The Return to Office Isn't the Point. The Work Is.
Canada is bringing workers back to the office, but the bigger question is whether companies have actually redesigned how work gets done.
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Alexander Pau
10/4/20266 min read
The Office Has Become the Wrong Argument
The return-to-office debate has been going on long enough that it is starting to feel like a question with only two answers.
Remote is good.
Office is good.
Pick a side.
That framing misses the more interesting question:
What work actually needs people to be together?
That is the question operators should be asking.
Because an office is not a strategy. It is an environment.
Putting people in the same building does not automatically make them collaborate better. It does not make ownership clearer. It does not eliminate unnecessary meetings. It does not fix a bad process.
And it certainly does not make a confusing organization suddenly efficient.
We have spent years arguing about where people work when many companies still have not figured out how the work should work.
Canada Is Putting Real Money Behind the Shift
This is no longer just a philosophical debate.
Canada's federal government has been moving toward greater onsite presence for public servants, and the physical implications are becoming significant.
In September, reporting revealed that federal organizations expected to spend more than $18 million on office renovations and related changes connected to the return to the workplace. The details are worth paying attention to because they show something larger happening: organizations are not simply asking employees to come back. They are redesigning physical environments around a different model of work.
That raises an obvious question.
If companies are investing millions in getting people back into buildings, what exactly are they expecting to get back?
More collaboration?
More learning?
More accountability?
More productivity?
Those are very different objectives.
And they require very different approaches.
Presence Can Create Value. Presence Alone Doesn't.
There are legitimate reasons to bring people together.
Some knowledge is difficult to document.
A junior employee can learn by listening to how an experienced colleague handles a difficult client conversation. A new team member can understand organizational norms by observing how decisions actually happen. A product manager, designer and engineer can resolve ambiguity faster when they can work through a problem together.
Those interactions matter.
Research from CIRANO examining Canadian work arrangements has also found that the relationship between working from home and productivity is more complicated than the simplistic "remote versus office" debate suggests.
The CIRANO research provides a useful look at productivity and work-from-home arrangements.
The important distinction is this:
Being physically present can enable better work. It does not guarantee better work.
That difference gets lost constantly.
You can have ten people sitting around a conference table for two hours and accomplish less than three people working asynchronously for thirty minutes.
You can also have three people sitting in different cities who solve a problem brilliantly because they have clear ownership, good documentation and the right tools.
Location matters.
But the operating model matters more.
The Meeting Is Not the Work
This is where companies often get themselves into trouble.
They bring people back to the office and suddenly discover that the office is full of meetings.
More calendar invites.
More status updates.
More "quick syncs."
More people walking over to someone's desk because they are finally close enough to do it.
But activity is not the same thing as output.
I wrote previously about why the meeting is not the work, and the return-to-office conversation makes that distinction even more important.
If your organization has unclear priorities, adding physical proximity can simply make the dysfunction more visible.
The answer is not necessarily fewer meetings.
It is better-designed work.
Who owns the decision?
What information does someone need?
Where does the work live?
What requires synchronous discussion?
What can happen asynchronously?
When does a problem actually need another person involved?
Those questions sound boring.
They are also where operational leverage comes from.
Start With the Work, Then Choose the Location
One of the biggest mistakes organizations can make is deciding where employees should work before understanding what the work requires.
Flip the sequence.
Start with the work.
Take a normal business process and map it from beginning to end.
Who starts it?
Where does information come from?
Where does it get handed off?
Where do decisions happen?
Where do delays happen?
Where does someone need judgment?
Where does collaboration actually add value?
My approach to process mapping and operational clarity starts with exactly this kind of thinking.
Once you understand the work, the location question becomes much easier.
Some activities might clearly benefit from being together.
Others might be better handled asynchronously.
Some may work perfectly well remotely.
Some might require occasional in-person sessions rather than five days a week.
The answer does not need to be ideological.
It can simply be operational.
What This Means for Career Pivoters
There is another side to this conversation that gets less attention.
If you are changing careers, moving into a new industry or stepping into a new role, being around experienced people can be extremely valuable.
Not because your manager needs to physically see you working.
Because proximity can create more opportunities to learn.
You overhear how someone frames a problem.
You get pulled into a conversation.
You ask a question that would have felt awkward over Slack.
Someone explains the unwritten rule nobody put in the documentation.
Those moments can accelerate a career pivot.
But there is a catch.
You have to use the proximity intentionally.
Showing up is not the same as learning.
If you spend eight hours in an office wearing headphones and attending video calls with people who are sitting fifteen feet away, you have technically complied with an office policy while gaining very little of the potential benefit.
For career pivoters, the better strategy is to treat in-person time as an opportunity to build context.
Ask better questions.
Observe how decisions happen.
Build relationships.
Find the people who know how the organization actually works.
Then turn what you learn into something reusable.
That is where good systems matter.
The Tool Isn't the Solution Either
There is a similar trap with technology.
Companies sometimes assume that a better collaboration platform will solve communication problems.
Then they install another platform.
Another dashboard.
Another project-management system.
Another chat channel.
And suddenly nobody knows where anything lives.
I wrote about this in Stop Failing at Tools: How to Actually Get Your Team to Adopt New Systems.
The lesson applies to office design too.
Tools should support the operating model. They should not become the operating model.
The same goes for the office.
An office should support the work.
Not define it.
The Next Workplace Debate Should Be More Specific
I do not think the interesting question is whether companies should be remote, hybrid or in-office.
Those labels are becoming less useful.
The better question is:
What kind of work are we trying to make easier?
If the answer is mentoring, design an environment that makes mentoring easier.
If it is collaboration, create spaces and routines that support collaboration.
If it is focused individual work, give people the conditions to actually focus.
If it is relationship building, create reasons for people to interact meaningfully.
If it is accountability, fix ownership and measurement.
And if the real problem is a broken process, fix the process.
Don't make everyone commute to it.
The workplace of the future probably will not be defined by one universal rule.
It will be defined by how deliberately organizations design work.
The companies that figure this out will stop asking employees to prove they are working by sitting in a particular place.
They will start designing environments where the right work happens in the right way.
That's a much harder problem.
But it is also the one worth solving.
📚Further Reading
Government of Canada: On-site presence in the public service
Background on Canada's federal public-service approach to onsite work.Statistics Canada: Working from home in Canada
Canadian data and context on remote and hybrid work.NBER: The Impact of Working From Home on Productivity
Research examining productivity effects associated with working from home.Springer: Research on remote work intensity and outcomes
Research examining relationships between remote-work intensity and workplace outcomes.CBRE: 2026 Americas Office Occupier Sentiment Survey
A look at how organizations are approaching office use and workplace strategy.IZA: Post-COVID Telework and Productivity
Research examining telework and productivity at scale.
TL;DR
The return-to-office debate is focused on location when the bigger issue is how work actually gets done.
Being together can help with mentoring, collaboration, relationships and learning, but simply sitting in the same building does not fix broken workflows.
Canadian organizations are spending millions adapting offices for more in-person work, showing that the shift is becoming operational, not theoretical.
Remote and hybrid work can be productive, but only when teams have clear expectations, good systems and intentional communication.
The real advantage belongs to companies that design work around the work itself, rather than treating office attendance as the solution.