4. Return to Office: Real Issue or Handy Distraction?

At Work with The Ready

You can’t throw a stone on LinkedIn without hitting at least one post about return-to-office policies. From CEOs to employees, from thought leaders to maybe even your mayor, everyone is taking a side, doubling down, and yelling into the void as loud as they can. Where people work is being treated as the most important issue—the existential sea change that will either make or break a company.

In reality, the RTO debate is the superficial fight we have instead of addressing the deeper, tougher, and way more complex issues that really matter (think questions around purpose, trust, "productivity", and communication). And here’s a fun fact: You can’t work well anywhere (in person or remotely) if confusion and misalignment is swirling around your company.

In this week’s episode of At Work With The Ready, Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin unpack why we’re still debating where people work, what that obsession costs our organizations, and how to start breaking free of the cycle.

Mentioned references:

• BNW’s first RTO/hybrid work episode: Ep. 79
• Erin Grau’s Fortune article “Flexible work is feminist”
• "Theory Y"
• Brian Elliott's previous appearances on our show: BNW Ep. 129, BNW Ep. 162, and FoHR Miniseries Ep. 9
• "Return-to-Office Mandates" from Mark Ma and Yuye Ding of the University of Pittsburgh's Katz Graduate School of Business
• "Lessons Learned: 1,000 Days of Distributed at Atlassian"
• "Basecamp": BNW Ep. 4 with Dan Kim
• Mural
• Miro
• Children of Time
• Previous episodes about retreats and in-person gatherings: BNW Ep. 64, BNW Ep. 82 with Lindsay Caplan, and BNW Ep. 94

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