What’s Driving The Shift Away From Remote Work?

Behind the RTO trend.

In 2020, millions of companies pivoted to remote work seemingly overnight.

The traditional corporate landscape changed drastically, for many it felt like chaos:

• Slack pings at all hours

• Calendars exploding

• Scopes lost in the void

• And decisions made without ever being in the same room as somebody

Fast forward three or four years and many companies, especially large ones, began a slow but vocal reversal. By 2025, the tone has shifted entirely. Remote work is no longer the default. It’s something that needs to be justified.

We’re familiar with the reasons:

• Productivity

• Collaboration

• Focus

• Or culture

In some cases the return to office (RTO) was done carefully, some abruptly, some because they have to, others because they don’t know what else to do.

But context matters. What works for JP Morgan or Toyota might be a terrible strategy for a 12-person SaaS team. So, instead of arguing for or against remote work in the abstract, let’s look at what’s actually driving the shift – and how to make a decision that’s grounded in your team, your systems, and your goals.

Why are big companies calling people back?

If we move past the headlines and press releases, what’s really motivating the shift back to offices? For many companies, it’s not a new strategy, it’s a mix of financial pressure, managerial strain, and cultural mimicry.

It’s not culture – it’s capital

Many big companies have spent the last decade:

• Building massive office complexes or campuses

• Signing multi-year leases

• And investing in physical infrastructure

During the pandemic, many of these complexes turned into ghost towns – far from the thriving hubs they were designed to be.

If a corporation’s finance team sees an eight-figure office expense that’s not being utilized, understandably there’s going to be pressure. Not to rethink the company’s strategy but to get people back into those buildings.

The reasoning here isn’t about the company’s culture of collaboration. It’s more practical – it’s about cost rationalization.

Remote breaks without systems

Managing a team at scale is tough. Managing remotely at scale is even harder. Many aspects need to be in place to successfully run a remote team, including:

• Establishing how accountability is tracked

• Ensuring teams bond

• Having decision-making procedures

• And effectively managing how information moves

Many companies never built these systems. They relied on what worked for them: proximity and visibility. So, when those disappeared – performance faltered.

Not because people don’t work, but because coordination, trust-building, and onboarding are structurally more complex. Companies without strong async processes or documentation habits often find themselves slipping into chaos. And instead of putting systems in place, they pulled everyone back to the office.

The bandwagon effect

When massive companies like Google, Amazon, JP Morgan, and Toyota bring their people back to the office, it sends a signal. Other CEOs naturally think: “This must be the right thing to do.”

But the truth is, modelling your company on a trillion-dollar corporation often ends up being a mismatch. We saw the same thing happen when open-plan offices became the next-best thing.

In reality, the work people do, the way they do it, and the way they live and structure their lives has changed dramatically since pre-Covid times.

When remote fails

Remote work doesn’t magically fix everything. There are many ways it can break down, especially in companies that weren’t designed for it.

Unclear expectations: Without clear goals, clear roles, and tight execution rhythms, remote teams drift. People fill in gaps with assumptions. Misunderstandings take longer to surface. Work slows, not because people are lazy, but because the structure is missing.

Micromanagement culture: Being remote amplifies whatever cultural dynamics already exist. If managers don’t trust their teams, they tend to overcorrect with endless meetings, Slack check-ins, Zoom surveillance, and passive-aggressive deadline reminders. This is a sure-fire way to have your team disengage quickly.

Poor hiring practices: Remote isn’t for everyone. Some people thrive in autonomous environments. Others do better with more structure, the pressure of in-person meetings, and a clear separation between home and work. If this isn’t taken into account in the hiring process, you’ll see failure pretty quickly. In these situations, it’s easy to blame the model, not the misfit.

When remote is your superpower

If your company is small, your reality is vastly different to Google’s. You don’t have the same legal risks, real estate burdens, hiring brand, or compliance headaches.

So when you copy their work model, you’re often solving problems you don’t have – and creating ones you didn’t need!

• You don’t have to hire locally. You can find amazing talent globally

• You don’t need to justify 500,000 sq. ft. of unused office space

• You don’t need to water down your culture to accommodate ten thousand people

Instead, you can build in your own way – around what you need, and what you want your culture to be. A caveat though, your values and culture have to be more defined and clear. They’re what glue your team together and define how work gets done.

Other things to consider:

• Clear processes: You can’t jump on a call every time you need to make a decision. Teams that document how they plan, code, review, launch, and support are successful because decisions don’t bottleneck on time zones or calendars.

• Clear hiring practices: Cultural-fit is paramount to successful remote teams. The best remote team members don’t just get their work done, they thrive in autonomy and build trust transparently.

• Strong company culture: You’re not having daily stand-ups like you do in offices. Your culture isn’t built by proximity. You need to be proactive in ensuring alignment in accountability, ownership, outcomes, reflections, and trust.

The short version: forget the binary, do what works

While it’s easy to polarize remote vs RTO, the reality is more complex. Instead of blindly following RTOs, we should ask:

• What are we actually optimizing for?

• Where are we seeing friction – and is it environmental, cultural, or structural?

• Do we have the right systems for the way we want to work?

• Are we hiring the right people for that environment?

The question isn’t whether remote work is “right” or “wrong.” It’s whether your current way of working supports the business – and the people inside it.

For me, remote means a competitive advantage and a chance to grab international talent otherwise unavailable to me. This gives me leverage.

Of course, there are pros and cons to working remotely and there are always people willing to work on both ends – some love working remotely, others hate it. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.

Copying Google’s office strategy won’t magically fix your onboarding issues. Copying Basecamp’s guide to internal communications won’t suddenly make your engineers more autonomous.

The point isn’t to be remote or not. The point is to make work work for you.

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