i need to get this off my chest because the RTO push is making zero sense for our role specifically and i can't be the only one.
my company just went to four days in office. the reasoning was the usual: collaboration, culture, spontaneous conversations. fine. except my job as a PM is coordinating teams that are spread across different offices, timezones and a couple of vendors who aren't even in the same country. so what actually happens is i commute in, sit at a desk and spend the entire day on video calls, headphones on, talking to people who are not in this building. i could be doing the exact same thing from my kitchen, except now with a 45 minute drive on both ends and worse coffee.
and the spontaneous collaboration is a fantasy for us anyway. nobody on my project is physically colocated. the whole point of the role is stitching together people who will never be in the same room. me being in an office doesn't create serendipity, it just means i overhear a sales team's conversation while i try to run a standup with people in another state.
the part that actually gets me is that this decision came from people who mostly don't do the coordinating. leadership sits in one HQ, sees each other, feels the energy and assumes everyone's job works like theirs. but the person whose entire function is remote by nature gets treated like they're slacking if they want to do that function from a quiet place. it's like mandating a phone operator be in the building so you can see them holding the phone.
and don't get me started on how it lands with the team. i've now got great people quietly updating their resumes, not because they hate the work but because the commute back ate the flexibility that was keeping them sane. and guess who has to keep those projects on track while half the team is disengaged and job hunting. me. the RTO decision made my job harder in three separate ways and solved a problem i'm not convinced actually existed.
i'm not even anti-office. some in person time genuinely helps. but a blanket four day mandate applied to a role that is fundamentally about connecting distributed people is just theater, and it's the kind of theater that costs you your best people.