A commute to the same Zoom call
You make the commute, swipe your badge and find a desk. Then you put on headphones because the person you're meeting is in another office and the person beside you is on a different call.
The company gets to count you as back in the office. Your team still meets on a screen.
In a new paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington surveyed 1,835 full-time, college-educated American workers. Among those describing a recent office day, roughly half had no fully in-person meetings. The authors identify geographic distance as the biggest driver of what they call "remote work from the office": teammates assigned to other offices or working fully remotely.
A company can take away your permission to work from home without changing where your teammates are. You lose the choice of where to work and keep the screen, the calls and the coordination across locations. Add the commute, and you've got the worst of both worlds. Everyone can follow the mandate perfectly and still end up in separate buildings on the same call. Making people come in more often won't move those buildings closer together.
I can see the appeal of a day with the people you work with. Working through a hard problem side by side, getting to know a new colleague, having lunch without watching the clock for your next call. Those are reasons to bring the right people together on purpose. They don't explain why you need to travel to a desk to talk to someone who also traveled to a desk somewhere else.
Remote-first companies start from where people actually are. They design everyday work for the screen, write decisions down where a colleague can find them without waiting for a call, and save the trips for when the people who need each other can share a room. Any company with a team spread across cities needs those habits, however many office days it requires.
For anyone considering a job with required office days, "three days in the office" is an incomplete answer. It tells you how often you'll commute. It leaves you to discover who you'll see when you arrive.
In an interview, I'd ask the hiring manager to walk me through the team's last office day. Where were the people I'd work with? What did they do together?
A manager who can describe a problem the team worked through in the room gives you something to weigh against the commute. A calendar full of calls with colleagues elsewhere is worth weighing too, especially if you'd rather take those calls from home.
The people who want you in the office should be able to tell you who you're coming in to see.
