Workplace Anecdote · Reddit
Return to Office. Office TBD.
A worker says their company ordered employees back three days a week one month after announcing it was selling the main office building. There is apparently one remaining detail to work out: where the office is.
Return-to-office policies usually generate arguments about productivity, collaboration, culture, commutes and whether anyone actually needs to see their coworkers eat reheated salmon at noon.
This one has a more fundamental problem.
Where, exactly, are employees returning?
A post on r/jobs over the weekend described a company announcing that employees would be required to work from an office at least three days a week beginning October 1. According to the poster, the workforce had been fully remote for two years.
The company had also announced the previous month that it was selling its main office building.
Employees had not yet been told where the replacement office would be.
Corporate Lunch cannot independently verify the account, and the poster did not identify the employer, so this should be treated as a workplace anecdote rather than reporting about a specific company.
The underlying logic, however, is almost impressive in its purity.
The policy has apparently been decided before one of the implementation details: the office.
That gets at something larger about the current return-to-office era. Increasingly, “office” can feel less like a physical workplace and more like an organizational principle. Leadership decides employees should be together three days a week, and the fact that there may not currently be a place for them to be together becomes a facilities problem to solve later.
The Reddit poster said workers had relocated during the remote period, some now facing long commutes if the mandate proceeds. They also speculated that the policy could be intended to encourage voluntary departures, although there is no evidence presented in the post that this was management’s intent.
That distinction matters. Companies can have legitimate reasons for bringing teams together without secretly running a headcount-reduction program.
But when the directive to return arrives before the destination, employees can reasonably wonder what problem the policy is actually meant to solve.
If collaboration requires an office, presumably locating the office would rank fairly high on the collaboration roadmap.
Instead, this company — assuming the account is accurate — appears to have started with the important part.
Attendance.
The real estate can catch up later.
Status: In office. Location: TBD.