Two or three years ago, when the back-to-office wave started rolling, I wrote a blog post about why I thought the whole thing was BS. I never published it. At that time the controversy was heavy, and the data was too thin. I had a clear position at the time, but with no real data behind it, it would have been perceived as opinion or as a feeling rather than argument, and I left it.Last week I listened to the return-to-office episode of The Curiosity Shop, the new podcast by Brené Brown and Adam Grant. They take it apart cleanly. The draft is open again.

After the podcast, I still think most of the back-to-office debate is BS. But with a few qualifications now. The argument is sitting at the wrong level. The question is not office or remote. The question is what work, how much of it, and what structures support each kind.

The biggest mistake in this whole debate is equating presence with work performance. Our thinking has been trained this way since the industrial revolution, simply because work time is objectively measurable. Hours are easy to count. Output is harder. So we count hours and call it performance management. Adam Grant calls this a cultural artifact rather than a performance indicator, and I think that hits the right nerve. Leaders are not stupid. The measurement tool is just older than the work it is now being applied to.

This shows up most clearly in how leaders think about office presence. It gives them a feeling of control. Employees who do not want to work, for whatever reason, do not work, whether they are at home or in the office. I sometimes do not want to work either. The feeling that you can force performance through a desk is wrong, unless you stand behind someone the entire workday.

And even then, I can imagine the kind of discussion I have with my kiddos when it is time to clean up. “Do I really have to do this now?” Brené Brown and Adam Grant make the same point more sharply on the podcast. “Butts in seats” gets used as a replacement for real performance management. The chair ends up doing the work the manager should be doing.

Every kind of work has its place. Anyone running experiments at the bench has to be present, at least until we have the fully robotic lab. Group conflicts should not be sorted over Zoom. Onboarding a new lab member through a screen costs more than it saves.

But there are surprises in the other direction. Writing, like this post, and meetings where you actually need to reach a decision, often run better online. People drift less. There are no side conversations between two participants while the third is talking. The slight discomfort of video pushes meetings to a result faster. Relational work is still better in person, because you can read the other person and respond to what is happening in the room.

So the question shifts. Not “office or remote,” but which work demands which place, and as a gradation, which work benefits from which place. From there it becomes natural to ask how much should happen from the office because it is necessary or better there, and how much can be done somewhere else.

Place follows work. Decide what the work needs. Then decide where it happens. Not the other way around. That is the principle I keep coming back to in this debate.

There are two parts of this debate that almost no one mentions out loud. The first is weak ties. Adam Grant’s point on the podcast is that real creativity rarely comes from running into the same five colleagues at the coffee machine every morning. It comes from contact with people outside your own herd. That puts a serious dent in the favorite “watercooler argument” that leaders use to justify mandatory office days. Watercooler talk between people who already think alike is not creative friction. It is mostly small talk.

The second is the commute. Anyone who does not spend two hours or more on transit tends to give part of that time back to the work. Not everyone. Not at all times. But for the people who are motivated and actually want to move something forward, it shows up reliably. I see it in my own week, and I hear it from friends. The hour saved on the train does not disappear into Netflix. Some of it lands in the project.

Remote work needs different structures than the office. Clear goal definitions and clear agreements, not over months, but from day to day. At least for the people who cannot manage that on their own. If someone delivers the agreed result in half the time, that is fine. The colleagues who want to spend more time then have the chance to deliver the same result, without anyone watching them. The same l ogic applies in the office, but there the fast ones have to sit out their hours, which creates frustration. Or they get more tasks piled on as a reward for being efficient, which also creates frustration. Either way, the office has been hiding this problem, not solving it.

“I can only work in the office, I have too much distraction at home” is a sentence I hear often. In my view, it is mostly eyewash. People procrastinate at home and in the office in roughly equal measure. The difference is that the office gives them a cover story. As long as the chair is occupied, the duty appears to be fulfilled. The procrastination is the same. Only the justification changes.

Brené Brown and Adam Grant use the iceberg model I also often use to describe what is going on. On the surface, the fight is about office days. Just under the surface lie patterns, structures, and mental models. At the root sit the real assumptions about trust, about control, about what culture actually is. As long as we keep arguing at the surface, we cannot get to the root.

The right question is therefore not “how many days in the office?” It is a stack of better questions. What kind of work do we actually do, and what does each kind require? Where does the team gain energy, and where does it lose energy? How do we measure performance in something other than hours being present in a building?

So the most useful question is not “how do I get my people back into the lab building five days a week.” It is: which parts of our work belong here, which parts belong somewhere else, and which agreements would make either one work? Place follows work.

If you are working through this question with your own team and want a second pair of eyes on it, reply to this post or send me an email at robert@glia-leadership.com. I would like to see what you are seeing.

– Robert

P.S. Brené and Adam did extensive literature research for this episode, which is part of what makes it worth an hour of your time. All references are in the show notes. If you want the full academic deep dive, that is where to start.