Author: Frederick Pilot

Beyond the Office-versus-WFH Binary

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Knowledge work is not a binary choice between “office” and “work from home.”

Some knowledge workers prefer to be co-located at least part of the time. Others do their best work remotely. Those preferences exist at the individual, team and organizational levels.

A strategy that works for client collaboration may not work for focused individual work. A team that benefits from regular in-person interaction may still need substantial flexibility. A policy that looks consistent on paper can produce very different outcomes across roles.

That is why the question is far more complex than the usual office-versus-WFH framing.

The underlying tension is that both remote work and commuting to an office involve tradeoffs. We are social creatures, and being with others can matter. But so do time, distance, concentration, autonomy, and the quality of the work environment.

Having someone commute an hour to sit in a cubicle with a laptop, only to become more demoralized, is a clear sign that an organization needs to think more carefully about what the purpose of office space.

It can feel like having one foot in 1980 and the other in the present.

Organizations need help sorting through competing assumptions and designing an approach that fits their mission, workforce, technology, management practices, and actual work.

That is the focus of Last Rush Hour’s advisory services: helping leaders examine workplace assumptions, reduce return-to-office conflict, clarify the role of the office, strengthen distributed management, improve ICT utilization, and prepare for AI-enabled knowledge work.

The goal is not to defend remote work or mandate office attendance.

The goal is to make better decisions based on evidence, context, and the work that actually needs to get done.

The awkward adjustment to virtual and decentralized knowledge work

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Since the 1980s, information and communications technology has transformed knowledge work. Much of the work involved in gathering, synthesizing, analyzing, and presenting information can now be performed without a dedicated office or a daily commute.

The decision-making function of many organizations has gone virtual. That does not make offices completely irrelevant. Co-located environments can still support relationship-building, training, brainstorming, and strategy sessions that benefit from real-time interaction. But routine individual work and many forms of collaboration no longer depend on a particular building.

The difficulty is that the physical environment has not adjusted at the same pace. Office towers, business parks, campuses, and the transportation systems connecting them were built around the assumption that knowledge workers would regularly travel to a common workplace. Much of that infrastructure remains in place even as the work it was designed to support becomes more distributed.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed this mismatch. Social-distancing measures forced organizations to test whether thought work could be done without the office and without the associated transportation demand. In many cases, the answer was yes. The experience produced a rapid shift in expectations, followed by what might be called a period of future shock.

The adjustment has been psychologically and organizationally difficult. The buildings and freeways are still there, but their necessity for many knowledge-work tasks is no longer self-evident. People are being asked to reconcile the visible permanence of the old system with the practical emergence of a new one.

Organizations are responding by experimenting with different ways of working. Some arrangements are proving more coherent than others. One particularly awkward example is requiring employees to commute to an office in order to participate in virtual meetings that could have taken place from home. Employees can see the contradiction: they spend time and money traveling to a designated workplace so that they can work remotely with colleagues who may be somewhere else.

Policies requiring attendance on prescribed days can intensify this frustration when they are not tied to a clear purpose. The problem is not simply that hybrid work is difficult to manage. It is that many organizations are applying old spatial assumptions to a changed model of work.

This is an awkward adjustment phase between two systems. The old system is organized around centralized workplaces and routine commuting. The emerging system is more virtual, distributed, and flexible. Organizations now need to determine which activities genuinely benefit from physical presence, which can be performed remotely, and how offices should be redesigned around those distinctions.

The transition will be uneven and sometimes contradictory. But the central task is clear: organizations must align their policies, workplaces, and transportation expectations with the work people actually do, rather than with the assumptions built into the previous era.

Cognitive biases produce cognitive dissonance for many knowledge workers

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For decades, knowledge work followed the centralized Industrial Age model: mass employment in high-rise towers, sprawling campuses, and office parks. Advances in information and communications technology (ICT) over the past few decades have upended that model, and the resulting transition now blends elements of the old and new, exemplified by “hybrid” arrangements, where staff split the work week between home offices and a centralized, commute-in office.

What makes this transition difficult for many organizations is less about logistics than about cognitive bias.

The first is a deeply rooted bias about employment itself: the assumption that employees are paid to leave home and show up at work. That assumption made sense before ICT made physical presence less necessary for completing most tasks. Because payroll supports staff, the expectation follows that staff must be visible, as if visibility itself were proof that something is being obtained for the expense.

A second bias is the sunk cost fallacy: the tendency to keep using something because money has already been spent on it, discounting evidence that it no longer delivers the expected value. Office space is expensive, largely illiquid, and often locked in for years, which makes organizations reluctant to write it off even as its usefulness declines.

Because payroll and office space are typically the largest cost items for a knowledge organization, and because that footprint is so large and hard to unwind, there’s a related pull toward doubling down on the existing arrangement even when it no longer fits how the work actually gets done. That’s a third bias: status quo bias.

Many knowledge workers commute to an office only to spend the day on a videoconference or at a computer, tasks they could just as easily do at home, minus the commute. That mismatch produces real cognitive dissonance. When workers weigh the personal time and expense of getting to the office and back, something doesn’t add up. They end up feeling like they’re subsidizing their organization’s cognitive biases, not the stated rationale for office attendance: better collaboration.

But collaboration doesn’t require co-location. Both approaches have advantages: co-located conversation offers nonverbal cues and helps build relationships, while collaboration by text, voice, or video call can happen regardless of where people sit. Effective collaboration isn’t dependent on physical proximity; it depends on the tools and habits teams use to work together.

The office as meeting place, not regular workplace.

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Traditionally, offices have been workplaces for all knowledge work. Staff commuted to them Monday through Friday. Now that it can easily be done in a home office or library, coffee shop, or shared local office space, knowledge work can be done most anywhere at any time.

Instead, what’s needed are venues for gatherings for training sessions for newer staff members, socialization, symposia on select topics, presentations, and brainstorming strategy and generating ideas.

Recognizing this, larger organizations are redesigning their offices to make them more like hotel conference centers. They are operated like traditional office workplaces, requiring regular commute trips.

That’s a viable model for staff who live nearby. But many may not and face long commutes, driven by more affordable housing costs in outlying areas farther from the office. Or they may reside in other more distant locations.

This is headed toward a redefinition of the office as a meeting and conference venue instead of regular workplace with the expectation of quotidian attendance. Rather than maintain fixed office space, organizations may evolve to operate more like industry groups and trade associations, meeting in hotels offering conference facilities and work spaces.

Daily commuting will transform to business travel to these gatherings. Each organization will determine their purpose, length and frequency consistent with their needs and budgets. They could be one day events or involve a full week held every month or quarter.

As offices become like hotel conference centers, hotel conference centers could become more like offices.

This shift helps address a critical need to provide an opportunity for staff to develop social as well as mentoring relationships between senior and junior staff that require a degree of co-location. Critically, hotels offer a place to for staff to stay for multi-day events.

Some larger organizations may use their existing offices as meeting places with staff staying at nearby hotels for multi-day gatherings. Social events could be held at adjacent restaurants.

Fundamentally, this requires a shift away from thinking of knowledge work like manufacturing where workers have to be concentrated in a workplace to be productive. Thought work doesn’t work that way. And organizations are made up of people. People who as the songwriter Hal David wrote need people to stimulate and refine their thinking.

California state employee union leverages state’s environmental quality law to bolster cause for fewer commute trips to state offices

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Courtesy The Sacramento Bee

During the COVID pandemic of 2020, ICT advances abruptly ended the commute-in office’s traditional central role in knowledge work with the social distancing measures to curb the spread of the infectious virus.

Those advances had been slowly building since the 1980s starting with personal computers followed by personal communication devices instead of desk phones and the most consequential, the mass market Internet. When the pandemic hit and knowledge work became largely done in a knowledge worker’s home, the momentum of that trend was released like a tightly wound spring. It has generated efforts to rewind the clock spring in the form of return to office mandates and office attendance policies.

It’s also changing the employment bargain between knowledge organizations and their employees. Now that they’ve experienced sustained ability to work from their homes, knowledge workers have come to view commuting differently. Previously, they accepted commuting as part of their jobs. Now they see it as a personal cost that isn’t necessary to incur in order to do their work. Consequently, they’ve grown less likely to accept it.

A prominent example is the relationship between California state government and state employee bargaining units. Now that commuting is seen as a personal cost, it has become a point of negotiation. The state wants staff in state offices four days a week. The employees are pushing for two rather than four days.

Notably, at least one of the bargaining units is looking to boost that stance by leveraging the Golden State’s longstanding efforts to improve air quality by reducing transportation demand and associated motor vehicle emissions, as The Sacramento Bee reports.

The economics of office presence

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The virtualization and decentralization of knowledge work has greatly reduced the need for office attendance. But it nevertheless holds value for many knowledge organizations as shown by return to office policies mandating attendance for all or some of the work week.

That value is being assigned and weighed by both knowledge organizations and workers in terms of compensation and talent attraction and turnover.  

The math of the office attendance value equation works roughly inversely. Some organizations offer premium pay for office attendance. It’s also being valued insofar as spiffing up offices to make them “worth the commute.”

Conversely, some knowledge workers are willing to accept lower compensation for roles that don’t require much if any office attendance. A paper issued earlier this year by the National Bureau of Economic Research found on average, tech workers are willing to accept a 25 percent pay reduction for roles that don’t require full time office attendance.

This explicitly recognizes the personal cost in terms of time and money incurred by the commute whereas traditionally it was externalized onto staff and seen as part of the job. Now it’s being factored into the employment relationship. Higher compensation for roles requiring regular office presence can offset employees’ cost of commuting.

On the other hand, companies that do not demand office attendance and thus remove the cost of commuting from the employment bargain are being flooded with job applications per this recent Business Insider article, reflecting their high desirability among knowledge workers.

“It’s not about where we work, but how,” Melanie Rosenwasser, chief people officer at Dropbox, told Business Insider. “Flexibility and agency are the new currencies of work.”

The length of the commute and housing costs also factor in. The math there is well established and similarly inverse. Housing tends to cost more nearer to downtown business districts or office parks and campuses or with reliable and fast public transit. Conversely, housing costs tend to be lower in outlying edges of metro areas but come with longer and more time-consuming commutes that take away from employees’ personal time.

As for talent attraction and retention, the most skilled and knowledgeable staff know they are marketable and factor that into their calculations. Knowledge organizations that require office attendance run the risk of losing talent not inclined to work in a mandated organizational office setting.

Buildings and bureaus: RTO isn’t only about trust and control

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Return to office (RTO) isn’t only about control or trust or workplaces. It’s more fundamental. It’s essentially about organizational identity.

For decades, public and large private sector organizations have defined themselves largely by how they functioned, structured in the industrial age management model as vertical bureaucracies exercising command and control management. The hierarchy is represented in the building with the building as totem. Leadership sits in the upper floors of the building and corner offices. Staff in cubicles in the center and on lower floors.

The building is at the core of organizational self concept and sense of purpose. The org may have started humbly in a garage like Apple but now a large multi building campus represents it nearly as much as its branding. In Apple’s case, for example, the modernistic circular spaceship headquarters building.

Apple founder Steve Jobs described the personal computer as the “bicycle for our minds.” That untethers the mind from time, place and distance. But the spaceship houses the bodies containing the minds of Apple employees. It’s the mothership, the corporate edifice.

Decentralized, virtual knowledge work first made possible by Apple computers and later information and communications technology (ICT) advances is at odds with that. Hence, we see resistance expressed as RTO. It really means return to the organization — get back in the building.

Or as some orgs have framed it to staff, you don’t have a future with this org if you don’t regularly appear at the building that represents it and should find another role outside of the org.

ICT has disrupted that. knowledge work no longer requires the industrial age buildings and bureaus of the 20th century or daily commuting to and from them. It’s done wherever knowledge workers are and thinking. Rapidly processed, communicated and recorded on ICT tools like personal computing and communication devices and the cloud.

The essential questions knowledge organizations face in the 21 century:

How are they defined in the post-industrial age (or “smokestack era” as Alvin Toffler termed it in his 1990 outlook on the 21st century, Powershift)? If buildings and bureaus no longer essentially define them, what does?

Since knowledge work has been traditionally defined by Dave Rolston’s four dead kings of work:

  1. One job title
  2. Performed under one manager
  3. At one time
  4. At one place

How will it be optimally defined and organized going forward?

Redefining office space use in the post CCO era

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Return to office (RTO) policies have created controversy, framed as a set to between executive leadership wanting staff to work in centralized, commute in offices (CCOs) and staff preferring to work in their home offices as they did during the public health restrictions during the pandemic years.

RTO mandates have been used to encourage resignations as a blunt personnel reduction strategy, sending the message if you don’t put in office attendance you don’t belong in the organization and should move on.

Another way to view RTO is future shock. As information and communications technology (ICT) and personal devices grew increasingly sophisticated and useful over the preceding four decades starting with the personal computer in the 1980s, it was becoming increasingly clear that they would disrupt the office as it had been known. No longer would daily office attendance with the often time and energy sucking commute be necessary.

The majority of knowledge organizations however didn’t adjust to this slowly emerging reality until the pandemic restrictions forced them to do so and in a space of just two years. The future of knowledge work had arrived but too quickly for organizations to adjust.

So many adopted RTO to lessen the shock. That’s not necessarily maladaptive, but a natural reversion to the known and familiar. That creates a pause to allow time to figure out how to go forward —  and not going backward per se.

What’s truly adaptive is recognizing the primary impact of ICT: that knowledge workers no longer must necessarily report to CCOs because that’s the only location where the tools they needed to work were situated. Now they are portable and can communicate easily. That requires rethinking the use of office space and determining its best and most logical use going forward.

One model that looks promising is that of Stamford, Connecticut–based Synchrony, a branded credit card issuer.

According to this item posted October 6, 2025 at Fast Company, the company’s 20,000 employees work in their home offices and at company offices “when in person gatherings occur for training, leadership meetings, innovation sessions, and culture-building events.”

That redefines the office from a regular workplace in their traditional sense to an event driven gathering venue. There, both the presence in the office and the transportation of staff to get there is defined by a specific business purpose and not just showing up. That provides a guiding vision for the post pandemic future, offering a useful template to knowledge organizations experiencing future shock.

No assembly required

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As information and communications technology tools decentralize and virtualize knowledge work, it challenges knowledge organizations to reconceptualize working. In the pre information economy industrial age, work and education involved assembling: in schools, factories and offices.

Now the office is optional.

Making this conceptual shift has proven difficult for many knowledge organizations. That’s because their leaders often believe assembly is essential for collaboration and teamwork. Hence, they demand staff attendance at least some of the workweek in a centralized, commute in office.

Assembly is no longer needed is when information of all forms is easily shared virtually.

Forced assembly hasn’t gone over well for staff who find themselves going though the motions of assembling, swiping their badges to create a record of attendance. Or sitting in a cube farm and having Zoom or Teams meetings with colleagues in other nearby cubicles – something they could just as easily done without making the commute trip there.

Future shock and past snapback

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Before advances in information and communications technologies over the past four decades, knowledge work required industrial scale centralized commuter offices (CCOs), often staffed by hundreds or thousands of knowledge workers.

Much of the staff worked processing repetitive tasks that shifted from paper to digital form that did not require centralized creation, processing and storage. Information then became portable and decentralized, moving along with knowledge workers on personal computer and communication devices and later internet-based telecommunications and the cloud.

That made CCOs obsolete as exclusive work and meeting places by making knowledge work far less dependent on time and place, allowing information to travel as text, data and video most anywhere and asynchronistically.

These ICT advances have sped up considerably in the current decade with widespread adoption of working from home accelerated by the pandemic and the emergence of generative and agentic artificial intelligence.

These changes have come so rapidly that they challenge knowledge organizations to constructively adapt to them. They are experiencing what futurist Alvin Toffler termed “future shock” in his 1970 book of that title. It happens when the pace of technological change is so rapid institutions and organizations feel overwhelmed by it and experience cognitive dissonance as past, present and future seem to merge.

Understandably so considering the as built environment of office buildings concentrated in central metro areas and connected by what were originally designed as “high speed” highways to bring knowledge workers to and from them from outlying bedroom communities.

That world of the 20th century when companies grew and staffed up and occupied offices at industrial age scale no longer easily jibes with the 21st. That scale no longer make sense when knowledge, innovation and strategic judgment are the most valuable resources, resources that no longer require large numbers of staff regularly concentrated in office buildings.

Future shock produces what could be described as past snapback. It’s resistance to the future and nostalgia for when knowledge workers regularly commuted to the office because that’s where the job was. It’s clearly seen with “return to office” expectations.

Which haven’t gone over well since knowledge workers and not their organizations have traditionally borne the costs of getting there. And once there, sitting in a cube farm doing the same activities they could do in their home offices. That produces cognitive dissonance for knowledge workers.

Knowledge organizations have been trying to reconcile the conflict between the 20th and 21st centuries with “hybrid” office attendance, having staff come in on a designated number and days of the work week. In other words, working in the CCO like in the 20th but with the current century recognition that knowledge work doesn’t necessarily require office attendance.

It eases future shock and cognitive dissonance. But going forward into the third decade of the 21 century, the shifts will require knowledge organizations make a big adjustment to a world that for many seems to have changed in less than a decade.