A founder I know won his return-to-office fight in March. Three days a week, badge data to prove it, and a catered lunch on Wednesdays. By June, the badge numbers were exactly where he wanted them. So was everything else: the same Slack threads, the same cameras-off standups, and the same people eating the catered lunch at their desks with headphones on. He had gotten the bodies back into the building, but the “people” had not come with them.
He is not alone, and he is not wrong to want what he wants. Something did go missing in the remote years, and “rebuild the culture” is a reasonable thing to put on a board slide. The mistake is in the next line, where the plan to rebuild culture turns out to be a plan to rebuild attendance. That treats connection as a logistics problem, a matter of getting people into the same room. It was always a design problem: making the room worth being in.
The evidence that proximity and connection are different things is older than the pandemic. In 2018, Harvard researchers Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban put wearable sensors on employees at two Fortune 500 headquarters before and after each company tore down its cubicles for an open plan, the architecture of “collaboration.” Face-to-face interaction fell by about 70 percent in both companies. Email and messaging rose to fill the gap. People put in closer physical proximity, with fewer walls between them, talked to each other less. The building did exactly what it was designed to do, and the humans responded by withdrawing.
The mandated version of the same experiment has now been run at scale. Mark Ma and Yuye Ding at the University of Pittsburgh studied S&P 500 firms that imposed return-to-office requirements and found no significant change in profitability or market value afterward. What did change was the employees: Glassdoor ratings for job satisfaction, work-life balance, and senior leadership all dropped after the mandates. The researchers’ conclusion is blunt. Executives were using the office to reassert control, and the people being controlled could tell.
This Morning
The daily digest for entrepreneurs and business leaders
None of this means the office is worthless. It means the office is a container, and a container has never produced connection on its own. If it did, the open plan would have worked. What produces connection is what happens inside the container, and that is the part most founders never design because they assume the building will do it for them.
What a designed room looks like
The people who understand this best are not running companies. They run dinners. Jon Levy has hosted more than a decade of what he calls “influencers dinners,” where a dozen strangers, many of them accomplished enough to be recognized, arrive at his apartment and cook the meal together. Two rules shape the evening. Guests do not say their last names, and they do not talk about what they do for a living until after they have eaten. The design strips away the one thing the office relies on most, the title, and replaces it with shared effort over a hot stove. Strangers who would have spent a cocktail hour comparing credentials spend it chopping onions. By dessert, they know each other. Chris Schembra has served pasta to thousands of guests through his 7:47 dinners, and the design turns on one question asked at the table: If you could give credit or thanks to one person in your life that you don’t give enough credit or thanks to, who would that be? The food matters. The question does more. It gives a room full of professionals a reason to say something true.
I host a smaller version of this, a dozen people around a long table with one question. The question changes with the city. What never changes is the lesson: the table does nothing by itself. The room is a set of conditions. The conditions are what people remember.