I’m not sold.
During a recent discussion with colleagues about whether or not to push staff members to return to the office, the word came up a lot:
Culture.
But what did people mean by “culture”? They seemed unsure when pressed—there was an assumption of shared meaning that evaporated once we put the word under a magnifying glass.
While I’ve loved the hybrid (or mostly remote) working life I’ve lived the past few years, I wouldn’t be opposed to going back to the office. Not full time, obviously—that would be too hard to take having now tasted the forbidden fruit of remote work—but I could get in line behind a part-time schedule.
But it would need to be for the right reasons.
There’s a great case to make for bringing people into the office if you focus on the narrow challenges of professional development and more effective collaboration. I’ll even allow the potential benefit of “informal interactions” to generate new ideas. (In my experience, though, it’s rare that people can point to actual anecdotal evidence of this—it’s almost always an aspirational premise. Aspirational as in—I can imagine running into a colleague and whipping together some brilliant thought leadership content…but this has never happened.)
So there are real, credible reasons for wanting staff members back in the office. The above reasons have demonstrable benefits—both for company success and the professional growth of employees.
But “culture”—in the broad, generic definition I keep hearing—doesn’t feel like one of them.
Taylor Coe 