Treat Your Employees Like Adults

They’ll do their best work when you do

Over the last few years, the RTO (Return to Office) movement has picked up steam. I foresee that 2025 will lean into this even more. If you have been reading this newsletter for a while, you know that I am a proponent of remote work. I even made a remotely produced documentary series about remote work, The Gray Area of Remote Work. Sure, remote work is not perfect and it is not for everyone, but this RTO movement is not based on the idea that we have COVID perfectly under control. It is based on the simple fact that most employers do not trust their employees.

Well, not all employers feel this way. There is one large company that keeps fighting back—Spotify. Sure, Spotify does not fight for their artists, but at least they are fighting for their employees. They have been leaning into a bold statement:

"Our employees are not children." Spotify will continue to work remotely

While I have not been able to confirm its original source, it is popping up all over the web. Raconteur, has a great interview with Spotify's CHRO (Chief Human Resource Officer), Katarina Berg.

Most companies will state that their reasons for RTO are actually because people work better together in person and that they have offices that need to be used. While there is some truth to these statements and some people want this, forcing it is not okay.

I have been working remotely to some capacity for most of my career. After pivoting from retail to my first SaaS company, working from home has always been allowed. When working as Head of Product, I worked 2-3 days of my week remotely. As a leader, I have never had an issue leading remotely. But this is because I have never been a micromanager. The RTO trend was not the first shift like it in modern working. Do you remember the shift to open office plans?

In the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, the goal was to get a promotion in your relative field and get that corner office with a view. But before you climbed the ladder, you still had privacy. You had a partially enclosed, padded, gray box to call an office—your cubicle. While the sea of cubicles in most offices was dark and a bit drab, it did foster the feeling of autonomy. When you clocked into work, you had a place that was yours. It was always your desk and your peripherals. But then a new trend came in from Silicon Valley: the open office.

The open office was bright and airy. It was brought to life with the promise of collaboration and teamwork. Sounds similar to the RTO movement, right? While the move to open offices seemed like a way to feng shui your office space, it was really a way for employers to see what you were working on. With the rise of email, chat tools, and text messaging—employers thought you were dicking around. They didn't trust their employees. They treated their staff like children.

If you were there for the open office change, you might remember the sudden influx of noise, audible and visual. Over a period of months, there was an influx in noise-canceling headphones being purchased and meeting pods being added to the corners of these large spaces.

The same thing will happen when teams RTO. They will return to their open offices. People will put on their headphones to block out the noise. Some will put on their blue light filtering glasses to filter the light from the sea of monitors and fluorescents. Then they will dive right back into the company's messaging tool to send the person next to them a message.

Sure, we collaborate better in person, undeniably. Being able to go back and forth, without the lag of an internet connection, cannot be matched. But how much time of your day is being spent actively collaborating? Unless you are a C-suite executive, jumping from quarterly planning session to whiteboarding workshop, how is silence and autonomy not better?

In most cases, we make privately first, before we make our work public. So why not do that in the environment that is best for each individual, not for the collective few? How do we foster teams and companies that support individuals?

Trust People

Trust your employees to do the work. As a leader, you are not there to herd sheep, you are there to inspire, educate, and empower people. Let your team manage their time. Yes, give them goals and deadlines, but let them break up the work as they see fit. Don't use synchronous ceremonies and rituals as the only way to get status updates. Meetings are for collaboration, not one-way communication. Depend on task and project management systems for status updates.

Provide Options

Not all companies and teams will have the same options, but provide the options you can. If you are a large organization, provide continuous office space, be it a true office or set co-working hubs. Default to remote-first, so no one feels like the black sheep. Being the only one remote, while everyone is on premise, is a terrible feeling. Default to everyone calling in from their computer, even if some are together.

No One Works All Day

Untrustworthy employers think that an employee should work 8-9 hours a day. That there should be some deep work, paired with a lot of busy work. Do you have down time? Do x, y, and z to fill the time. Or here is another project to fill your plate. No one should be working, actively, their whole work day.

You should leave about 40% of your time open. This doesn't mean 40% of your time is busy work, like checking emails and Slack. This time is used for nothing work-focused. This is the time where real work happens. This blank space is when you are messaging your partner about what you are doing later, when you are walking between meetings, when you are staring at your office wall art. This is the time when ideas will flow in and you remember to add that final touch to something from last week's work. This time needs to not only be allowed, it needs to be encouraged.

Work is not a place you come to, it's something you do.

– Katarina Berg

Whether you are a leader or an individual contributor, remember that work is something you do, not someplace you go. The RTO movement is not going anywhere. There are plenty of companies sitting on real estate that they plan on filling and they will try. As leaders and contributors, foster trust with your team. Show them that the work can be done anywhere. No one has to remove your walls and look over your shoulder to prove it. Prove to them that our best work can be done from home, from an office, or from the beach—if that's your thing. Prove to them that we deserve to be treated like adults.