A steady drumbeat of headlines has emerged: CEOs across industries are calling employees back to the office, some several days a week, others full-time. Their rationale is familiar—restoring productivity, fostering collaboration, strengthening culture, optimizing real estate, and regaining managerial oversight.
These are sound business imperatives. When thoughtfully implemented, return-to-office policies can deliver clear benefits. But what’s concerning is the broader signal being sent: that the remote work experiment has failed, and that we are reverting to the status quo without asking whether work itself should be fundamentally reimagined.
Why the First Experiment Fell Short
The abrupt shift to remote work in March 2020 was a crisis response, not a strategic redesign. The goal was business continuity—not innovation. Under those conditions, it’s not surprising that company culture eroded, onboarding suffered, and large-scale initiatives lost momentum. New employees struggled to integrate. Informal mentoring faded. Recognition became elusive. Remote work, as implemented, had real limitations.
Yet despite these outcomes, there was no concerted effort to architect remote work differently. No serious investment in next-generation digital infrastructure. No large-scale push to develop new leadership models for distributed teams. No rethinking of how to recreate spontaneity, mentorship, and shared learning in a digital-first workplace. The failure, in short, was not in remote work itself—but in the lack of strategic intent behind it.
This shift back to the office accelerated when JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon publicly championed the return to in-person work in 2021. His position, grounded in the belief that culture, apprenticeship, and innovation depend on physical proximity, made headlines. It was soon echoed by other Wall Street leaders and, eventually, executives across sectors. As their own office spaces remained underutilized and collaboration felt strained, many found it easy to embrace Dimon’s stance.
Over time, this thinking hardened into policy. Senior executives returned. Yet many employees—especially younger workers, working parents, those with caregiving responsibilities, and individuals hired into roles originally labeled as remote—resisted. Patience among leadership began to wear thin. And with a softening labor market, organizations now feel emboldened to enforce stricter attendance requirements.
But stepping back, we must ask: was the remote work model inherently flawed, or did we simply abandon it before trying to make it work?
What limited innovation did emerge came from the tech sector. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Slack, and Meta expanded tools for digital collaboration, onboarding, and performance management. But these were largely extensions of pre-pandemic practices—not breakthroughs in how we think about work at scale.
A Second Inflection Point – Powered by AI
Now, just as the return-to-office movement gains momentum, we find ourselves on the cusp of another transformation—this time driven by AI. The implications are far-reaching. Generative AI is reshaping how we analyze, create, and make decisions. Its potential is not just efficiency, but a new model of productivity and value creation.
The question is whether we will make the same mistake again.
Will leaders approach AI as a blunt instrument for cost-cutting—reducing headcount and telling those who remain to simply “do more with less”? Or will we treat this inflection point as a chance to rethink how people work, grow, collaborate, and find purpose?
The way many organizations handled remote work suggests we risk missing the moment again. A reactive posture won’t suffice. We need leadership that treats the future of work not as a return to what was, but as a chance to design what could be.
This requires more than policies. It demands imagination, investment, and a willingness to challenge legacy assumptions about presence, productivity, and value. We need new management frameworks, new metrics, and new commitments to workforce development that align with both technological advancement and human fulfillment.
The AI revolution will test our leadership maturity. If we revert to traditional models out of habit or fear, we may achieve short-term gains but miss the long arc of transformation. This is a moment to lead boldly—with foresight, not just force.
Let’s not repeat the improvisation of 2020. Let’s take the opportunity before us to shape a future of work that is not only smarter—but better.