If you didn't care before, a fad won't fix it now...

TLDR

If you weren't already investing in asynchronous teamwork skills, alignment of people to purpose, measuring progress, improving communications skills, respect for people, and innovative technology, just 'returning to office' will probably make it all worse - right when you were hoping for a magic solution to the chaos of 2025. So read some good research on the topic, that has stood the test of time.

A Fad or a Thing?

The start to this year has seen a mushrooming of 'must-have' business ideas presented on platforms from TikTok to Time Square - the only thing you need to be working on right now! Blame algorithms, our hyper-connectedness, or our frantic efforts to keep our heads above water in a zone so flooded with sh*t we need digital lifesavers - we just need a solution to the thing ... that other thing ... no, the new new thing.

Merriam-Webster get close with their definition of a fad - 'a practice or interest followed for a time with exaggerated zeal'. A fad can have lasting impact on people and organisations, much more than a craze or trend in my mind. Nor is a fad the same as a 'cult' which requires some complex elements like a charismatic leader, a cause, a manifesto - and are generally more harmful.

The roots of a fad are generally fascinating, if you can find them - quite often there are only sketchy facts, qualitative 'research' or evidence to base the fad on - but it generally catches on because it scratches an itch and sounds plausible. It's sometimes hard to argue or debate with a fad, as they are like vapour to fight. People get passionate in proportion to their desperation to solve a problem, and in web-time and at web-scale, fads spread like wildfires now.

I've lived through 4 generations of management fads, from MBO, to BPR, to ISO9001, downsizing, right-sizing, startups, PMBOK, ITIL, outsourcing, 6sigma, shareholder value, OKRs, flat org structures, eLearning, knowledge management, dare I say agile? Follow the string and you'll usually find someone making money at the end of it.

You didn't need to be an economic genius or conspiracy theorist to work out that letting staff head to the hills during COVID in 2020, then endorsing hybrid, asynchronous work, only to recapitulate in 2024 might be linked to avoidance of redundancy costs in some way.

What's the source?

My job at 思特沃克软件技术（中国）有限公司 is to yank on any methodological fad-yarn I can find, to uncover its origins, connections, motivations, dependencies, and see if anything has been missed in the algospeak media headlines. Always hoping that something might be useful for all the interdisciplinary, technosocial balls of wool we unravel daily for clients.

As we head into March 2025, this quarter's hot topic (in the circles of leaders that I haunt), is definitely RTO - return to office. The zeal for this fad is deep and wide - from the public service to global giants. With COVID unleashing the genie of working from home (which may turn out to be more than a fad), in what amounted to the largest unsupervised by adults workplace social science experiment in history, Q1 2025 seems to be the moment everyone seems to be imposing their definition of what is going to be 'normal' about work again.

So what does the research say? Both sides of the argument have suddenly got interested in whether there are facts in the narrative, that might be used to persuade the 'other side' to change their minds about commuting to work again.

TLDR there's evidence both ways. Turns out researchers have been thinking about this topic for decades, but like so many work-related ideas, there's less data-driven or empirical thinking than you might like if you were trying to be impartial. This is a favourite - now 25 years old, but a really thorough and relevant piece of work into what makes asynchronous and remote teams perform:

It's a great read from the year 2000 (say that with a scifi voice) where newfangled groupware, video conferencing, web chat, and document sharing was emerging to replace 'telecommuting' and 'distance work'. The authors do a bang-up job of predicting where we'd be 25 years later too (same shit, different bandwidth). Great case studies and detailed references illustrate that to make it all work in new, higher performing ways, you need to invest in:

• Creating common ground for the participants (alignment, comfort, dignity)
• Understand how tightly coupled the work actually is (engineers will love this bit)
• Invest in advance in collaboration skills and technology
• Get good at asynchronous work, to anticipate time zone conflicts (shout out to my colleague Sumeet Gayathri Moghe at Thoughtworks India for his new book The Async First Playbook).
• Be aware of the cultural impacts of teams made up from people in different nations - not the least of which touches on Geert Hofstede's power-distance index (founded on research in the tech industry too, with work done at IBM).

More recently, the HBR case study of the digital travel business in China where hybrid working in a call centre was tested has been getting air time, and the circumstances of that organisation may well be relevant to your workplace too.

Supporting the thesis that RTO boosts performance is this article about engineers from 2023 (backed by this Harvard and OUV NBER research paper).

Prolific thinker and writer Bob Emiliani's thoughtful Linked In post on Dell's cancellation of hybrid work for reasons posits that simply jamming people face to face back in the office is no guarantee of higher bandwidth of communication - politics, human behaviour, hidden agendas, and misaligned rewards can all degrade face-to-face time into a managerial clown-bus. Read the comments to get the full weight of both sides of the argument!

Karl Marx (and those sassy next generation leaders Corporate Rebels) would have no difficulty explaining the current tensions between workers and bosses over the need to return to office - the owners of capital are simply expressing their power over labour, ensuring the costs of RTO are borne by people commuting 90 minutes a day (the average in Melbourne these days) on their own time, while the alleged benefits accrue to the business. RTO is political, but that might be another socioeconomic debate completely.

Tackling any existing negative office politics is likely worth spending time on though - it has long been noted as a blocker of the flow of value to customers, and hence business success. Great 2021 HBR article on that topic by Niven Postma.

My point, and I do have one

The glittering promise of staff returning to the office solving all your company woes over profit, lack of growth, innovation, or politics, is fool's gold if you were not already focused heavily in removing the friction in the flow of value to customers, communication, alignment, operating model and management. Focus would look like measurement, research, surveys, value stream maps, data-driven experiments. Not decrees.

Expanding on that insight, here's my sweeping observation - the same constraint applies to every fad or current hot topic for management and work in 2025:

Scaled agile - were you already focused on growing your business model, your org, your people's capability, team interactions? How much of your time in management has been spent researching, measuring, thinking and talking about this before you bought a Fad-in-a-box?

Founder mode - were you already working on alignment of rewards, processes, values, structures, and culture? If I saw the last ELT agenda at your place where was that discussion on the order?

High agency people - same exact preconditions! How long have you obsessed about getting obstacles out of the way of your people as a cultural tenet?

Gen AI - as the great Jim Highsmith recently noted, these all cross over - if you were struggling to get the value from adapting/ adopting new ways of working inspired by TPS, lean, or agile 20 years ago, you are highly unlikely to reap the benefits of what the 2020s generation of automation intelligence is bringing to workplaces.

To win requires being all-in on tech-savvy leaders, a learning culture, interdisciplinary teams, belief in constant coaching-as-management, and a new, adaptive operating model as pre-conditions. Get started today!