RTO Is a Measurement Failure (Not a Collaboration Strategy)

Return to Office, and the Story We Tell About It

Over the past few years, many companies have begun implementing return-to-office policies, often framed around a familiar set of justifications. The most common one is collaboration. The idea is simple and intuitive: if people are physically together more often, collaboration will naturally improve.

In practice, that logic doesn’t always hold. Many organizations now employ people who live both within and far outside a reasonable commuting distance to an office. Teams are already distributed by default. Meetings still happen over Zoom, Slack, or Teams. Decisions are still documented asynchronously. Being in the same building doesn’t necessarily mean being in the same conversation.

Other reasons are often cited as well. Some leaders point to the value of more face-to-face time with clients, which may make sense for certain client-facing roles. But a large portion of modern tech work is not client-facing at all, and many clients are no longer showing up to offices with any regularity. In those cases, the connection between office presence and business outcomes becomes less clear.

Sometimes the justification is even simpler: a competitor has already done it. An RTO policy becomes a defensive move, a way to signal seriousness or discipline, rather than the result of internal analysis.

What’s noticeably absent in most of these announcements is hard data. Very few companies publicly explain what problem they are trying to solve, how they measured it, or why physical presence is the most effective lever. There may be organizations that have done this work, but they are rarely the ones setting the tone of the broader conversation.

At the same time, the cost of these decisions is felt immediately by employees. Some people were hired explicitly into remote roles and structured their lives around that assumption. Others no longer have reliable transportation or live far from offices that were downsized or relocated. Commutes incur real financial costs, including fuel, vehicle wear, childcare, and pet care. They also introduce a less visible cost: the loss of time and mental energy that could otherwise be devoted to rest, focus, or family.

These impacts don’t show up on dashboards. But they show up in stress, distraction, and quiet disengagement.

Taken together, this creates a gap between the stated goals of return-to-office policies and the lived reality of how work is actually getting done. That gap is where most of the confusion, anxiety, and resentment around RTO begins.

The Official Story vs. the Real Incentives

Most return-to-office policies are presented as neutral or even positive changes. Collaboration will improve. Culture will strengthen. Alignment will happen more naturally. These are not unreasonable goals, and in isolation, none of them are inherently wrong.

But they avoid a more uncomfortable conversation about incentives and tradeoffs.

For the company, an RTO mandate is relatively cheap to implement. It does not require rethinking how work is scoped, how outcomes are measured, or how accountability flows through the organization. It does not require better documentation, clearer ownership, or improved cross-team coordination. It is a policy change, not a systems change.

For employees, the costs are immediate and measurable.

Returning to an office often means getting paid less to do the same work.

Childcare costs increase. Pet care becomes necessary. Transportation costs are reflected in fuel, parking, vehicle wear, and public transit fees. Time once spent resting, exercising, or with family is converted into commuting time. None of these costs are typically offset by increased compensation.

In practice, many employees view RTO as a pay cut.

This is especially true for people who were hired into explicitly remote roles and made life decisions based on that arrangement. Selling a car, moving farther from an office, or choosing a specific childcare setup were rational choices under the original terms of employment. When those terms change without a corresponding adjustment in pay or support, the economic impact is real, even if it is not formally acknowledged.

What makes this dynamic harder to discuss is that these costs do not appear on company balance sheets. They are externalized. From an organizational perspective, nothing looks more expensive. From an employee’s perspective, everything does.

This is where incentives quietly diverge. A policy that seems administratively simple to leadership can feel destabilizing to the people doing the work. And because the costs are borne individually rather than collectively, they are often dismissed as personal inconvenience rather than recognized as a structural change to compensation and working conditions.

Seen through this lens, RTO is not just about collaboration or culture. It is also about shifting where the friction lives. Instead of investing in clearer outcomes and better systems, organizations absorb less of the cost, and employees absorb more.

That imbalance sets the stage for the confusion and resentment that often follows.

Why Presence Feels Safer Than Outcomes

When leaders talk about collaboration, culture, or alignment, they are often pointing to real discomfort.

The kind of work most tech teams do is difficult to measure in real time. Progress is uneven. Impact is delayed. Cause and effect are rarely obvious in the moment.

Outcomes, especially in software and tech-adjacent work, tend to show up late. A decision made today may not reveal its consequences for months. A team can look busy while building the wrong thing, or appear slow while quietly eliminating risk. This makes outcome-based management cognitively demanding and politically risky.

Presence, by contrast, is immediate and legible.

People are either there or they are not. Offices are full or empty. Badges swipe. Desks are occupied. These signals are easy to observe, easy to report, and easy to defend upward. They create a sense of control, even when it is largely symbolic.

This is not a moral failing. It is a predictable response to uncertainty.

When leaders lack confidence in their ability to define, track, and explain outcomes, they reach for proxies. Presence becomes one of those proxies. Not because it reliably produces better results, but because it reduces ambiguity. It answers the question “are people working?” without forcing a harder question: “are we measuring the right things?”

The problem is that presence and productivity are not the same signal. They were never meant to be.

In distributed teams, collaboration already happens through shared documents, written decisions, and asynchronous communication. The effectiveness of that collaboration depends on clarity, ownership, and trust, not physical proximity. Without those systems in place, putting people in the same room does not fix the underlying issue. It simply makes the work more visible.

This is why return-to-office policies often appear alongside other forms of visibility theater. More meetings. More status updates. More metrics that track activity rather than progress. These tools create the illusion of motion while leaving the more intensive work untouched.

At a system level, RTO is appealing because it shifts the burden. Instead of investing in better definitions of “done,” clearer accountability, or more durable feedback loops, organizations rely on presence to signal seriousness. The cost of that choice, as we’ve seen, is largely absorbed by employees.

Seen this way, RTO is not primarily about collaboration. It is about managing uncertainty in environments where outcomes are difficult to articulate and even harder to defend.

Until that underlying measurement problem is addressed, the cycle repeats.

What the Data Actually Shows

Employee Cost Realities

Multiple surveys make clear that the financial and time costs associated with commuting and office presence are very real for many workers.

• A recent analysis reported that hybrid workers can save roughly $51 per day simply by avoiding in-office commuting costs, which adds up quickly when multiplied over weeks or months. Avoiding the commute also saves money on fuel, parking, vehicle wear and tear, meals, and other incidental expenses associated with being in the office.

• Separate research shows that remote employees save significant amounts of time, on average, about 72 minutes per day that would otherwise have been spent commuting. Time savings of that magnitude translate directly into either more productive hours or more personal time, both of which contribute to work-life balance and overall well-being.

• In a broader survey of hybrid or remote workers, 48 % said they would accept an 8 % pay cut to keep working remotely, highlighting how many employees value the flexibility and reduced costs even at a direct compensation trade-off. Additionally, a large share of employees say they would consider seeking a new job if forced to work full-time in the office.

• Another survey tied commuting expense concerns to lower office attendance and reduced perceptions of well-being, with higher commuting costs correlated with poorer sleep quality and negative feelings about RTO policies.

Taken together, this data supports the idea that returning to an office often leads to increased financial and time burdens for employees. Burdens that are not offset by higher pay or compensation adjustments.

Productivity and Collaboration Evidence

When companies talk about RTO improving collaboration and productivity, the empirical picture is more mixed.

• Broad industry data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that increases in remote work were positively associated with total factor productivity growth across a wide range of industries, even after adjusting for pre-pandemic trends. This suggests that remote work has not systematically undermined productivity at the macro level.

• Independent surveys continue to show that many employees feel at least as productive, if not more so, when working remotely or in a hybrid environment. In one recent report, 61% of workers said they’re more productive at home, while another 34% said they’re as productive as in the office. Only a small minority felt less productive.

• Large-scale studies of remote and hybrid workplaces have found that productivity holds steady or improves across diverse company cultures — in one two-year study of more than 800,000 employees, productivity was stable or up after a shift to remote work.

At the same time, evidence does not point to a simple universal law that remote work always increases output. Some academic work suggests that hybrid arrangements often produce productivity comparable to office work, rather than dramatically higher or lower results.  The key takeaway is that remote work in itself does not appear to consistently degrade productivity, and in many environments, it supports it as well as the traditional office does.

There is also a human factor: employees working remotely or in hybrid roles often report greater flexibility and a better quality of life, which can indirectly support engagement and retention, factors that matter for long-term collaboration, even if they don’t show up as immediate output metrics.

Taken together, the data suggest:

• RTO is not a guaranteed productivity booster
• Remote and hybrid setups can maintain or improve productivity
• Collaboration quality depends on systems and norms, not proximity alone

What to Do With This Reality

Once return-to-office policies are understood as responses to uncertainty rather than as a proven productivity strategy, the question becomes less ideological and more practical. What should people actually do with this information?

The answer depends on where you sit in the system.

For Employees

If you’re an individual contributor or a non-managerial employee, the most important thing to internalize is this: RTO is rarely a direct signal about your individual performance. It is a signal about how the organization is managing ambiguity.

That distinction matters because it changes what’s worth worrying about.

Instead of trying to infer intent from policy changes, focus on the things that remain durable regardless of work location:

Make your impact legible.
When outcomes are slow to show themselves, clarity matters. Document decisions. Write down what changed because of your work. Make it easy for someone outside your immediate context to understand why your contributions mattered.

Anchor on results, not visibility.
Presence is a weak proxy. Results travel further. If you can clearly articulate what you shipped, what risk you reduced, or what problem you unblocked, location becomes less central to the conversation.

Separate anxiety from signal.
RTO announcements tend to trigger worst-case thinking, especially for remote employees. In many cases, the policy reflects leadership uncertainty rather than a prelude to layoffs. Panic often leads people to make rushed career decisions based on incomplete information.

Decide deliberately, not reactively.
For some people, the additional costs of returning to an office are manageable. For others, they are not. Treat this as a decision about tradeoffs, not loyalty. Understanding the economics of your situation gives you leverage, even if you choose to stay.

The goal here is not to comply quietly or rebel loudly. It’s to stay grounded, informed, and intentional.

For Companies and Leaders

For leaders, the uncomfortable truth is that RTO is often doing work that measurement systems should have been doing all along.

If collaboration, alignment, or productivity feels fragile, proximity alone is rarely the solution. It’s clarity.

That starts with asking harder questions before reaching for visible fixes:

What problem are we actually trying to solve?
Is it slow decision-making? Missed handoffs? Conflicting priorities? If the problem isn’t clearly named, office presence won’t resolve it.

How would we know if collaboration improved?
Without a definition of success, policies become symbolic. If improvement can’t be observed or measured, it’s worth questioning whether the intervention matches the problem.

What costs are we shifting, and to whom?
RTO externalizes financial and cognitive costs to employees. Ignoring those costs doesn’t make them disappear; it just moves them out of sight. That has downstream effects on engagement, trust, and retention.

Where could systems replace supervision?
Better documentation, clearer ownership, fewer meetings with clearer purpose, and stronger feedback loops do more for collaboration than shared office space alone.

The organizations that navigate this well tend to treat presence as optional and outcomes as mandatory. They invest in making work understandable, not just observable.

Closing the Loop

Return-to-office policies persist not because they are clearly effective, but because they feel decisive in environments where progress is hard to see.

Understanding that doesn’t solve the problem outright. But it does remove a layer of confusion.

For employees, it replaces fear with clearer decision-making.
For leaders, it replaces symbolic control with the opportunity to build better systems.

Until outcomes become easier to define and defend, presence will continue to be mistaken for progress. Recognizing that distinction is the first step toward changing it.

The sources below include government labor data, large-scale surveys, and independent research on productivity, commuting costs, and employee sentiment. Findings vary by role and organization, but consistently show real employee costs associated with return-to-office mandates and no clear universal productivity advantage tied to office presence alone.

Sources – Return to Office, Employee Cost, and Productivity

Employee Cost, Commuting, and Financial Impact

OfficeRnD – Hybrid Work Statistics
https://www.officernd.com/blog/hybrid-work-statistics/
(Estimates daily commuting cost savings for hybrid and remote workers)

The Interview Guys – State of Remote Work
https://blog.theinterviewguys.com/state-of-remote-work-2025/
(Average daily commute time saved by remote workers)

Archie – Return to Office Statistics
https://archieapp.co/blog/return-to-office-statistics/
(Employee willingness to accept pay cuts to remain remote, intent to leave if forced back)

HealthEquity – Path Forward: How Commuting Impacts Return to Office Experience
https://ir.healthequity.com/news-releases/news-release-details/path-forward-how-commuting-impacts-return-office-experience
(Commuting cost concerns, impact on sleep, stress, and employee sentiment)

U.S. Census Bureau – American Community Survey (Commuting Data)
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs
(Baseline data on commute times, transportation modes, and geographic spread of workers)

Productivity, Output, and Remote / Hybrid Work

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics – Remote Work and Productivity
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-13/remote-work-productivity.htm
(Macro-level productivity trends during increased remote work)

Archie – Remote Work Statistics
https://archieapp.co/blog/remote-work-statistics/
(Self-reported productivity comparisons: remote vs office)

Great Place to Work – Two-Year Study on Remote Productivity
https://www.greatplacetowork.com/resources/blog/remote-work-productivity-study-finds-surprising-reality-2-year-study
(Large-scale productivity stability across remote and hybrid environments)

WFH Research (Barrero, Bloom, Davis) – Working from Home Studies
https://wfhresearch.com/
https://wfhresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/BTOS-WFH-Barrero-et-al-2025.0605.pdf
(Academic research on hybrid productivity, firm outcomes, and labor market effects)

The Guardian – Hybrid Working and Employee Outcomes
https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jun/16/hybrid-working-makes-employees-happier-healthier-and-more-productive-study-shows
(Summary of research linking hybrid work to well-being and productivity)

Employee Engagement, Retention, and Preferences

Gallup – State of the Global Workplace / Hybrid Work Reports
https://www.gallup.com/workplace
(Engagement, burnout, and flexibility preferences)

Pew Research Center – Work From Home and Hybrid Trends
https://www.pewresearch.org/topic/economy-work/work-at-workplace/
(Employee attitudes toward remote and hybrid work)

• FlexJobs – Remote Work & Flexibility Surveys
  https://www.flexjobs.com/research
  (Employee preference data, turnover risk tied to RTO)