The Biggest Lie About In-Office Work

Years ago, when I first moved to Texas, I had this job where maybe 200 other employees existed. It was half-Texas and half-Seattle. Texas had maybe 115 employees, and the CEO (son of the founder, naturally) worked outta there. We were on the fourth and fifth floor of a downtown Fort Worth building. So many mornings, he would enter the elevator with 6–7 employees, grunt “hi,” and then stare at the floor until the fifth floor was reached. It became almost comical.

That, and many other leaders I’ve observed, make it laughable when we use the “spontaneous collaboration” argument about bringing people back into offices. The bulwark of that argument is usually something about Steve Jobs and how he designed Pixar for “spontaneous collaboration” between people. In reality, Jobs probably designed those offices to maximize the building costs, not to create collaboration, but history is written by the winners, and until recently, Pixar was a winner — and Jobs still is. So, I get the narrative.

The thing is, it doesn’t happen. A peon worker will interact with a decision-maker in a “spontaneous” way approximately zero times across the course of a year. Senior leaders spend almost all their time (when they’re in office, which is oddly not as much as they preach they are) with people at their own level, discussing metrics and financials that they view as sacred and barely contextualize down the chain.

I think most people with an IQ above 55 realize that the return-to-office movement is largely about control and relevance, and very little else. But because those aren’t fun things to say out loud, we need a different narrative. We’ve tried several:

1. "You will be single forever."
2. "Your posture will be destroyed."
3. "China will win."

The actual reason is a bit simpler: executives and middle managers want to be deified.

The biggest joke to me is two-fold:

1. This discussion has gone on too long (“Which model is best?”) and the real discussion is about how self-aware and in-tune with the business the senior team is. If they realize things can get done productively from anywhere and the real goal of life is to accrue memories and experiences with loved ones, they will let you work from anywhere, and they retain the right to fire you if that’s not working. Plus: fully-remote, fully-WFH is about 8% of the North American + European population right now. With hybrid, it’s maybe 20%, per most data. Most people can’t work from home. I currently bartend three nights a week. Can I do that on Zoom? No.
2. “Spontaenous collaboration” is almost an insult. Most senior leaders barely know your name at your three-year anniversary with a company. Do you think they want to “spontaneously” do anything with you? The only thing they want to do spontaneously is (a) have sex with their wife or (b) find another 17 nickels in the couch cushions of their vertical for a bigger bonus. They certainly don’t want to hear your ideas in some drably-decorated hallway.

If you look at that article above, you’ll also see that in reality peons don’t often even collaborate with peons. I’ve been in dozens of office environments, and while meetings are commonplace — and those are, in some form, “collaboration” — a lot of people put on Beats by Dre and focus on their own stuff as they move through the day. If you tap them on the shoulder, they’re often annoyed. Most people, I think, realize that work is a game and the game is played individually while periodically using leverage of others. So they try to stand out as A-Players, assuming they care about their career as more than a means to an end. That diminishes the idea of collaboration as well.

The “mentorship” argument for RTO is kinda similar to the “collaboration” argument. I agree that junior employees should be mentored, but I take issue with the fact that the argument is always about “junior engineers,” and not everyone in the world is an engineer. That’s “A.” Moving to “B,” companies just don’t really train or mentor that well, because they see it as a cost they can avoid by finding people who can “hit the ground running.”

Case in point: I’m doing this bartending stuff right now, right? Just last night, on my 7th or 8th shift, I learned two new things that I hadn’t been taught or told during training. I trained for five days. So last night was probably my 13th time behind the bar, right? There’s still big chunks of things I needed to know that I’m learning by osmosis. Companies just don’t really care that much about the training side. Training and mentoring are similar concepts. So I’m not entirely sure that’s happening, except again at places with self-aware leadership.

But if you work at a joint where the CEO is heads-down in the elevator, and “spontaneous collaboration” is the argument for you to be in the office, run — because it’s all a sham and a lie.