Why companies ditch hybrid work? Are there any data-based reasons to back up this decision? Are CEO’s too emotional and employees simply cheating when working from home?
In today’s episode, we tackle one of the most controversial workplace topics: the return-to-office (RTO) mandate.
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✅ Which CEOs are championing the push?
✅ Is there any data or research to back it up?
✅ And what’s really happening on home office days: are people more productive, or are they just sleeping?
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- Michael Sliwinski (@msliwinski)
- Magda Błaszczyk (nozbe.com/pl)
🔗 Show notes
- Gallup. (2017). State of the American Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for U.S. Business Leaders
- Harvard Business Review (2021) The Benefits of In-Person Collaboration
- Frances Frei on RTO Decisions
- An Update On Return To Office Policies As We Enter 2025
- How to reduce the number of meetings and how to them right
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Read this episode’s transcript if you prefer
Return to office. Is remote work done? Is hybrid work no more? Why are companies and CEOs insisting on us going back to the office for five days a week? What’s going on? Is there a chance that they are right or wrong? What are the consequences and what are the trends? Everything today in our new episode of No Office Podcast. Hello, Magda. Hello, everyone. Hi, Michael. So before we start, I want to clarify that if you’re seeing the episode number 70 of the No -Office Podcast and The previous one was 58. You haven’t missed 12 episodes of the podcast, but because we are recording two podcasts in English and in Polish, on the same day in the morning Polish time, European time, the Polish podcast, and in the afternoon Central European time or 10 a .m. Eastern time, the English podcast, we decided to harmonize the numbers. So because the Polish podcast had more episodes, and it is episode 70 for the Polish podcast, we decided to change the number. For this podcast, it’s also number 70. Just because we love optimizing things. Yes, and we don’t want to just mess it up or just be confused ourselves, which episode it is. And because we are right now going forward, we’re going to be tackling the same issues on both podcasts. So basically recording the same thing twice just in different languages or with different guests. But again, the same topics. That’s why it’s just better for us to have the same number.
- That’s right. So today we are going to talk about hybrid work. Usually we love talking about remote, fully remote because that’s how we work, no office at all. But now as the RTO mandate is very popular and everyone is talking about it, we wanted to also tackle this topic. So hybrid work. So now people who are working three days from the office and two days from home or four days from the office and one day from home, they will have to go back to office full -time even though in so many organizations, almost 43 % of organizations adapted in some way this hybrid work. And in 2023, it was just 20%. So people love it. This trend was really flourishing. And people really liked it because it was nice and it was flexible and great. But now some people decided that it’s wrong. It’s bad. And they want to force people to go back full time to the office. No flexibility, no possibility to work from home. Who are they?
Yeah, so exactly. So this is for me a big disappointment because I am a technology guy. I am a technology nerd. I started a technology company. Nozbe is a technology company. We are developing an app, which the first version, 18 years ago, I wrote. So, you know, I am a technology geek. And then I see all these smart engineers and technologists like CEO of Google, Sundar Pachai, or CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, or CEOs of, you know, banks, JP Morgan Chase or Goldman Sachs, which are, again, the smartest people, the smartest financial people, the smartest engineers, suddenly they are deciding on bringing people to the office without a smart justification. Yeah, and that’s not only the businessmen, not only the tigers of capitalism, but also, okay, he’s also the tiger of capitalism. Donald Trump, yeah, I think he’s also very into banning the remote work. In January, he signed some another document forcing all the people working in a public sector to ditch telework, to ditch remote work and go back to the places where they are supposed to sit and where their bosses are supposed to watch them. And the best part is that, as far as I remember about what I read about this mandate, this executive order, it is really stupid because many agencies and especially these agencies affected in Washington DC have worked like this forever. They at least or just stop leasing offices because they have structured their way so that people can work remotely and just commute every now and then to the Washington DC office. And because of that, many of them have moved outside. They have moved outside of Washington DC, which is a very busy area for that reason. And now it’s like, and also I love this part. And they send them an email like on a Thursday that they have to be back on in the office on Monday. Like they don’t even give them like a moment’s notice. They just tell them, you have to go back to the office, you know, tomorrow, basically. Well, that’s a very economically reasonable decision. Yeah, but we’ll We’ll argue here, spoiler alert, that this is not a reasonable decision. But let’s try to be, you know, considerate. Let’s try to understand why this decision, why RTO, why return to office. Well, we will be discussing it to try to justify and to find the way they were thinking. But honestly, we will just have a little spoiler here, there is no data, there’s no statistics, there are no numbers behind these decisions. If you look closely at who is advocating for these RTO mandates, there is a certain group of men, demographically very narrow, there are the guys around 50 who started to work and started to build their businesses when remote work wasn’t possible, so they just want it. When you ask them why they are doing that, they don’t have any numbers, nothing. This is out of just emotion. Yeah, nostalgia. They just want it. Yeah, so that’s the thing. What you’re saying, Magda, is that these otherwise smart people are not making a smart decision by any measure, any objective measure. Apparently, I really, I was looking for any data, but there’s no, they just want to see people working. For everyone listening to this show, really Magda is always preparing very thoroughly to each out really thoroughly, like I would say too thoroughly. And this time she was really searching for data to back it up. And she was so disappointed that she couldn’t find anything. But anyway, let’s try. Magda, let’s try to understand. Let’s go. Let’s try to understand this. Yeah, I’m going to play the devil’s advocate in this episode and try to look for some arguments that that could back up this this decision on the RTO. So what I think, maybe it was the way people working from home lose this, you know, this line between work and life. It’s really hard to separate. If you have a small apartment, if you are kind of over responsible and overachieving person, you will you will go like, okay, it’s 5pm, but I will send those two more emails. I will go prepare soup or something to eat, and then I won’t be closing the laptop. I will get back here and just continue this report just to have it done by today. And many people were like that, and that can be a source of being overwhelmed and the burnout and even depression. So maybe that was one of the arguments.
- Yeah, so we know that, you know, working from home requires some setup. You ideally, you should have a dedicated place to work. Of course, not everybody can have that. And also we have to have a special mindset for that. So that’s true. that some people just prefer to go to the office because they prefer that they have a set up there, they prefer the routine of the commute even, even though the commute usually is in a traffic jam, but still they want to have this clear boundary. They close the laptop in the office this way, the private works start. So spoiler alert in the next episode will be referencing Carl Newport and his ideas of how to hack remote work, how to make it better, how to also simulate all these things that we mentioned in a context of remote work. So stay tuned for the next episode in two weeks. But yeah, I understand this is true. But my experience has been listening to people who have had hybrid work enabled, is that they really loved it. They loved this idea that on certain dates, they would work from home. They would focus on what they had to do. And whenever they would go to the office, it would be just different. They would socialize more. They would go for coffees. They would recoup the social part of working together. And then they would enjoy again working from home to just work on this very important document or this presentation or whatever they were working on. So many people who I’ve talked to about this, they actually like it. And also they love, they used to love the flexibility of being able to choose which days they go to the office and which days they don’t. And that’s why this RTO mandate is so awful because there is no option, there is no agency, there is no flexibility. They’re just telling you, you have to be in the office on this day or else. On all the days, actually. On all the days, yeah. Okay, so this one we check off. Next argument that is especially important to me. This is this sense of loneliness and the feelings of isolation. When you are working from home, you don’t see people. Of course, this is the most real when you work fully remotely, but also if you know four days from home and one day from office or three days from home and two days from the office, then still you are spending most of your time all alone in front of the screen, at least maybe with your cat or dog somewhere around, but you’re alone. And then in the evening, when you want to meet with someone, usually people are really tired because they spend themselves eight hours or nine hours in the office full of people and full of noise. So it’s difficult to meet people after work and very often people now come to big cities just for work so they don’t have any close ones they don’t have families neighbors they don’t have friends from college or friends from primary school around because they moved for work so they are totally lonely and the only people they have there are they these are the people from from their office, from work.
- Again, that’s true, but there are ways to deal with that. There are ways how managers could deal with this. For example, in our case, we have regular meetings. For example, our marketing meeting on Tuesday. Usually the first half an hour of the meeting is about our private stuff, like catching up on things, what’s going on in our lives before we talk about Nozbe marketing. So that’s always the case. And that’s why it’s a regular meeting every week so that we can catch up, we can be together, we can be in touch, we can feel that we are part of a team. Of course, there is more. Some people in our company, they’ve moved back to their hometowns because once they started working remotely, they didn’t have to go to any office. So they could move back to their hometowns so they can be closer to family. And as you said, they can make these ties in the afternoons or on the weekends tighter. So, again, there are ways to cope with that. But of course, we are talking about feelings of isolation. But feelings of isolation in a hybrid work, I don’t think they exist because if you juggle, as I’ve heard from many people, this way that one day you work from home, one day you work from the office and you decide which days. Then you have the best of both worlds because you have this time with your co -workers and then you have this time on your own when you can really focus and get your things done. Yeah and again this is probably some people prefer that and some people prefer something else. There are introverts who hate going out to the office, and the office day is a horror for them. And there are extraverts who appreciate the possibility to work more in the headquarters or in the office. Yeah, there is also research behind it. Studies suggest that over 70 % of employees believe that having work friends is essential for a fulfilling career. The social element is something that the office environment naturally provides. And also another argument here might be that when you are in the office, when you are in those big buildings, you can meet other professionals, you can do some networking, you can meet other people from your business, from your sector, and Yeah, it’s kind of like opportunities to meet other people to make connections. I remember a friend who moved to a different city with his business and he was a consultant. So he chose to work from a co -working space, mostly because of networking, because it was a big co -working space. So there are many professionals working in this co -working space. So this way he could also have killed two birds with one stone. On one hand, have a meaningful relationships, but on the other hand, you know, get some sales and get some business contacts and find some clients. So it was like best of both worlds for him. And of course, because he moved to a different city and actually different country. So for him, it was also a great way to like instantly reconnect, connect with people like, you know, with strangers and build some relationships out of thin air. So it was really a good idea in that sense that you know, a co -working, that’s why co -working spaces, especially the bigger ones, they can provide that too. - Yeah, but then what’s the difference between co -working and your office? This is a bit tricky. Anyways, argument number three. - We’ll talk about this in the next episode.
- Oh yeah, I can’t wait. Number three is probably that would be more from point of view of the manager, of the CEO. This is this sense of belonging, the sense of purpose that you have, that you can foster having people around. When you are in the office, when you observe people, when you can come up to them, and when you can regularly remind them why they are here, what we are doing, not only, you know, because when you are working from home, and you can like, at one point, you can get so absorbed with your work and all the tasks that you forget why you are doing something. And yeah, so you start to lose this sense of purpose. So maybe this is also why they prefer to have people all the time and to be able to look at them all the time and to see people in the office, as Trump said, and just to be able to react quickly. When you see someone is demotivated, hop, you remind him why he’s here, how great he is, and how wonderful company we are. Yeah, especially when you mandate them getting, you know, rejecting a life that they built and the lifestyle that they built, and you force them to your office and you want them to, you know, have a sense of purpose while telling them, “I don’t trust you. I want you around or else.” Well, you know, forget about it. So yeah, so yeah, maybe, maybe they want to have that, you know, belonging of purpose. But again, Once you have the hybrid lifestyle, I think it’s already there. In my case, in a completely remote environment, this is hard. I know. For me, for example, it’s important that while we are working in Nozbe, and we have projects, tasks, and comments, so in the comments when I’m commenting some activities people are doing, to over there, also in these comments, sometimes explain the why. So why we should do it this way? Why I believe that this is the way to go? Or why I think this is important. Yeah, you like emphasizing our values and talking about what we’re trying to do. Exactly, exactly, because this is the reason, you know, there is raison d ‘être, or something like this. So this is important. So for me, I’m doing this remotely by just getting more active in the comments with people so that they know I’m there and I’m trying to reinforce the values and the purpose of the company. Also, as we’ll talk about it a little bit later, but I’m a vlogger in that sense that I vlog to our team. So every month I post a video, an update of what’s happening in the company. And this is also my way of getting people involved or showing you know, I know what’s going on in the company and they also will know what’s going on in all the aspects of the company. So there are ways. You’ll be talking about the meeting and vlogging just in a second after the break, but we just have one more argument. And this one is the funnest one. It comes from my, you know, like Actual research that I did among my friends who are working in the hybrid mode and Like Believe me or not people are cheating that they are cheating a lot. There is one person Is working In a hybrid mode, I think two days per week and her work is she’s like customer service and she’s taking calls from people calling and asking for some advice or they want to make an appointment. So what she does is in the morning when she has the home office she wakes up she puts on the headphones she starts the system and she goes back to sleep she’s just in bed, covered with her, you know, guilt and everything. And when someone calls, she just opens her eye. She says, “Yeah, hello. How can I help you?” She does what she has to do. Then she, you know, hangs up and go back to sleep. So yeah, probably she’s not as effective as she would be back in the office. another person. This is totally cool. This guy, he wakes up in the morning. He wakes up in the morning, he starts his laptop, he turns on the system, and then he puts some cap or something pretty heavy on the keyboard, so that it simulates that someone is typing all the time, and he goes back to sleep. And the third guy, he has just this quiet agreement with his team. He’s the superior. His people just cannot contact him or call him when he has a remote work day because he sleeps. When they have only, when there is something totally urgent and the fire is burning, then they have right to contact him. Otherwise, they have to be quiet. They have to do their job when he’s back in the office. He’ll, you know, keep up with work, but not on his home office day. So believe me, people aren’t cheating when they are on hybrid work. Yeah, so when people are cheating, there is a bigger problem. It’s not about the hybrid or remote work, there has to be something bigger. They are doing this out of spite, out of not trusting, out of feeling maybe abused when they are in the main office, that they work too long or too much, and then finally they can just get some rest. So this is not a healthy environment. If you have people cheating, it means there is something bigger. And of course, if you install software that logs their keys and to check if they are typing, I think there might be some trust issues there, because I would never install this on your computer, Magda, or anyone’s computer. I would never do that, and this is not the way to go when you have remote people. When you work remotely, the trust is the main component, and apparently in the examples that you quoted, I feel that there is some trust issues over there. Yeah, and also, it means that people are really tired, like really, really tired, that they are really even able to cheat and then to not think about it, just get some rest. But think about it. Yeah, the office, the office work very often in the big companies the corporations hasn’t been healthy because people would stay in the office like 12 hours a day they would stay I remember my wife when she was working as in a top law firm like I wouldn’t see her like she would leave before nine and she would come after nine on a good day you know so it was less like it was awful like I would never see her and she would be dead after work like completely So it’s, so if people get a chance of working from home like this, you know, after three days of working 12 hour, you know, shifts, they, I don’t, I mean, I don’t blame them for just wanting to sleep, you know, like, I would do the very same thing. Like, this is not healthy. So again, Yeah, this is the information for for the good manager that something should be done. Maybe he should care about those people. Maybe he should do something about, I don’t know, their their welding, maybe asking them to sleep more, to maybe change the hours, the office hours from 8 a .m. maybe tonight 30, maybe, you know, there’s something else that can be done to avoid this cheating thing. But yeah, that was hilarious. Listening to all those stories. I bet. All those ideas and crazy, you know, like tricks to just be able to get some sleep. - Okay, so let’s, you know, before we dive deeper now into real like reasons for return to office and real flaws in this argument, let’s have a break and have someone talk about something cool like Nozbe and how cool it’s been for them. So let’s talk about that. And for just a few seconds and we’ll be right back. Hi, I’m Blazgoraj, I’m a trainer and consultant and I help the teams working more efficiently, applying project management techniques. Nozbe is right now my go -to tool whenever I start working with a new team who is asking me to improve their productivity and to make sure their tasks are delivered on time. The reason why I have chosen Nozbe is the fact that it is simple and easy to start. In many cases, in an organization, the decision maker, the leader, is with a high level of understanding. And those people actually have a tendency to pick up more sophisticated tools. And then there is this problem that there is imbalance between the decision maker who wants to have the more sophisticated tool and the people from the team who want to have something easy, something simple. So I think Nozbe helps out to put this into the balance and we can build the working environment like from the building bricks. You build it step by step and I saw in past months many successful implementations based on the fact that we just implemented Nozbe, spend the time to agree how to use it and we wrote down the key rules and decisions upon that. All right, all right. So again, people want simplicity. People want flexibility. Yeah. Oh, yes. People want simplicity. People want flexibility. People want agency. All smart books, when they talk about motivation, this is what people want to do. They want to do exciting things, they want to do important things, and they want to do things where they can also make their own decisions. And RTO saying, “Let’s go back to the office or else, I’m telling you to go back to the office or else,” doesn’t inspire that. Yeah, when I was doing this research and trying to find What what was there behind those decisions? one of the very few things that I found was that these companies argued that in -person collaboration enhances spontaneous communication and it makes the Decision making quicker and it reinforces the company culture that that might be that well but there is no evidence nobody none of those CEOs never run any research and you know any polls in the company they didn’t ask people when when in what environment, they feel more productive or creative or spontaneous, people weren’t asked about it. So how come they knew, they made that decision? There is no evidence. I love this podcast that you quoted, that you send it my way with Frances Frey, the interview with her. She’s from Harvard and she’s a professor on Harvard and she’s studying all this. And she said that all these CEOs that she was consulting with, they are talking about performance, KPIs, Excel sheets, like everything performance, performance, performance. And then she would tell them, “Guys, there is this way to make your workers unhappy and less productive. What do you think?” And it is, of course, RTO return to office, and they would say, “Yeah, let’s go.” Like, why would they say, “Yeah, let’s go,” if they are saying that they want performance? Yeah, normally, every tiny decision based on money, on the income, and in this situation, they were just like babies. They just wanted it. That’s what I - And? - Yeah, that’s what I prefer.
- That’s what I feel, that’s what I’m used to. I don’t know, it’s really, really interesting that even this professor Frey, she wanted to tackle this issue with them because she’s a consultant as well and she was directly talking to those people about it. And they just avoided this topic. They just cut it and just because I prefer this way. So yeah. And this is like, you know, it’s like all these smart people, they have, they are saying that they are so rational and that they make decisions based on data. And suddenly in this thing, decision decision is just purely made based on emotions, based on things, nostalgia, as we said, that’s true. Okay, another thing that I thought could be, could be what they, what they wanted to achieve is better communication. I mean, better, you know, those interactions, this energy that is apparently better and more intense when we are in one room. So those meetings, though, those face to face meetings that we have to be there, all hands, everyone from the team, because because we don’t want someone to be sad or be angry that they weren’t invited because you write about it a lot in one of the chapters of your book. We will link to it. We also have a separate site about meetings and how to do them right, so we also will link to this. But those seals, they think that meetings live when everyone is in one room are more effective. But in fact, that’s not true, right? It’s again, the data taken from this interview with Professor Frey. Do you remember that? - Yeah, completely. She said, of course, that when we are in the office, people tend to be so happy that we’re in the office that they take one on a meeting. So there are too many meetings. The meetings are too crowded. So everybody joins the meeting. The meeting starts being this status symbol. So if I’m not invited to this meeting, it means I’m not important. And I want to be on that meeting even though I have nothing to bring there. I have nothing to give. I have no feedback to offer. But still, I have to be there because of status. So all these things. And because of that, there is data that proves that when you have so many meetings, you have no time for work, and you are not engaged in these meetings, or while you are in the meetings, you’re actually answering emails or doing something else. When it’s actually easier to have fewer meetings with fewer people, and then maybe record some of the meetings and play it back, so people can actually listen to it, and even there’s data like that, If you listen to something in motion, so if you walk and listen to a meeting, right, then then you actually absorb the so even people Who are listening to this podcast very some of you listeners told me that Even though I speak so fast you still can listen to this podcast in 1 .5 speed and still Get you know everything that we’re sharing today. Yeah, exactly. there is data that says that people get and remember, memorize much more information when they listen to the recording in 1 .5 speed and being in some kind of motion, so walking, running, cycling, whatever, then being actually present face to face at that meeting and listening to that person watching them and in one point zero speed, yeah, life. That’s amazing, apparently our brain, when in motion, and when listening to something very quickly, gathers all the power and is more effective. And we save 50 % of our time. - But also I think very often the meetings, apart from being crowd it and all that stuff and being too many. Another problem, and we mentioned that in our podcast here, we’ll link in the show notes to past episodes where we talk about meetings. But the most important thing is we say meetings should be optional, regular and well prepared. And the well prepared part is that very often on the meetings, people are presenting things. So very often when you’re here, especially a bad presenter, it’s just boring. You’re just dozing off. Like you’re not really focused. In our meetings, people don’t present anything. We read the documentation before the meeting. And then on the meeting, we just discuss the nuance, we discuss the issues. So this way the whole meeting is more engaging because you are actually discussing things, discussing issues that you understand. Everyone is on the same page And we are just, yeah. - We are not absorbing new information. We are basically arguing some information. - And being creative, which is apparently impossible when you are having an online meeting.
- Don’t get me started on this. I mean, this is my story of my life, you know, before the pandemic, before people actually tried working from home and they would tell me, ah, yeah, Michael, yes, You have this small app, Nozbe, which doesn’t require you for you to be creative. Because in my company, we have to be creative. We have to be there in the same thing. We can’t afford to work remotely. Yeah, exactly. Because we are so special and we are so creative and you’re not, “Oh, am I insulting you right now?” So it’s like they were insulting me like this and then they were saying these things and then they were catching themselves say these things. And when they were listening to what they were saying, then they realized that they were actually insulting me right now. So it’s like, yeah, so I am not creative. I am developing this app and I’ve been doing this for like for the last 18 years. So I have to really like not being creative for the last 18 years, not being creative. And all these thousands of customers who are using this every day, paying for Nozbe and even thanking me for Nozbe, they must be really confused, right? Yeah, because you don’t run face -to -face of meetings, sort of, Michael. Exactly, yeah. Okay, another thing is that by banning and restricting this hybrid work, the CEOs, the managers are actually losing the best employees. The fact is that hybrid work or remote work is some kind of added value. People find it as something extra. So when someone is taken away from them, they’re just starting to look for a new employer because something was taken away from them. There is research, or maybe kind of just the story, that when in Amazon, they announced a five -day return mandate, 73 % of surveyed professionals said that they were reconsidering their positions, they were reconsidering changing the employer, and similarly, 77 % of workers broadly view that decision not I think that will boost their productivity because they knew that they were working well. They knew it was a mechanism of control. It’s like when you quote the Hamilton musical, “Don’t look at me like I’m stupid. I’m not stupid.” So this is the same thing. These people are not stupid, especially people who are working for Google, for Amazon. Like they’re not stupid people. They And the CEO that knows this, everyone knows this. This is a stupid policy. They know that by they are communicating, I am a male, I am an alpha, I am telling you what to do. And then these guys are like, yeah, and I’m a great professional and I can get a job in a different company in five seconds. So what am I still doing here? - Yeah, if you don’t trust me if you think that I was cheating or that why I wasn’t effective enough when I was working on company laptop, but just from my home office and not your office. Well, yeah, this is nothing like nothing that could be nothing astonishing that people yeah, about it. And in the beginning of this show, you mentioned that 43 % of companies are already offering hybrid work. So there are plenty smart companies, and we are a smart company having fully remote work, that can offer hybrid or remote positions for these great employees. It’s even better, like this way, some employees that have been working for Amazon or Google for many, many years, years suddenly are on the market. I think the competition must be really happy that these otherwise hard to get employees, suddenly you don’t have to poach them. They’re actually coming to you because the CEO of this other company was crazy. Yeah. Also, this is funny because most of those companies are global. They are huge. They have branches in all the continents. And while the guy wants to see people in the office, he will only see those who are in his town. But he won’t see people in Europe or in Australia or in another city. So this is just kind of really strange. Yeah, I remember there was this documentary about this global company that they change their offices to open space and stuff. And they basically made the office worse for the employees. And the best part was that the CEOs, the managers, they had the best offices and they were never there. So the thing is that whenever they go there, they wanna Like, you know, I’m coming today and I want to see everyone there, you know? And I remember from, again, from my wife, when she was working in a big law firm, that when sometimes the manager wasn’t there for the whole day, and he would come at 7 p .m. just to see who’s still there. And he would be happy and proud of these people who are still at 7 p .m. in the office. Again, no tangible data if these people who state until 7 p .m. are actually contributing something good or effective or whatever. No, just the fact that they were sitting there was their only data point. But this is crazy. How people who are working 12 hours a day can be efficient? How can be they productive? They are so wasted. They are so tired that it’s impossible for them to do an actual work and Make that out of their full potential. Anyways, last thing I wanted to say is that the research also shows is that when people are back in the office and They either Just ask to be given a Personal office like a space when they will be alone or an office where they can close the door and be alone in silence just for a little bit, or they are all wearing the noise cancellation headphones. I’m, my, my home is just opposite the Deloitte building. And sometimes when I’m just looking over the window, I see those people working there and they are all, you know, they are not sitting like this, like straight, they are all like, I don’t know, like crunch, they are as if they were hiding, as if they were suffering, as if they wanted to, you know, cover themselves somehow, or they are all sitting in those like aquariums that the small glass covered spaces, that guarantees the noise cancellation, or they are wearing the headphones. So yeah, I mean, that’s the efficient office work. I can tell you right now, when we’re recording this, I’m wearing very expensive Bose and noise, noise, noise cancelling headphones from, you know, award winning Bose company, you know, great headphones. And they’re great. But I can wear them for an hour to record this podcast, but I wouldn’t want to wear them for the whole day. This is not nice. This is not comfortable. Why? Normally, if you’re working, do you really want to carry headphones all the time? That’s the flexibility. If you want to socialize or you have tasks that require being with people, be with people. But if you have something that requires total focus and being alone and just writing something or being creative alone, then it’s so important to have the possibility to just stay at home, not having to commute, and being trusted and just do the work. Was it you who told me about the video when there was the company and the office of the open space when people were sitting under the desk just to have some privacy and silence? Yeah, the one that I mentioned before, yeah, that there was there was footage of people like they have the stand -up desk just like I do. And you know, with the stand -up desk, you can lift it up pretty high. So they would have the stand -up desk lift completely and they would hide below the desk to work. So instead of working standing, they would work sitting under the desk. I mean, come on, like this is pathetic. And that’s the effect of RTO. Yeah. So tell me, Magda, is this all bad news, or is this RTO a fad? Like what’s going on? Yeah. At the end of my research, when I was really completely down because of all these complications connected to return to office, I found that in the first quarter of 2025, those CEOs, those managers already realized that there are some unintended consequences of RTO. And now they are like, rising cleave requests, declining productivity, top talent leaving and and yes so so I think that this trend will stop they will realize that this is that wasn’t a good decision not only for the productivity and for the money but also like from the people aspect and hopefully it will stop as quickly as it started I’m looking forward for this because really, this is for me, it doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense that people who are otherwise smart, capable, and as you mentioned, performance driven, they are accepting this performance hit because of some nostalgia, because of some feeling, because of the managing by working around or something. It’s weird. It doesn’t make any sense. Yeah, I think this is good. I think that the most the most important factor here was that people were leaving that they realized that if they don’t offer hybrid work, someone else will. And they will just lose really good people and their offer won’t be as as nice as I mean, I mean, to conclude, like we we’ve had that before, like we we have We’ve had employees coming to us to work with us, because they were disillusioned with the work -from -home policy of their current employer, and they said, “Look, they promised me this, they told me that I would have it, they wouldn’t let me have it, and I heard Michael in Nozbe we work remotely.” So I was like, “Yeah, let’s go.” Yeah, before it was even a small problem for us because sometimes people were coming not because we are a nice company because they like us because they wanted to work on the stuff that we work on or they were into productivity but just they wanted to work remotely for when we were probably one of the very very few companies in Poland working like that. If you listen to one of the previous episodes where I was talking that I pay people people for working for not working on Fridays, of course, like work remotely. We have mighty Fridays, like this is ideal place to work, and it’s true because this is a place we created. But anyway, that’s the thing. All the analysis, all the research shows that you have to invest in your employees and you have to listen to them and you have to empower them. So RTO is not that. It’s the opposite of that. And all right, and if you want to also work better, just like we do, so not only, you know, not working on Fridays or working remotely, but you also want to work without email, because you want to have your projects, tasks, and comments nicely configured, nicely, you know, you want to be in control of what’s happening, then you should try Nozbe. And Nozbe is our product, Nozbe is our app. It’s available for all the platforms. And for listeners of this podcast, there is a special bonus. If you sign up using our link, and I’ll explain in a second, you’ll get a bonus, which will give you basically three months of Nozbe for free. So maybe you should check it out. So anyway, thank you so much for listening. Thanks, Mark. Thanks for being with us. Thanks for this conversation. And as I mentioned, in the next two weeks and next episodes, we’ll talk about many cool aspects of adjusting to remote work and helping you be better at remote work, at hybrid work. So stay tuned for the next one and claim your bonus for Nozbe. Thank you for being an amazing listener of the No Office podcast. Every other Wednesday we meet to talk about productivity and hybrid lifestyle because we believe that work is not a place to go. It’s a thing to do. A special gift only to No Office podcast listeners. When you sign up for Nozbe using this link, nozbe slash podcast, you’ll get 30 bucks of credits, which you can use to upgrade to Nozbe premium. Nozbe helps thousands of smart business owners and their teams get their professional and private life organized in a single app in a simple way. And Nozbe is free for up to three active projects and three people on your team. So start today and claim your free bonus credits, which you will later need to upgrade to unlimited projects. Once again, thank you for being an amazing listener. Thanks for your support and for spreading the word about our no -office podcast and Nozbe. See you and hear you in the next episode and in the meantime, claim your bonus credits here.
