Return-to-office policies are usually framed as cultural decisions.

They’re described as a way to rebuild connection, improve collaboration, or restore momentum that feels harder to sustain at a distance.

That framing isn’t wrong, but it doesn’t complete the thought.

It misses what’s actually broken, and RTO doesn’t fix it.

What Leaders Are Actually Trying to Fix

When leaders talk privately about why RTO feels necessary, the reasons are practical:

Work feels slower. It’s harder to tell if people are actually engaged. Collaboration that used to happen spontaneously now requires scheduling. Managers aren’t confident they know what’s happening across their teams.

These are coordination problems, not cultural ones.

When coordination breaks down, proximity feels appealing because it’s visible. It gives leaders something solid to point to when the work itself has become harder to evaluate.

The Assumption Beneath RTO

There’s an unspoken belief supporting many RTO decisions:

Teams can’t produce results greater than the sum of individual effort unless they’re physically together.

It’s an understandable belief. Many of our strongest collaboration memories happened in a shared space.

But what made those moments work wasn’t the physical space. It was shared context.

Teams outperform individual effort because of coordination, not co-location.

The outstanding performance comes from shared goals made explicit, work designed to interlock, clear ownership, and explicit feedback loops. Proximity can support these conditions. It cannot substitute for them.

What RTO Actually Buys

RTO buys visibility: attendance is trackable, presence is observable, effort feels measurable.

For leaders without strong systems for evaluating distributed work, that feels like control.

This isn’t a failure of motive. Most leaders weren’t trained to manage outcomes they couldn’t see.

RTO becomes a visual proxy to manage uncertainty without recognizing or redesigning the system underneath it.

The Cost That Shows Up Later

The real cost of RTO isn’t the commute or the lease. (Those are immediate and real.) There are long-term costs you don’t see immediately.

When presence replaces clarity:

• High performers feel constrained.
• Remote-capable talent feels mistrusted.
• Hybrid teams experience uneven rules.

Turnover increases quietly.

Not dramatic exits. Measured ones.

Hiring takes longer and onboarding consumes senior time. Managers absorb the load while still delivering results.

Eventually leadership responds by tightening control again.

The cycle reinforces itself.

What RTO Can’t Do

RTO masks the absence of clarity rather than restoring it.

Clarity doesn’t come from proximity. Accountability doesn’t come from presence. Trust doesn’t come from geography.

Those come from systems that make work understandable without surveillance.

Without those systems, RTO delays the reckoning rather than preventing it.

Most leaders who mandate RTO won’t regret the decision immediately. The regret comes later when they struggle to:

• Rehire roles they already had.
• Rebuild teams that once worked.
• Explain why trusted people left quietly.

Flexibility didn’t fail them. Their version of flexibility was never operationalized.

If this resonates, I’m building tools to help leaders create the clarity RTO can’t provide. More soon.