Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
At the same moment offices are being written off as obsolete, many of the world’s best-performing companies are leaning back into them. Not quietly. Not apologetically. Nvidia. Instagram. Tesla. JPMorgan. Goldman Sachs. These aren’t legacy firms clinging to old habits. They are outperformers operating in fast, competitive, high-stakes environments.
That should make us pause.
If offices were simply outdated containers for work that can now happen anywhere, this behavior wouldn’t make sense. These companies are ruthless about efficiency. They don’t carry unnecessary costs out of sentimentality.
The more interesting question isn’t why leaders are mandating return to office. It’s what kind of work they are trying to protect.
Offices still matter because coordination still matters
Work today is less about individual output and more about coordination. Research from MIT Sloan on digital work and interdependence shows that as work becomes more digital, it also becomes more interconnected. Tasks are distributed across teams. Decisions rely on shared context. Progress depends on how quickly people can align, adjust, and move together.
That kind of work breaks down fast when coordination costs rise.
Microsoft’s 2024 Work Trend Index: AI at Work Is Here. Now Comes the Hard Part found that employees now spend most of their day communicating across teams rather than completing isolated tasks. Meetings, messages, handoffs, and decisions are the work. When coordination fragments, productivity doesn’t just slow — it erodes.
High-performing organizations understand this. Offices give them a way to lower coordination costs by increasing shared context, accelerating feedback loops, and enabling real-time problem solving. Not all the time, but when it matters most.
Time, not attendance, is the real advantage
The most misunderstood part of return-to-office strategies isn’t space. It’s time.
Stanford research on hybrid work shows that flexibility alone doesn’t determine performance. What matters is overlap — whether teams share meaningful time together.
Studies from Stanford’s Work, Technology, and Organizations group show that teams with coordinated schedules outperform teams that are technically “present” but rarely overlapping.
Synchronized presence changes how work moves. Conversations build instead of restarting. Decisions stick because everyone heard the same discussion. Learning compounds because context is shared, not reconstructed.
This is why mandates tend to appear after coordination breaks down. Leaders are trying to restore overlap in systems that quietly lost it.
Talent density only works when it’s activated
Hiring great people isn’t enough. Putting them on Slack together isn’t enough either.
Research from the National Bureau of Economic Research on proximity and knowledge spillovers, reinforced by recent MIT findings, shows that learning accelerates when people work near others with different or deeper expertise. Informal observation, spontaneous questions, and quick corrections matter more than formal training in complex roles.
Gensler’s Global Workplace Survey 2025 shows that employees consistently report coming into the office primarily to get work done and to get access to colleagues. Not amenities. Not perks. People.
Talent density only creates advantage when it’s activated. Offices remain one of the few tools organizations have to make that happen intentionally.
Space is a performance tool
Most offices don’t fail because people won’t come in. They fail because they don’t support the work people come in to do.
JLL’s Designing Workplaces to Drive Success research shows a growing disconnect between how offices are designed and how teams actually work. Space optimized for utilization metrics consistently underperforms space designed for collaboration, focus, and adaptability.
High-performing teams expect environments that let them move easily between modes: heads-down focus, small-group problem solving, and larger collaborative moments. When space fights those needs, people disengage. When it supports them, offices feel alive — and effective.
The office is no longer the whole system
The future of work isn’t office versus remote. We need to create room for a coordinated system.
CBRE’s 2024 research on flexible office and portfolio strategy shows that leading organizations are using hub-and-spoke models, distributed portfolios, and project-based spaces to support different kinds of work. Core offices bring people together for moments that benefit from density. Remote work supports deep individual tasks. Regional and client-facing spaces shorten distance to opportunity.
Assuming all work benefits equally from the same setup was the big mistake companies made over the past few years. Flexibility is not the place where things went wrong.
AI makes offices more important, not less
As AI takes over routine, individual, and transactional work, the remaining human work becomes more social — not more isolated.
MIT and Stanford researchers studying AI adoption in knowledge work are already observing this shift. The 2024 Microsoft Work Trend Index shows AI boosting individual output while increasing the need for collective interpretation and decision-making. The better the tools get, the more important it becomes for humans to align on meaning, judgment, and direction.
Offices increasingly become places where humans do the work only humans can do — together.
Why the office conversation keeps going sideways
The office debate is framed as cultural when it’s operational. As control when it’s coordination. As nostalgia when it’s performance.
High-performing companies are bringing people back because the work they do now depends on fast alignment, learning velocity, and shared judgment — and because those things are fragile when left to chance.
Offices still matter. Not as defaults, not as mandates, but as intentional tools in a modern work system.
The real question leaders need to ask about RTO initiatives is when, why, and whether the spaces employees enter actually enhance the work at hand.
That’s the question the best companies are already answering — quietly, decisively, and with results.
