Research shows that the costs of remote work outweigh the benefits, but companies will have a hard time convincing workers.
“The case for in-office work has never been stronger,” write Wharton professor Peter Cappelli and HR strategist Ranya Nehmeh in their new book—titled, for good measure, In Praise of the Office: The Limits to Hybrid and Remote Work (Wharton School Press, 2025).
The argument gets more nuanced along the way, but Cappelli—a longtime skeptic on the subject [“Expert Opinion,” Nov|Dec 2021]—and his coauthor contend that early claims that the great experiment spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic had proven that companies can do just fine with a workforce operating partly or completely away from the office, while affording employees greater freedom and flexibility, simply haven’t stood up to scrutiny. Drawing on a variety of research studies on job performance as well as interviews and focus groups involving 720 employees conducted by Cappelli, the George W. Taylor Professor of Management, and Jasmine Wu of the University of Texas, they offer numerous examples from a wide range of fields and office sizes documenting significant losses stemming from the lack of in-person contact in areas ranging from brainstorming sessions to routine inter-office functions. “We assumed the office work got done the way it did because of the nature of the tasks being performed,” Cappelli and Nehmeh write. “We did not appreciate the role that physical proximity played because we had never seen office work without it.”
It turns out that much of companies’ ability to continue to operate effectively during the pandemic depended on essentially cannibalizing relationships that predated the shift to remote work. With the passage of time, and more and more employees knowing only remote or hybrid work, those relationships have dissipated, and the result has been losses in performance for organizations and diminished career prospects for employees, and especially for new hires.
Increasingly, companies are looking to bring people back to the office. But along with employees’ reluctance, one big constraint in many cases is that firms have reduced their office space. The pandemic accelerated this phenomenon, but companies had previously been experimenting with various office-sharing and “hoteling” schemes, and moving toward open offices, in search of real estate savings. “The lack of interest employees have in returning to the office is at least in part because the goal of using office space to increase productivity has given way to the goal of providing space as cheaply as possible,” they write.
They also fault firms for lax enforcement, which has led to practices like “coffee badging,” in which an employee comes into the office but stays only briefly. As a result, offices may be largely empty even on “in-person” days—and people end up sitting in their cubicles rather than at home for their Zoom meetings, defeating the purpose.
And most employers so far have done a “lousy job” of explaining why a return to the office is necessary, falling back on “general, culture-sounding appeals like ‘We all work better together,’” the authors write. But employees generally think things have been fine the past four years, and legitimately ask, if being in the office is so important, why wait all this time to say so? “Not to be too blunt about it, but the problem of getting employees back in the office is a management failure, one we could have well predicted.”
At this point, companies should admit that they were too slow to bring employees back—and make a clear case for why presence in the office matters. “What employees need in order to accept the change is evidence that there is an organizational need to come back and that it is not just because the leaders don’t trust other employees to work from home—which we hope is not the real reason for returning,” they write.
Cappelli and Nehmeh have developed a framework for accomplishing a successful return that they call BOND, which stands for: Build the case, Own the expectations, Normalize engagement, and Demonstrate inclusion.
Companies need to show how being in the office strengthens employees’ own career opportunities and fosters stronger overall performance; they should also address employee hesitations head-on. Next, they must set clear guidelines for activities like team meetings, brainstorming sessions, and mentoring that benefit most from in-office participation—and leadership has to model these behaviors through their own presence and participation. Office attendance must become a “new cultural norm,” with social interactions and cross-functional collaborations built into the workflow. Finally, rather than “a rigid one-size-fits-all policy,” they write, “employees should feel valued and heard, with flexibility in how they engage.” To make “participation more organic and meaningful,” they recommend things like mentorship programs, knowledge-sharing lunches, and team-led social events.
“We have all loved the flexibility of remote work, but we have also missed the human connections. There is no going back,” Cappelli and Nehmeh conclude. “The real opportunity now is in reimagining what the future office should look like—and moving forward with purpose. Together, leaders and employees can help shape a future workplace with clear purpose and shared norms that is something better than what we had before.” —JP
