Walk the floors. That's my advice to any executive who thinks their return-to-office mandate worked. Not the dashboard. Not the badge report. Walk the actual floor on a Wednesday afternoon and count the empty desks yourself.
One large employer did exactly that and found that 20% of its workforce, more than 10,000 people, never badged in on a given day despite being marked "present." Nearly half of workers admit to coffee badging: swiping in, showing their face, and leaving to work from somewhere else entirely. The memo says everyone's back. The floor says something different. Most executives are managing off the memo.
Here's my hot take: remote and hybrid work is not going away, and the companies still fighting it are going to lose the exact people they can least afford to lose.
I've been managing remote teams for fifteen years, long before anyone needed a mandate to figure out whether it worked. It works. Stanford's WFH Research project, led by economist Nick Bloom, found a 13% productivity increase among remote workers in one of the most rigorous studies done on this, driven by fewer distractions, fewer sick days, and more focused stretches of work. A broader analysis across 61 industries found that as remote work participation rises, so does total factor productivity. This isn't a fringe finding. It's been replicated enough times that "does remote work work" is no longer a serious question.
What is still a live question is why so many leaders don't believe it. Call it the productivity paranoia gap: most employees report feeling productive at home, while most executives say they aren't confident that's true. That gap isn't a data problem. It's a trust problem, and you don't fix a trust problem by forcing everyone into a building so you can watch them.
Here's the part most RTO arguments get backwards. The complaint I hear most from executives is "our remote people leave more." Maybe. But look at why people actually leave, and location drops out of the explanation fast.
Gallup's research has found that roughly one in two employees has left a job at some point specifically to get away from a manager, and that managers account for the majority of the variance in how engaged their teams are. People leave leaders. They leave leaders whether those leaders are down the hall or three time zones away. Gallup's own tracking shows manager engagement has fallen sharply in the past few years, from 31% in 2022 down to 22% in 2025, which means the people responsible for keeping teams engaged are themselves checked out. Remote work didn't cause that. Undertrained management did, and remote work just removes the hallway coincidences that used to paper over it.
Handing someone a laptop, a Zoom license, and a "have at it" is not a management strategy. It never was, even in the office. It's just more visible now because there's no hallway left to hide the gap.
The data on flexibility is not subtle. Companies with real flexible-work policies report meaningfully higher retention and engagement than those without, and a large share of hybrid employees say they'd leave a job that took remote work away. If you want to keep your best people, the answer isn't a mandate. It's two things done well at the same time: real trust in how and where people work, and real, deliberate space for the team to get together when it matters, not because someone's tracking a badge, but because a kickoff, a hard planning session, or a team win deserves to happen in person.
And underneath both of those, you need managers who were actually trained to lead distributed teams. Most leadership development programs weren't built for this. They were built for a manager who could read a room, catch someone in the hallway, and build trust through a hundred small unplanned moments. None of that transfers automatically to a team that's never in the same room. If your leadership pipeline hasn't changed its curriculum since 2019, it's training people for a job that doesn't exist anymore.
This is exactly the gap we built RemoteBridge to close. I've spent fifteen years leading distributed teams, first at virtual schools, then at KnowBe4 running a 120-person content organization spread across time zones, and retention was never the problem when the leadership was real. RemoteBridge is a fully remote company ourselves. We don't have a headquarters we're asking people to come back to. We live this every day, which means when we build leadership simulations for managing remote and hybrid teams, we're not guessing at the problem.
If your organization is serious about building a culture that keeps its best people, remote, hybrid, or otherwise, let's talk. We'd like to partner with you on it.
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