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A chief operating officer at a mid-size technology company recently offered an unusually candid explanation for her company’s return-to-office decision.
“We don’t actually know if the work is getting done well,” she said. “We know it’s getting done. We just can’t tell if it’s excellent or mediocre until something blows up. When people were in the building, I could walk a floor and know within ten minutes which teams were thriving and which were drifting. I lost that.”
Notably absent from her explanation were the usual talking points. She didn’t mention culture. She didn’t cite collaboration or innovation. What she described—precisely and honestly—was an assessment problem: an inability to distinguish high-quality work from merely adequate work without physically observing people doing it.
That level of honesty is rare. When major corporations announced return-to-office mandates last year, the public rationale focused on restoring culture, collaboration, and creativity. Yet the productivity evidence never supported that framing.
Bureau of Labor Statistics research from October 2024 found a positive relationship between increased remote work and total factor productivity across 61 private-sector industries. A 2024 randomized controlled trial led by Nicholas Bloom found that hybrid work—two days per week at home—had no negative effect on productivity or career advancement. Gallup’s engagement data showed no systematic decline when employees worked remotely.
If the work was getting done, what problem were return-to-office mandates actually solving?
The uncomfortable answer is the one the COO articulated: many organizations lack the ability to evaluate performance independently of physical presence. The mandate is less about restoring collaboration and more about restoring the confidence that comes from visual verification—seeing people work and inferring progress from proximity.
What Leaders Actually Observed
Before dismissing executive concerns outright, it’s worth acknowledging what leaders genuinely noticed during extended periods of remote work.
Strategic projects that once took three months stretched to nine—not because people weren’t working, but because informal coordination disappeared. Decisions that would have been resolved in a hallway conversation now required scheduled meetings, calendar alignment, and compounding delays. Junior employees developed more slowly as observational learning evaporated—no overhearing how a senior colleague handles a difficult client, no watching how a complex analysis is structured. Early-stage innovation slowed as idea generation proved harder to replicate on video calls.
These were real frictions. The question is whether the diagnosis—and the solution—were correct.
The Assessment Gap That Proximity Was Masking
When leaders say they need to “see the energy,” “feel the collaboration,” or “sense the culture,” they are not describing metrics. They are describing experiential proxies for outcomes they struggle to measure directly.
At one company, a vice president proudly presented a dashboard tracking office occupancy by hour, complete with heat maps of conference room usage. The data was pristine. It showed exactly when people arrived, where they sat, and how long they stayed. It revealed nothing about whether the company’s strategy was succeeding.
That is the core issue. Physical proximity once created ambient awareness. Leaders walked floors, sat in meetings, and felt informed. That feeling substituted for structured evaluation of outputs. Remote work did not create an assessment problem; it exposed one that had been masked by presence for years.
Consider a senior director I asked to define what “excellent” performance looked like for a product management role she had overseen for nearly a decade. She could list activities: stakeholder meetings, sprint planning, roadmap presentations. She could name valued behaviors: responsiveness, initiative, thoroughness.
But when asked what a top-performing product manager actually produced—what outcomes distinguished excellence from mediocrity—she paused. Finally, she said, “I know it when I see it.”
That sentence explains more about return-to-office mandates than any corporate memo.
Organizations with strong output clarity adapted without crisis. They knew what each team shipped, where work stalled and why, which dependencies caused delays, and whether quality standards held. Management conversations focused on decisions and obstacles, not status signaling. Many of the organizations now mandating returns lacked that infrastructure. They managed through walking around, meeting volume, and visible effort—who arrived early, who stayed late, who looked busy.
Remote work eliminated those signals. Leaders discovered they could no longer articulate what “done” looked like.
Five Shifts That Would Actually Address the Problem
Blanket mandates impose uniform requirements regardless of role, performance, or work type—suggesting the policy is optimizing for organizational comfort, not outcomes. A more strategic response requires different shifts.
1. Stop mandating uniform presence. Start tailoring work arrangements to performance needs.
Research teams tackling ambiguous problems need different setups than operational teams executing defined processes. Early-career employees benefit more from in-person exposure than senior specialists doing deep individual work. Cross-functional initiatives may require periodic in-person sprints rather than daily attendance. Design policies around how work actually gets done.
2. Stop framing RTO as compliance. Start framing it as contribution to purpose.
There is a difference between telling an engineer she must be in the office three days a week and explaining that the team is entering a six-week prototyping phase where rapid iteration will accelerate both the product and her development. One is a rule. The other is a reason. When people understand why presence matters in specific moments, compliance turns into commitment.
3. Stop tracking attendance. Start defining excellence.
If leaders cannot articulate success criteria without watching people work, location is not the problem. Build review rhythms centered on deliverables, decisions, and outcomes. Train leaders to evaluate results, not activity signals.
4. Stop assuming proximity produces innovation. Start designing collaboration intentionally.
If spontaneous interaction matters, create forums that enable it. If junior talent needs exposure, formalize mentoring and observation. If cross-functional trust is critical, build deliberate touchpoints and measure whether they work.
5. Stop measuring who shows up. Start measuring what changes when people are together.
Track collaboration quality, innovation output, learning velocity, and strategic progress—and correlate those outcomes with different work arrangements. Let evidence, not intuition, guide policy.
The Strategic Choice
Every organization making location decisions faces a choice: invest in evaluation systems that work regardless of where people sit, or reinstate proximity to restore reassurance through presence. One builds capability. The other restores comfort.
The assessment gap does not disappear when people return to offices. It simply becomes less visible. Leaders who struggled to define excellence remotely will not suddenly gain that ability in person. They will resume managing through presence, meeting attendance, and perceived busyness. The work will remain poorly understood—but everyone will feel more confident because they can see one another.
The real diagnostic question is not whether people should work remotely or in offices. It is whether your organization can clearly articulate what excellent work looks like independent of location.
If it cannot, you don’t have a workplace problem. You have an assessment infrastructure problem—and no real estate policy will solve it.