Return to office: a power grab masquerading as policy

The data shows remote work boosts outcomes yet control, not collaboration, remains the real motivator

The return to office push means workers who moved to affordable areas now face long commutes, higher fuel costs, and childcare disruptions just to sit in open-plan silence and take Zoom calls they could’ve done from home, says Michael Dunn.

Let’s stop pretending return-to-office mandates are about collaboration. They’re not about team culture or innovation. They’re about control. 

Executives who built their power on parking passes, proximity, and title inflation are demanding a return to rituals that reinforce their relevance. The corner office means little when the top-performing team member is working from Kerry or Kraków. What we’re witnessing isn’t a strategy, it’s a cultural counterattack from a generation that feels left behind.

Productivity was never the issue. Microsoft, Meta, and other high-output firms have reported better retention and performance under hybrid models, while companies like Amazon and Google slashed thousands of jobs even as they pushed people back into buildings. In January 2025, Amazon targeted 14,000 managerial positions for elimination shortly after its RTO policy rollout. 

Meanwhile, leaders cited “culture restoration” while morale tanked and attrition soared. When the people still getting results from home are the same ones being told to “show commitment”, the message becomes clear: it’s not about performance. It’s about presence and who gets to enforce it.

Returning to the office is costly and the bill isn’t paid by the executives. Workers who moved to affordable areas during lockdowns now face long commutes, higher fuel costs, and childcare disruptions just to sit in open-plan silence and take Zoom calls they could’ve done from home. 

Dublin rents are among the highest in Europe, with some counties reporting fewer than 50 affordable HAP units in total. The Simon Community’s 2025 housing snapshot showed systemic undersupply across key Irish cities. For workers, the message is: subsidise the real estate contracts your employer signed in 2017 or risk being labeled “non-collaborative.” That’s not strategy. That’s displacement policy in corporate packaging.

At the same time, surveillance is spreading under the guise of productivity. From keystroke tracking to badge swipe audits, companies now monitor everything from meeting engagement to emotional tone. Axios and AI Now have detailed how AI-driven oversight tools are reshaping the workplace into a lab experiment with dashboards. Employees are told to bring their “authentic selves” to work—but only if that self is camera-ready, always-on, and smiling for the engagement score. Trust has been replaced by telemetry. And the ones most exhausted by it are the ones being asked to prove themselves daily just by showing up.

This isn’t just about friction. It’s about legacy leadership colliding with a workforce raised on outcomes, not optics. Gen Z and millennial workers don’t equate facetime with effectiveness. They’ve grown up building in distributed environments where deliverables not desk hours are what matter. And while IT departments are designing global infrastructure for asynchronous, cross-time-zone work, executives are still measuring productivity by who’s in the lift before 9am. That’s not a policy gap, it’s a values gap.

People aren’t quitting because they’re disengaged. They’re leaving because they’ve been gaslit into believing their best work only counts if it’s performed under fluorescent lighting. The smartest workers are already spreadsheeting their exits, scanning visa options like Canada’s Express Entry, Portugal’s D7, or the Netherlands’ highly skilled migrant programs. They’re not running: they’re reallocating. Because they’ve realised something leadership hasn’t: proximity is not proof of commitment. And no one’s commuting two hours a day to prove they can be trusted to do what they’ve already done for years.

If your ability to manage depends on watching people sit at desks, you’re not managing. You’re supervising. And supervision is no longer worth the petrol. Not when real work happens in GitHub commits, Airtable dashboards, async feedback loops, and global collaboration channels that never needed a badge scan to begin with. The office didn’t die. It just lost its monopoly. And workers aren’t coming back to rebuild what’s already been replaced.

This isn’t culture. It’s regression. It’s a last-ditch attempt to recentralize power in a workforce that’s already outgrown it. And as teams quietly update their LinkedIn profiles and explore contracts in cities they’ve never visited, it’s clear who’s adapting and who’s clinging to an era that no longer fits the work. Trust is the new currency. And those who don’t invest in it are about to find out just how expensive nostalgia really is.