The return-to-office push has been justified with a lot of words. Collaboration. Culture. Serendipitous encounters. Innovation. Mentorship. Water cooler conversations. The magic that supposedly happens when bodies occupy the same physical space.
It is all bullshit.
The office exists because managers do not trust you to work without being watched. That is it. That is the reason. Everything else is a story they tell to make the distrust sound reasonable.
If collaboration required physical presence, remote work would not have worked during the pandemic. But it did work. Companies shipped products. Projects completed. Teams functioned. The collaboration happened over Zoom and Slack instead of in conference rooms. Some things were harder, yes. Some types of interaction are better in person. But the core work got done. The proof that distributed collaboration is possible exists. We all lived it. The claim that collaboration requires offices is contradicted by recent memory. We know it is not true because we watched it not be true. The excuse persists anyway because the real reason cannot be said out loud.
Company culture is supposedly built in the office. The values. The norms. The shared identity. You cannot build culture remotely, they say. You need face time. But culture is not built in an office. Culture is built through shared work and shared values and leadership that models what matters. Remote-first companies have strong cultures. They build them deliberately instead of hoping they emerge from proximity. The companies most obsessed with return to office often have the worst cultures. They think putting bodies in rooms will fix dysfunction that exists at the leadership level. It will not. You can have a toxic culture in an office just as easily as remotely. Probably more easily because the surveillance enables worse behaviour.
Managers who cannot measure output need to measure presence. If you do not know whether your team is doing good work, you can at least know whether they are sitting at desks. This is bad management. Good managers define clear goals, measure results, and trust people to achieve those results however they work best. Bad managers count hours and monitor attendance because they have nothing else to count. Return to office is a confession of bad management. It says: we do not know how to evaluate your work, so we are going to watch you instead. We do not trust you to be productive without supervision, so we are bringing back the supervision. This is insulting. It tells workers that their judgment is not trusted, that their autonomy is not respected, that they are children who need to be watched. And then companies wonder why morale is low and turnover is high.
The framing is always about what workers need. You need collaboration. You need mentorship. You need the spontaneous interactions that drive innovation. But workers did not ask for this. Workers, given the choice, overwhelmingly prefer flexibility. The surveys are consistent and overwhelming. People like working from home. They are more productive, happier, and less burned out. The return to office is not about what workers need. It is about what managers want. Managers want to see their teams. Managers want to feel in control. Managers want the status markers that come from commanding a physical space. These wants are being dressed up as worker needs. If this were genuinely about worker wellbeing, companies would ask workers what they want. They do not ask because they already know the answer and they do not like it.
There is another factor nobody admits. Companies have invested billions in office space. Real estate is a sunk cost but it does not feel that way. Empty offices feel like waste. Getting people into those offices feels like using the investment. This is sunk cost fallacy at organisational scale. The money spent on offices is gone whether people use them or not. The question is what arrangement is best going forward, not how to justify past spending. But executives do not want to admit that the office investments were mistakes. They do not want to write down real estate. They do not want to explain to boards why they are paying for empty buildings. Easier to force people back and pretend the offices were necessary all along.
Some managers trust their teams. They set goals, provide resources, and get out of the way. They evaluate based on outcomes. They do not care where the work happens as long as the work is good. Other managers do not trust their teams. They need visibility. They need the feeling of control that comes from watching. They manage presence because they cannot manage performance. Return to office mandates come from the second group. They are a symptom of management failure, not a solution to collaboration problems.
The office exists because managers do not trust you. The collaboration story is a cover. If they trusted you, they would let you work where you work best. They do not, so they do not. That is the truth nobody will say out loud. But everyone working under these mandates already knows it.