By Harold Phillips | March 2026
My LinkedIn feed has been doing this thing lately where every other post is either a CEO explaining why in-office collaboration is "essential to company culture" or someone furiously dunking on that CEO in the comments. It's been going on for months. I've read probably forty of these arguments. I haven't changed my mind once.
I work hybrid. Three days in the office, two from home, has been that way since late 2022. My company makes project management software, which means, yes, I manage projects on software that's supposed to make managing projects easier. The irony is not lost on me. We're about 200 people, spread across three time zones, and the hybrid model has been largely fine. Not transformative, not a disaster. Fine.
The commute math nobody wants to do
I live in Leslieville. My office is downtown, near King and University. Door to desk, the TTC takes about 45 minutes on a good day, longer when the 501 decides to take a personal day. On a bad day, which happens more than the TTC's official service standards would suggest, it's closer to an hour.
That's two hours of commuting time, three days a week. Six hours a week. Around three hundred hours a year. Roughly twelve and a half full days. Every year. Just getting to the same laptop I could have used at home.
I'm not saying this to complain. I chose to live where I do, I chose this job, and the TTC is what it is. But when someone tells me remote work isn't "real work," I keep thinking about those twelve days. What would I do with twelve extra days a year? Probably something useless like run further or finish the board games on my shelf. The point is: that time is not free.
And then there's the money side. When I go into the office, I spend differently. Coffee I didn't make. Lunch somewhere that isn't my kitchen. A replacement pair of chinos when mine wore out from three-days-a-week rotation instead of occasional use. These aren't huge amounts individually (maybe $20-25 on a full office day), but they stack. I haven't tracked the exact number in a few months (my partner would tell you I usually have tracked the exact number, but I actually haven't this time), so I won't pretend to precision. It's not nothing.
The "culture" argument
Here's the thing about the culture argument: it assumes that the thing being created in an office is good culture, or at least better culture than what you'd have otherwise.
I've worked in offices with genuinely miserable cultures. I've been on remote teams I liked talking to every day. I've sat in open-plan offices where no one spoke to each other because there was nowhere quiet to have a real conversation. "In-person collaboration" is not a culture. It's a location.
My current team works fine hybrid. We over-communicate on Slack, we have weekly syncs, and we use (I say this with no irony) the project management software we sell. Some of my best working relationships are with people I've met in person maybe three times. Some of my worst work experiences happened in buildings I commuted to every day.
None of this is a universal claim. I know people who genuinely love the office. I know people with apartments too small to work from home, or roommates who make focus impossible, or jobs that require physical presence. Those are real constraints. But "culture" as a justification for mandatory in-office days, when the actual thing being measured is whether butts are visible in seats, doesn't hold up.
A tangent I feel the need to take
I had a period, around 2019, where I was fully in-office five days a week. This was at a startup that later folded. Funding dried up, the whole thing unravelled over a miserable winter. Small company, everyone in one room, that startup energy people write thinkpieces about.
It was fun for about eight months. Then it was just loud. Every conversation was everyone's conversation. Someone's lunch smell filled the kitchen by noon. I once spent forty minutes in a phone booth (they'd installed these little acoustic phone booths to create "quiet zones," which tells you everything you need to know about open-plan offices) trying to finish a document I could have written in fifteen minutes at home.
The startup folded anyway. In retrospect, proximity wasn't doing the hard work for us.
What I actually think
The companies calling people back full-time are mostly making a calculated bet on attrition. They know some percentage of employees will push back, and they're willing to lose some of those people. Maybe because they want to reduce headcount without formal layoffs, maybe because they genuinely believe office presence produces better output, maybe because the people making the decision just miss seeing the building full.
What they're not willing to do is say any of that out loud. Which is why we get "culture" and "serendipitous collaboration" and "watercooler moments" (I have never once had a career-shifting conversation near a watercooler; I'm not convinced those conversations happen outside of TV dramas).
But here's what I keep coming back to: the knowledge-work labour market, even a slower, post-2022 version of it, still has plenty of people who will walk for a hybrid or remote role. Not everyone. Not in every field. But enough that flexibility is a real recruiting advantage, and that advantage doesn't disappear because a LinkedIn post says it should.
Remote work got normalized in two years because circumstances required it. The genie doesn't go back in the bottle just because the bottle is more convenient for executive teams. Arrangements shift, some industries genuinely returned, individual policies changed, but "white-collar knowledge work can be done effectively from home" is established fact now. Facts don't really care what the CEO posts.
Beans just knocked my water glass off the desk. I'm choosing to read it as editorial commentary, but it's more likely he just wants dinner. Either way, I think that's probably where I'll leave it.
Opinions are my own. If I mention a service I use, there might be a referral link, and you'll always see a note about it.