Return To Office is all about power

Enlightened employers will work on culture instead

Ben Werdmuller
5 min readOct 31, 2023

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Expensify’s experiment to use craft coffees and a free cocktail bar to lure employees back to the office failed spectacularly:

If the best office in the entire planet can’t compete with the local coffee shop, the tightly-closed Pandora’s box of “work from anywhere” has burst open, and will never be resealed. No amount of begging or coercion is going to work in the long run: the businesses that demand it are fighting a losing war of attrition against an infinite universal energy. You heard it here folks: the office is dead.

This isn’t where every company has ended up on this issue. Most large tech companies in particular are demanding a return to the office, for a few reasons.

The first, although not the main reason, is that a lot of very large companies have real estate portfolios that are now sitting mostly-empty, which will drive down prices when leases come up for renewal, in turn jeopardizing the value of commercial real estate holdings. (Boo hoo.)

The second is a belief — more religious than fact-based — that workers are more productive in the office than if they work from home. (Research tends to show the opposite.)

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Ben Werdmuller
Ben Werdmuller

Written by Ben Werdmuller

Writer: of code, fiction, and strategy. Trying to work for social good.

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