Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
For years, the debate over remote work has sounded like static: mandates versus flexibility, culture versus convenience, bosses versus workers. But beneath the noise, a quieter — and far more interesting — shift is emerging.
Why Talent Density Matters
Some of the world’s most influential companies are making a specific, strategic bet: that the physical distance between smart people still matters.
Not because leaders are nostalgic for cubicles. Not because they enjoy badge swipes. But because a growing body of evidence keeps pointing toward the same conclusion: when the right people are close together, ideas spread more easily, and teams are more likely to build on each other’s work.
This isn’t an argument against remote work. It’s an observation about what proximity does inside complex organizations.
Research Evidence Supports Proximity Benefits
Research from the MIT Sloan School of Management found that geography and physical closeness continue to play “a major role in digital innovation,” even in industries that consider themselves inherently virtual.
Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge highlighted a study of startups randomly assigned to offices in the same co-working hub. The results weren’t subtle: knowledge spillovers peaked within roughly 20 meters.
The underlying NBER paper, (Co-)Working in Close Proximity, showed that once teams were more than 20 meters apart — even on the same floor — their likelihood of adopting each other’s technologies dropped sharply.
A similar pattern appears in how people learn. Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York examined office-based workers before, during, and after pandemic closures and found a persistent effect.
Their report, “The Power of Proximity”, concluded that employees working near colleagues invested more in building skills that paid off later, even when it temporarily reduced short-term productivity. Proximity, in other words, shapes the rate at which teams accumulate capability.
How Leading Companies Are Handling RTO
That research offers one explanation for a trend emerging inside several highly influential companies. Amazon, for instance, shifted from a flexible approach to a three-day in-office schedule in early 2023, a change laid out in a memo later detailed by GeekWire.
By late 2024, Amazon moved further. A company-wide memo, widely reported across business outlets, confirmed a transition to five days a week for most corporate employees. CEO Andy Jassy wrote that the hybrid period had “strengthened our conviction” about the benefits of co-location for collaboration and invention.
Tesla took a firmer stance much earlier. In 2022, Elon Musk told employees they were required to be in the office a minimum of 40 hours per week, insisting that the office must be “where your actual colleagues are located, not some remote pseudo office,” a position reported by Ars Technica.
More stories for you
In finance, JPMorgan Chase followed a similar trajectory. A January 2025 memo, described by Reuters, informed hybrid employees they would be required to return to the office five days a week. CEO Jamie Dimon has repeatedly argued that mentorship, apprenticeship, and complex decision-making are fundamentally in-person activities.
Nvidia offers a different but equally notable example. Reporting by Business Insider describes a culture defined by intense in-person collaboration and fast, iterative problem-solving, with CEO Jensen Huang emphasizing accountability and direct engagement.
As Yahoo Finance’s analysis makes clear, Nvidia’s financial performance has accelerated dramatically during this period, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world.
None of these companies claim that returning to the office caused their growth.
Amazon’s decade-long total return has outpaced the S&P 500, but those gains were driven by logistics, cloud computing, advertising, and a sprawling global footprint.
Tesla’s extraordinary rise reflects EV adoption, manufacturing strategy, and investor sentiment. JPMorgan’s consistency stems from its scale, risk posture, and leadership. Nvidia’s surge is tied directly to the global demand for AI hardware. These factors dwarf any single workplace policy.
But it is notable that several companies producing a disproportionate share of market value are also the companies intentionally concentrating talent in physical hubs.
Implications for the Future of Work
Whether coincidence, correlation, or early signal, the overlap raises questions about the competitive dynamics of proximity. If knowledge spillovers are stronger within 20 meters, and if long-term learning accelerates when colleagues sit near one another, then the decision to bring teams together may not be cultural at all. It may be operational.
The idea of talent density reframes the conversation. It’s not a referendum on office nostalgia. It’s a question about the architecture of high-performance work.
In environments where insight spreads unevenly and apprenticeship is fragile, proximity becomes a variable — one that leaders can either manipulate or ignore. The companies leaning into it are not issuing manifestos. They’re adjusting inputs.
Whether talent density becomes a mainstream strategy in the future of work or remains a differentiator among a small group of firms will depend on whether other leaders see the pattern the way these companies appear to.
But the research is consistent on one point: when skilled people work near one another, the texture of the work changes. Information flows differently. Judgment transfers faster. The organization learns in ways that are difficult to quantify but consequential over time.
For companies navigating increasingly compressed strategy cycles, those effects may matter more than they once did. And while remote and hybrid work are certain to remain part of the modern workforce, the early signals suggest that proximity — deployed selectively and intentionally — may carry more weight in the next decade than it did in the last.
In that sense, the ROI of RTO is less about policy than about physics: how far ideas have to travel, and how quickly teams can turn them into action.
