Reverting to pre-2019 ways of working is the easy route.

City giant orders 110,000 workers back to the office at least four days a week

Is it really this simple… the number of days per week in the office?

Will switching from three days to four make a difference between corporate success and failure?

In his extraordinary autobiography 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, Ai Wei Wei describes his efforts to publish his first book of collected works The Black Cover Book in China thus…

The difficulty in making something happen, I have found, is often directly correlated to its importance:
things that come easy aren’t worth doing.

In 2019-20 the world discovered skills for remote working at a scale it didn’t think possible and at the same time unlocked the personal benefits that can flow from that. Surely there can be a link between corporate performance and personal satisfaction? Yes, there are important benefits to physical collocation. But for many there are equally important benefits in having choice in work location.

Prior to 2019 it wasn’t really possible to achieve both. Now we can, but it means rethinking how teams and the individuals that comprise them work, how we harness technology to break down the barriers that can exist in multi-locational working, how to foster responsible autonomy and effective asynchronous collaboration. In essence, entirely rethinking the way we work.

Reverting to pre-2019 ways of working is the easy route. Exploring new ways of working that embrace multi-locational and asynchronous working will be hard, but the glittering prize for organisations that invest the time and resources to do this will be a very significant competitive advantage in attracting brilliant people to do brilliant work.