I've been the one banging the drum for more in-office time lately, and honestly, it hasn't been great. The reaction is mostly just... resistance. People hear "office" and they assume I'm making a productivity argument: that I don't trust them to work hard at home.
That isn't it.
I totally get why people push back. Over the last few years, we've rebuilt our lives around remote work. Childcare, errands, our entire daily structure. That flexibility is part of why I believe in remote work, and I want us to keep it. So when I talk about being in the office more, I'm asking people to rethink a system they've built their lives around. That's not trivial, and the pushback is rational.
Most of the debate focuses on where the work happens. In a hybrid team, I keep getting stuck on how we stay in sync, figuring out what we're actually building and whether everyone shares the same assumptions about it.
In an office, alignment is lightweight. It's incidental. You overhear a side conversation, you pick up on intent, and you can challenge something before it hardens into a decision. It's the ability to resolve things in three minutes before they ever become a Jira ticket.
In our hybrid setup, the breakdown is quieter. In retros, planning, or grooming, you often get silence from a large part of the group. People care, but jumping in takes more effort. Cameras are off, the social signal is weaker, and it's easier to become a passive observer rather than an active participant. You stop noticing who's actually engaged, and the real disagreement gets harder to spot.
Most engineering decisions don't get made in the formal moments. They get made in the chaos in between, by whoever happens to speak up.
We're "remote-friendly," but we're not really "remote-native." We don't have the disciplined async culture where being clear and pushing back are habits people actually work at. In hybrid, some of those small decisions still happen between whoever's in the room. I haven't figured out how to make sure the people joining remotely are part of those conversations.