Buildings and bureaus: RTO isn’t only about trust and control
By Frederick Pilot
October 12, 2025
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:
- One job title
- Performed under one manager
- At one time
- At one place
How will it be optimally defined and organized going forward?