I’ve been wondering about how I’d feel if I had to come back to the office most of the time. Plenty of companies have been announcing Return to Office (RTO) mandates these years. Even during my job search last year, I got the sense that things were already changing, except for the odd remote position, most jobs were hybrid and pushing for at least three to four days in the office.

Let’s be honest, if there’s no other choice, I will go. Still, it’s shocking that companies haven’t learned much from the pandemic, and can’t wait to rush to the old ways. At least, I get the sense that we might be going in the direction of the 4-day workweek, which will be a great step for people that can’t work remotely—most of the population.

When wondering about coming back to the office full-time, my mind goes into the quality of life that I’ll lose, the way my day to day will change. I can rationalize it by saying that this is just “going back to normal”, that I’m snapping back to reality, and it’s not wrong. I fully accept that being a developer is already a privileged situation, and that working remotely or hybrid is even more so.

There’s a hidden reality right in the open: many companies didn’t offer hybrid or remote work, as they thought it didn’t work or that it would stymie collaboration, camaraderie or creativity, until they were forced to. The pandemic was, in a twisted way, a catalyst and a reminder that things can be different. After being forced to adapt, many companies found that things didn’t get worse, and I bet that lots of them found out that productivity actually increased, like the company I was working in during the lockdowns.

Let me tell you a bit about my experience of working during lockdown. Before the pandemic, the company was mostly office-based, although people had the freedom to work from home occasionally. The team did pair programming by default during core hours (roughly 4 hours a day). When somebody decided to work from home one day, we just started a call and paired, no big deal. Originally, the teams were split by location, London teams and Dundee teams, but at some point it was decided to mix them, so teams had developers from both locations and, therefore, were distributed. Once the pandemic was upon us, nothing was radically different, and looking at the engineering metrics, teams were even more productive! The company decided to continue working remotely after the pandemic.

When we were able to go back to the office, something caught my attention: we kept working remotely, but, once in a while, we self-organised to share time together in the office, do some pair programming, go for lunch, etc. Those few days felt great, we wanted to go, it was our decision, no manager was breathing on our necks to see us there. There was no office farce, no “you need to be in the office for camaraderie or collaboration” pretence. What stands out to me in this anecdote is choice, self-organisation. Some people wanted or needed to go more frequently to the office, some didn’t. In the ability to have choice, there’s also inclusion.

My experience in the pandemic taught me that you can still have great collaboration, camaraderie, and an outstanding team while working remotely if the company makes the effort to adapt and commit, no excuses. I wonder how organisations would look if self-managing was a thing, if we were to embrace the power of people to be treated like adults, organise themselves freely without power-over dynamics.

Coming back to Return to Office mandates, I strongly consider them unethical and nonsensical. After organisations apparently embraced remote work and people made potentially long-term decisions (where and how to live…), now the boss unilaterally wants to force people back to the office to do just about what they were doing remotely, but worse. In one of my jobs, I had to go to the office a few times a week just to join a video call and be online, most of my teammates weren’t even in the same country!

I’ve come to the conclusion that many companies that exalt the values of collaboration and coming back to the office aren’t really collaborative anyway, not in any meaningful sense of the word. I’ve also come to the conclusion that RTOs are not about collaboration, creativity, or anything like that, it’s mostly about control over workers. A study on RTO mandates shows that:

There are other reasons for the mandates as well. I’ve read that many companies have expensive contracts to rent offices without employees going to them. Another reason can be that the mandates are a sneaky and sleazy way to get rid of people, after all, workers that made important changes based on the company’s policy now find their life’s disrupted and might think of leaving. The latter reason has the most weight to it because the end of the zero interest rate world means that many companies have to make adjustments to reduce costs. Leaders decided to take risks and expand too much, and now their mismanagement is trickling down on workers—with no repercussion on the CEO. As an example, see Spotify’s CEO email to explain the lay-offs, in particular this part:

If the pandemic shows something about remote work is that there’s a bigger topic: what do we value in life, what does it mean to work, does work have meaning, is there a different way of working and living? Moreover, people experienced choice and flexibility, as this article describes:

From the changes of working in the pandemic, I’ve realised that my life has also changed and that there are things that are difficult to let go. Having the ability to not go to a noisy and chaotic office all the time feels great, specially with hearing loss—I wrote more about it in “Do we have to go back to the office?” It feels great to have control over how I organise my day, and move, exercise and go for a quick walk without having to be glued to a random chair all day.

Having choice is great, if I think of going back full-time to an office, all I can think of is that it better be a good one, or be worth my time. Mind you, I’m not against working in the office, I’m against bad offices and lack of choice and flexibility. Ideally, it would be like the story I told you about my company in the pandemic, people self organising, deciding willingly whether they go or not and when and how they want to work.

Interesting links

• RustConf 2023 - Too many cooks or not enough kitchens? Elizabeth Ayer gives a wonderful talk about open spaces. “Boundaries matter, especially in creating spaces for teams to thrive. The challenging part is making boundaries purposeful, and not just passively importing marginalization patterns from outside”.

• What They Don't Tell You About Having Kids And A Career. Fantastic piece by Deb Liu about the challenges of motherhood, being a working parent and the need for a supportive and flexible working environment.

• The Lateral Lens: The Agile Trojan War. “The Greeks feel the entire organisation needs to evolve. […] The Trojans instead see the Transformation Horse as a way to accelerate their command-and-control Waterfall”.

• Surviving Continuous Deployment in Distributed Systems. Excellent post about the challenges of adopting Continuous Deployment, and recommended practices with diagrams and code examples!