Why Do Companies Drag Us Back to the Office?

In September 2024, Andy Jassy, Amazon's CEO, sent a message to all employees (1.6 million people worldwide). Starting in 2025, the company will revert to its pre-COVID arrangement, with the majority of employees expected to work from the office five days a week.

As Andy’s message states, Amazon's decision to return to the office is based on its belief that in-person work fosters better collaboration, a stronger culture, and more effective learning and mentorship opportunities.

This announcement sparked a huge debate. Is it the end of the promise of a world operating fully online? Or is it an opportunity for remote-first companies to attract great talent who aren’t planning to return to the office?

While few know Amazon's true agenda behind this decision, I invite you to explore the remote vs. onsite work debate from a few different angles through the eyes of an engineering leader.

My Perspective

Before COVID, I was an all-time office employee. I spent a minimum of 8 hours a day there, with another 1 to 1.5 hours commuting. I never really considered working from home. Most of my team was onsite, and once I stepped through the door, I could immerse myself in the job. If I wasn’t deep into coding with noise-canceling headphones, I was wandering between meetings, sketching on whiteboards, chatting in the kitchen, or relaxing in the break room. Office time felt like a second life.

Today, I work in a hybrid model. I’m remote-first because more than 50% of my colleagues are located tens, hundreds, or even thousands of kilometers away. But I still visit our headquarters a few times a week. This allows me to meet some people in person, maintain relationships, and engage in brainstorming sessions.

Occasionally, we also organize onsite meetings for all employees or smaller teams, depending on the need.

Would I return to the office for 5 days a week? No. I’ve already gained back several hours a week that I can spend with my family or on hobbies, and I’m not willing to trade that for daily commuting.

Would I become a fully remote employee? No. I need people, their ideas, and physical presence as much as I need focused work hours.

I love flexibility because it makes me the most creative. But it can also complicate things, especially when managing people with blurred lines between work and personal life.

COVID Taught Us How to Survive, Not How to Live

Why is Amazon forcing people to go back to pre-COVID norms? Many years have passed. Hasn’t the pandemic taught us how to be remote-first?

Even though it lasted many months, the pandemic wasn't regular life. For many, it was a survival period. I remember when lockdown hit us at work. From an office-first company, we became fully remote overnight. It was surprising, but our performance as a ~200-person company didn’t change much after many weeks.

But it was far from normal. It was a global crisis. None of us knew what was coming; everyone just wanted to survive. People did their best to adapt. They worked from kitchens or bathrooms. They raised babies in the same room where they worked (myself included). They wrote code, had calls, did online shopping, and watched Netflix on the same laptop that was ON 24/7. I doubt this would be a sustainable situation for years.

Such an experience teaches us a lot, but it doesn’t guarantee we’ll do everything better remotely than in person. Remote work is unnatural—our evolution hasn’t prepared us for that. In virtual communication—emails, IM, even videoconferencing—we miss verbal cues like body language, eye contact (are you looking into eyes or the webcam lens?), and emotions.

No matter how much we work remotely, it will never be as natural as an in-person contact.

You Are Remote-First Anyway

When lockdown hit, my team and I quickly realized that not much had changed in our ways of working. The team already had a flexible schedule because some were students balancing work and university. Meetings were documented in online tools like Miro or Confluence, tasks were managed with JIRA, code was stored in repositories, and designs were created in Sketch. We tracked our goals in Looker Studio and conducted brainstorming sessions using online whiteboards.

This was already a complete remote-first environment. There was nothing extraordinary here—it’s a regular setup for most tech companies.

Our only dependency back then was an on-premise CI/CD machine (an old Mac Pro), which we quickly migrated to the cloud when we realized the risk of keeping it onsite.

The team itself was remote, too. Even though most of us sat in a single office, some worked from different rooms. Our PM worked from a different country, the same as our management, and there was always someone who had to stay home for various reasons. In such cases, the rule is simple: if even one person joins from outside, the team automatically becomes remote. All meetings must happen via video call, and all decisions and workshops must be documented in some kind of online tool. If you draw on the physical whiteboard - take a photo and store it in the online tool.

As software engineers, we are remote-first from day one. This is the nature of our profession. Of course, this doesn’t mean these things come for free. As engineering leaders, it’s our job to build an environment that supports collective intelligence. How? You can find inspiration in my blog post: How to Build Collective Intelligence and Empower Decision-Making.

Your Home is Your Office, Not the Company’s

But the company’s culture is more than just ways of working. It’s about how you interact and behave. Many companies have a solid culture already established. Yet, many are still defining their style and values.

In such cases, the office itself can serve as a cultural anchor. It’s easier to shape the physical space, form good behaviors, and create space for spontaneous interactions. Once you enter the main door, you meet people who are there for the same reason—to do their job for your employer. Walls with the company’s slogans, swag—t-shirts, pens, backpacks—everything reminds you that the world focuses on one thing: your company’s mission.

In your home office, it’s just you doing your job for a regular company. You can change your employer, and in some cases, literally nothing will change at your desk. Your posters, gadgets, and sometimes even your laptop will stay the same.

If you are a leader managing a team of remote workers, you are often the lone representative of the company’s culture. There are no walls, no posters, no environment to help you promote that.

That’s why forcing people to come to the office can be a good move to enhance the feeling of unity and loyalty.

Productivity

Okay, but what about productivity? Studies show that remote workers can be more productive than their office counterparts. For example, Stanford University research found that remote workers were 9% more productive than office workers, according to Psychology Today.

Another study reveals that out of 8 hours a day, the average worker is productive for only 3 hours. For the remaining time, they read the news, browse social media, search for new jobs, or discuss non-work-related topics with co-workers.

Here’s the dilemma. As a leader, do you want your people onsite, available for 8 hours but only working effectively for half of that time and slacking for the rest? Or do you want them to be slightly more productive but out of your direct control?

When it comes to the productivity of engineering teams, there are multiple factors that don’t strictly depend on working remotely vs. onsite. You can read about them here:

• Top Ten Factors of Developers' Productivity

• Key Insights for Engineering Leaders from DORA Research

Loyalty and Trust Issues

A family, a sports team, an Amazonian, a Googler—many companies want you to see them as something more than a 9-5 job. They want loyalty and dedication. Many organizations have mastered this game almost to perfection. You can be an MVP (Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional) or a GDE (Google Developer Expert) without being an employee of Google or Microsoft. Former Google employees call themselves Xooglers.

They are all members of corporate families, contributing to their culture.

Years 2023-2024 were a wake-up call for many. With global layoffs, hundreds of thousands of tech workers became just regular employees who were dismissed in a very ordinary way. No more company culture, shared vision, or team ceremonies.

On the other hand, Gen-Z employees are slowly entering the job market. They are comfortable with the gig economy (Uber drivers, food delivery) or the platform economy (platforms connecting workers with customers, e.g., Upwork and Fiverr). For them, having multiple jobs and minimal loyalty to employers is a way of life. Rising costs of living and student debt have made it challenging for them to rely on a single income source. They prefer financial security over status games.

Mass layoffs only strengthen this trend and make people trust companies even less. Good company culture? Sure, but it’s secondary to work-life balance and reasonable compensation.

To delve deeper into Gen-Z's situation, I invite you to read my article: How to Manage Gen-Z.

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Now, let’s assume the research on productivity from the previous section is universally true. So out of 8 hours, office workers are effective for 3, and remote workers for about 4 hours. What about the remaining time?

You can either spend this “extra” time working online for a second employer, earning more, or slacking off in the office, scrolling through news, social media, and job offers. It’s no surprise that remote work is the preference for many. Today, everyone knows someone who works "full-time" for two or even three employers. If you’re a great software engineer, it’s not a challenge.

What do companies do about this? They force people to come back to offices. If people are paid for spending 8 hours at work, the company, in effect, owns this time. Even if half of it is unproductive, it’s still time that can be used for culture-building activities onsite. This is not as easy with remote workers.

Outcomes or Hours Spent?

Time is a universal measure of work around the world. Labor laws focus exactly on that. They regulate the standard workweek, how many hours you are expected to work, and the minimum wage that must be paid for each hour.

But does it really matter how much time we spend at work? Many successful tech organizations have proven that your effort, input, and even generated output are often secondary to the company’s success. What matters most are outcomes.

But focusing on outcomes is hard. A company must have:

• a good strategy (I wrote about the Engineering Strategy Framework, which can be used as an analogy for company strategy),

• a product-focused culture (covered in the series The Role of Engineering in Product Model Transformation),

• clear expectations management (detailed in Managing Growth and Expectations in Engineering Teams).

• good measures of success (John Doerr wrote Measure What Matters, an entire book about the importance of focusing on the right objectives).

What if the organization doesn’t apply these practices? As Marty Cagan says in his book Transformed, only 10-30% of features pushed by companies bring positive results.

Only 1/3 of our tasks have real value.

With such facts in mind, companies face a tough choice. They either build a strong culture with a product-first mindset, where people know exactly what they are expected to achieve (outcomes, not input or output), or they try to maximize success statistically, i.e., deliver as many features as possible so that even if 1/3 are valuable, it pays off.

Neither is easy. But if a company chooses the “feature factory” mode, the assumption is that it’s easier to (micro)manage people onsite rather than remotely. Because if you see someone slacking, you can assign them another task. This illusion of control is often a compelling reason to enforce RTO (Return to Office) policies.

Missionary or Mercenary

But is it really just an illusion?

The main statement that drives Practical Engineering Management is that the role of technology in a product company is to solve customers’ problems. My main style of working is center-out leadership. It assumes that people who have adequate skills, a good attitude, and enough context can make decisions on their own, leading to the company’s success.

Yet, center-out leadership is not easy. It requires strong leadership skills, good facilitation, communication, and knowledge-sharing practices. On the other hand, not all employees want to make decisions and take responsibility for them. Some prefer to be told what to do and then execute.

If you work with missionaries (people focused on making the company successful and customers happy), and the company truly supports that (employees are trusted in their decisions and have access to all needed context—insights, product strategy, etc.), you can be sure they’ll make the most of their working hours.

But very often, we work with mercenaries (give me a precise task so I have something to focus on) or in a company culture that is more hierarchical, power-oriented, or bureaucratic. In such cases, a classic top-down leadership approach can be more suitable. If you work in this style, it can indeed be easier to manage people in person rather than assigning tasks and controlling execution remotely. In the office, it’s easier to notice when the work is done, whereas working online, you rely on them reporting it proactively.

To explore the differences between center-out and top-down leadership, read my article: Top-down Leadership vs Center-out Leadership.

RTO Makes Us Less Happy—So What?

Okay, but what about the human aspect? Forcing me to return to the office will make me less happy.

Remote work seems to be a people-first approach. We don’t have to commute; we can spend more time with our families or on hobbies. We can work with flexible schedules—start at 8, take a break at 11, go to the gym, have a healthy lunch, come back at 2 PM, and work till the evening.

Forcing people to return to the office will disrupt their lives and force them to rearrange schedules according to the corporate calendar, not the other way around. Everyone will be less happy because of that.

But this brings us back to what a company is in the end. It’s not a family, a sports team, or a culture. Its purpose is not to make employees happy. It exists to generate profits from the collective intelligence of all employed people.

Sure, happy employees are more productive, but there are different ways to achieve that beyond giving us back our time. Fancy offices, free meals, and team-building activities—all exist to please us, so we are more loyal, focused, and productive.

And sometimes we don’t even need to derive joy from our work. We are only expected to get our job done, for which we are compensated as agreed.

Final Thoughts for Engineering Leaders

Work from office vs. work from home—this could be an endless debate with no clear winner, which is why many organizations prefer a hybrid model.

But what if your company is now on the verge of implementing a Return to Office policy? Is there anything we can do as low/mid-level engineering leaders? It all depends on the case and the main motivation driving your organization’s decision.

My experience suggests that while the order comes from the top, the RTO execution falls on Engineering Managers, Directors, and sometimes even Team Leads. This means you may have some influence in the debate.

Your job as a leader is to make your company more successful through the work of your team. Be honest with yourself—is it possible to achieve this remotely? Assess all aspects—SDLC, documentation, ways of running brainstorming sessions, setting goals, day-to-day communication within and outside the team, being outcome-oriented, etc.

If, with all honesty, it’s true and you can prove it, it’ll open the door for negotiation about office presence policies. If not, it’s worth building the culture and processes to make that possible.

In healthy organizations, if you show that “your way” works, management will be less likely to interfere.

What’s Your Take Here?

What do you think about remote vs onsite work? What does this look like in your organization? You can join the discussion on the PEMs chat to share your insights and see how other leaders deal with it:

Thanks for reading!