Every few months, someone announces that culture is “back in the office.” That’s completely reasonable. Culture happens in hallways. Culture needs people together. Culture depends on presence.

But how can that be true? If culture disappears when people stop sharing a building, it wasn’t culture. It was proximity, a shaky substitute for leadership.

Culture isn’t where you work. It’s how you work together. Culture shows up in what gets rewarded when no one is watching. It undergirds how decisions get made when things are unclear. It works out what happens after a mistake.

Buildings can amplify culture. They can never create it.

Why the office used to feel like culture

For a long time, offices did a lot of invisible work. You could see effort and overhear conversations. You could sense momentum in the hallway energy. Managers absorbed information without realizing it. They knew who stayed late, who spoke up, and who seemed engaged.

That information wasn’t neutral across all work locations. It favored the visible and the nearby.

Remote work didn’t break culture. It removed the illusion that culture happened automatically by working in the same space.

When offices emptied, many organizations discovered they didn’t actually have:

• clear definitions of good work
• shared expectations
• consistent ways to measure contribution
• intentional rhythms for connection

As a result, leaders reached for what felt familiar: meetings, check-ins, and being together to create clarity. This move was born out of uncertainty, not because they wanted control, but because clarity was missing.

What actually carries culture across distance

Culture survives distance when it’s carried by systems, not by osmosis. Culture isn’t realized with rules about where people sit, but with

• agreements about how work moves
• clear outcomes
• predictable rhythms
• shared context
• fair access to information
• consistent ways to show progress

These aren’t soft ideas, they’re structural.

When these structures exist as norms, people feel connected even when they’re apart. When they don’t exist, no amount of office time fixes the underlying problem.

You can mandate attendance. You can’t mandate trust.

Trust shows up when people know what matters, how they contribute, how they’re evaluated, and that proximity won’t outweigh impact.

That’s culture.

The mismatch underneath a lot of frustration

Many teams are living with this tension:

• Leaders say outcomes matter — but systems still reward visibility.
• Organizations say flexibility is valued — but advancement quietly favors presence.
• People say culture feels fragile — but ignore the work required to make expectations explicit.

So individuals compensate.

They overprepare. They overperform. They stay busy instead of getting clear.

Not because they’re disengaged, but because the rules are fuzzy. Fuzzy rules don’t create freedom. They create anxiety. Anxiety isn’t a culture.

Some people don’t compensate at all; they just leave.

What culture asks of leaders now

Leading distributed teams requires less observation and more intention.

Leading distributed teams well calls for less improvising and more design.

Culture today lives in:

• how meetings are run,
• how decisions are documented,
• how progress is surfaced,
• how recognition works,
• how disagreement is handled.

None of that happens by accident.

Organizations retain talent through building new norms deliberately.

They replace “being seen” with “being clear”, face time with follow-through, and guesswork with shared expectations.

That’s not culture loss. It’s an upgrade.

What this means as the year closes

If you’re remote and feeling disconnected, it’s not because you opted out of culture. It’s because many systems still assume proximity will do the work for them.

Culture that depends on being in the building will always exclude someone. Culture that depends on clarity can include everyone.

This quiet stretch at the end of the year matters. When the noise drops, what’s left is signal. What actually moved the work forward? Where was clarity missing? What systems helped — and which ones didn’t?

Culture isn’t something you return to in January. It’s something you notice, name, and intentionally create – one outcome, one rhythm, and one expectation at a time.

That’s where the real work starts.