups most affected by remote work. Experienced employees understand the context of their work and know how to find the information they need. New employees, however, often do not even know what they do not know. There is far more knowledge that formal training alone cannot provide.
In the office, new employees can naturally observe how experienced colleagues speak with clients, when they ask questions during meetings, and how reports are revised. Simply watching someone solve a problem can teach them the standards of the job. Such learning is not included in a separate training schedule and is rarely documented. Nevertheless, it plays a decisive role in developing professional competence.
In a remote environment, every learning opportunity must be intentionally designed. Time must be set aside for new employees to ask questions, work processes must be shared, and regular feedback must be provided. Yet managers have difficulty noticing where employees who are not physically visible are struggling. New employees may also feel reluctant to repeatedly ask busy senior colleagues what appear to be minor questions.
When this situation continues, some employees who ask many questions and actively build relationships will grow, while those who quietly try to solve problems alone may fall behind. A working arrangement that emphasizes autonomy may therefore widen learning gaps based on individual personality and social ability. Without systematic organizational support, remote work operates more favorably for those who already possess experience and established relationships.
Mentoring can also become weaker. Creating a formal mentoring program does not automatically generate meaningful advice and sponsorship. Career-enhancing relationships are formed through repeated contact. As managers solve problems, share meals, and converse with employees, they come to understand their abilities and interests and can connect them with appropriate projects or opportunities.
Career development is shaped not only by job performance but also by visibility. It is difficult to measure numerically who helped the team through a difficult situation, who mediated conflict outside formal meetings, or who suggested a promising idea. Contributions made by employees who meet managers frequently in person may be recognized more easily. By contrast, the performance of remote employees may remain largely invisible apart from their final output.
In a hybrid environment, these differences in visibility can become an issue of fairness. Even if employees who frequently come to the office and those who work remotely are evaluated by the same criteria, actual opportunities may be distributed differently. Even without intentional discrimination, managers may tend to share more information and assign more important work to people they encounter frequently and at close range.
Employees with caregiving responsibilities or long commutes may be more likely to choose remote work. If they are disadvantaged in promotions and access to essential projects, flexible work may appear to be an employee benefit while widening career disparities over time. Providing a choice of work location does not by itself guarantee fairness. Organizations must also manage the opportunities and costs created by that choice.
The office is not simply a space where work outputs are produced. It is also a stage on which employees build expertise and establish their positions within the organization. If this function is ignored, immediate productivity may be maintained while the organization’s ability to develop future managers and experts gradually weakens.
The Structural Contradictions of Hybrid Work
Hybrid work rapidly spread as a compromise between fully office-based work and fully remote work. Employees spend part of the week in the office and work from a location of their choice for the remainder. It appears to be the most practical solution because it offers employees flexibility while preserving opportunities for face-to-face collaboration.
The problem is that hybrid work may combine not only the advantages of the two models but also their disadvantages. If employees come to the office on whichever days they prefer, members of the same team are less likely to meet there. If the colleagues someone needs to work with are at home, the employee may sit at an office desk and join another video meeting. The cost of commuting is incurred without obtaining the benefits of face-to-face work.
Not every problem is solved even when an organization sets common office days. If everyone comes in on the same day, there may not be enough office space or meeting rooms. This is especially likely in companies that have reduced the size of their offices or eliminated assigned seating to save costs. Booking a desk becomes inconvenient, and spontaneous conversations decline when team members are seated far apart.
Common office days can also become packed with meetings. Because everyone has made the effort to gather, teams try to schedule every meeting on that day, leaving employees to move from one meeting room to another from morning until evening. The time needed to build relationships or engage in informal conversation disappears. Although employees have come to the office, they find themselves trapped in schedules even more crowded than those experienced through screens.
The quality of hybrid meetings is another important problem. When some participants are in a meeting room and others join through screens, differences in access to information and influence arise. People in the meeting room can exchange glances, have spontaneous conversations, and sense the atmosphere, while remote participants may struggle to find opportunities to speak. They may also be excluded from conversations that continue after the formal meeting ends.
Management becomes more complex as well. Managers must know where employees are working, monitor the progress of their work, and ensure that office-based and remote employees receive the same information. In many cases, work processes must be duplicated to support office work and remote work simultaneously. Without sufficient management capability and time, hybrid work becomes not a flexible way of working but a confusing one.
Ambiguous rules create conflict. A company may require employees to come to the office three times a week, but some teams may enforce the requirement strictly while others operate with almost complete flexibility. Employees tend to react more strongly to unfairness than to the necessity of the rules themselves. If office attendance depends on a manager’s personal preferences or an employee’s individual negotiating ability, trust in the system breaks down.
The purpose of office attendance requirements is often unclear as well. Senior leaders talk about collaboration and organizational culture, but employees come to the office only to process emails alone and attend online meetings. When this experience is repeated, return-to-office policies are perceived not as an organizational necessity but as an attempt to regain control. If office attendance is required, the organization must be able to explain what employees are expected to do together in the same space on those days.
Hybrid work is not a middle ground that functions automatically. It is an operating system that must be carefully designed around who gathers when, which activities are performed in person, and how remote participants are protected. Merely declaring that flexibility is available is not enough. Hybrid work may require a higher level of management capability than either fully office-based work or fully remote work.
Designing Around Purpose, Not Attendance
Recognizing the value of the office does not mean that every employee must commute every day. Work requiring individual concentration, specialized work that can be performed independently, and tasks with clearly measurable outcomes can all be handled effectively in a remote environment. There is no need to abandon the benefits of reducing long commutes and allowing employees to adjust their schedules to their personal circumstances.
Face-to-face interaction, however, is advantageous when forming a new team, training new employees, solving highly uncertain problems, or combining knowledge from several departments. Conversations in a shared physical space also matter when conflicts must be resolved and trust restored. Work location should be selected according to the nature of the work, rather than treated as a uniform benefit or disciplinary rule.
The first principle is to define the purpose of office attendance rather than merely determining the number of office days. It is not enough to require employees to spend two or three days a week in the office. Organizations should first identify the activities that require face-to-face work and then ensure that the employees involved gather at the same time and place. On office days, it is better to focus on activities that benefit most from in-person interaction, such as collaboration, feedback, mentoring, and relationship building.
The second principle is coordination at the team level. Applying a single rule across the entire organization may appear simple and fair, but it is difficult to account for differences among sales, research and development, finance, customer support, and other functions. Conversely, allowing every team to apply completely different rules can create confusion and mistrust. The organization should establish basic principles and allow teams to design appropriate working arrangements within those boundaries.
The third principle is to give managers both responsibility and capability. Managing a hybrid team requires clearly defined objectives, performance assessments based on results, and continuous attention to employees’ learning and relationships. Managers also need specific training to ensure that they do not share information only with employees in the office or neglect those working remotely.
The fourth principle is to examine differences in career opportunities. Organizations should determine whether important projects, training, mentoring, and promotion opportunities are becoming concentrated among those who frequently come to the office. Providing remote employees with the same meeting link is not enough. Their opportunities to speak, access information, and build informal relationships must also be considered.
The fifth principle is to redesign office space around its new purpose. If employees commute to perform focused work only to encounter more noise and interruptions, they will inevitably choose their homes as the more efficient workplace. It is equally contradictory to emphasize collaboration without providing sufficient meeting rooms or shared workspaces. The office needs to be reconfigured not as a fixed location where every kind of work is performed, but as a space that increases the density of encounters and collaboration.
Debates about returning to the office often reveal conflicts between the interests of senior leaders and employees. Leaders emphasize collaboration and organizational culture, while employees point to commuting costs and quality of life. A sustainable solution cannot be created by considering only one side’s position. If companies require face-to-face work, that necessity must be demonstrated through actual work processes. Employees, too, must consider not only their personal convenience but also the effects of their choices on colleagues and the organization.
Methods of measuring performance must also change. If time spent sitting in the office is treated as performance, unnecessary commuting and performative attendance will increase. On the other hand, if only short-term output is assessed, long-term contributions such as mentoring, knowledge sharing, and culture building may disappear. Organizations must be able to evaluate individual outcomes alongside team learning, collaboration, and the development of future talent.
There is no single working arrangement that is right for every organization and every employee. Fully remote work is effective for some organizations, while continuous face-to-face collaboration is essential for others. Even within the same company, the most suitable arrangement may differ according to the nature of the work and the employee’s career stage. What matters is that decisions are not made solely on the basis of trends, leadership preferences, or employee preferences.
The pandemic demonstrated that work could continue without the office. That experience encouraged organizations to reconsider outdated practices centered on attendance and revealed the possibility of giving employees greater autonomy. At the same time, it also became clear over time that an organization is not simply a system for distributing tasks, but a community sustained through relationships and learning.
The true value of the office does not lie in attendance itself. It lies in the ability to meet people, ask questions, observe, and solve problems together. There is no reason to require employees to come to the office on days when these functions are unnecessary. At the same time, organizations should not expect online tools to replace these functions automatically.
The workplace of the future cannot be designed by declaring either the office or remote work the winner. Organizations must distinguish between activities that are more effective when performed alone and those that produce better results when people are together. How employees use the time they spend together matters more than how often they come to the office.
The office is not a relic of the past, and remote work is not a temporary exception. The two are not competitors that can completely replace one another, but working environments that perform different functions. The best way to revive the office is not to increase the number of required attendance days, but to create compelling reasons for people to come. Flexibility does not end with the freedom to choose a location. It becomes complete only when time, space, and relationships are purposefully designed so that people and organizations can perform at their best.
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