Fast Company published an article confusingly titled The return-to-office mandate is here. So is the open office. One has to go. To pull some background forward, the author states they are someone with dyslexia and ADHD who has struggled to work effectively from traditional corporate designed offices.
Right off the bat, sentence number one, we get this doozy of a statement:
It’s official: The era of remote work flexibility is over.
The author is taken it as a given that madates will reign and commonsense has abandoned us (that is my own paraphrasing obviously, but the author’s own points seem to support that view later in the artcle). This statement is supported by a link to a Resume Builder survey of company decision makers from 2023 (although the article mistakenly refers to this as a 2025 survey).
From there, the author pivots to the good, highlighting the strengths of home workspaces and remote working. The next nine paragraphs and three bullets highlight and link to supports for the benefits of remote working and the problems with most workplace designs. In the middle the author nails it when describing their trip through a client office:
That was a lightbulb moment for me: The modern office isn’t designed for everyone—and certainly not for people like me.
Most workplaces are not designed for diverse work activities or employee types. They focus on space efficiency and having enough of each type of work area. Even well designed offices suffer from an inability to have spaces that support every person and every preferred way of working. There have to be compromises when there are limits to budgets and footprints.
But then, after setting up all the reasons remote working is good, we get this:
Return-to-office doesn’t have to be a loss. It can be a gain. But only if we rethink how the office functions.
This statement is so close to being true that it is painful the author missed the point entirely. It is untrue that we must choose between return to office and remote working. There are an infinite number of paths between the two that bring better balance, flexibility, productivity, and choice. We are not forced to choose to either grant infinite freedom or remove it entirely. We can instead choose to design processes that are human-centric that adopt to circumstances, needs, and roles. We can focus on ensuring that flexibility is not just defined as never coming into the office, but instead having control over how you work today versus tomorrow versus next week versus next month. The author even talks about the need for employee control throughout the article!
I do agree completely about the need to “rethink how the office functions.” However, this is independent of mandates. In fact, the more time you mandate your employees back to an office, the less freedom you will have in your office design because you need to shove in more desks than is really practical. It is self-defeating to build offices for mandates.
Their final paragraph is led in with this statement which is wrong only by the choice of the final word of the sentence:
As we usher in a new era of work, let’s not default to old environments.
If the word “environments” were changed to “ways of working” the entire tone of the article would shift to a human-centric view that the author has already built the article to support. The built office is a support for how people work. It is not a goal unto itself. This era of work has shown us that the built office is not central to employee productivity or business success. It is simply one tool that smart companies have as part of their toolkit to maximize the good for their people and profits.
But that should not start with assuming RTO mandates are the future.