Are you treating the symptom or the disease?

Return-to-office mandates have hardened. What began as “three days in the office” became four, then five, and the conversation has settled into a standoff — leadership convinced that presence is the missing ingredient, employees convinced that it isn’t.

Both sides are arguing about the wrong variable.

It’s worth remembering how we got here. Before 2020, remote work was arriving slowly and deliberately: usually framed as a perk for the employee and a continuity plan for the employer, often a privilege extended once trust had been established. The pandemic collapsed that timeline into a weekend. Organizations improvised, discovered that remote work was far more viable than they’d assumed, and a good number declared the office obsolete. People moved out of cities. Smaller towns courted newly untethered talent.

Then the correction came, and it came as a mandate.

The through-line is that remote work has been managed with a single global setting the entire time — first “everyone home,” now “everyone back.” What suits one team can fit another badly, and neither blanket setting is a strategy.

Treating the symptom, not the disease

Here’s the thing about a return-to-office mandate: it’s a blunt instrument aimed at a symptom. Leaders see disengagement, thin collaboration, or a culture that feels diluted, and they reach for the one lever that feels decisive — get everyone back in the building. But if the underlying problem is a workplace that doesn’t help people do their best work, changing the location doesn’t fix it. It just moves it.

The disease, more often than not, is experience. A remote employee fighting a VPN, juggling six separate logins, waiting two days for access to a system, or onboarding onto a laptop that showed up half-configured isn’t unproductive because they’re remote. They’re unproductive because the digital workplace is working against them. Sit that same person in the office and they’ll have the same bad day — just with a commute attached.

Design for the outcome, not the location

The healthier question isn’t “remote or in-office?” It’s “what outcome are we actually after?” — and the answer is almost always the same: productive, connected, motivated people. Once that’s the goal, location becomes a tool rather than a mandate.

That’s an end-user computing problem before it’s a real-estate one. The same identity, the same tools, the same effortless access whether someone is at a desk, at home, or on a plane. Onboarding that makes a new hire feel welcome on day one from anywhere. Collaboration that doesn’t degrade the moment half the room is remote. When the experience is genuinely good, the office stops being a place people are ordered to sit and becomes a place they choose for the things offices are great at — mentorship, spontaneous problem-solving, energy, belonging.

So before you write the mandate, ask the harder question: is our digital workplace good enough that our people could do their best work anywhere? If the honest answer is no, you’ve found the disease. Treat that, and the debate about days-in-office gets a lot smaller.

If this resonates — or you just want to compare notes on making hybrid work actually work — let’s talk.