Tag: knowledge work

Beyond Return to Office: Rethinking Employment in the Knowledge Organization

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The return-to-office debate is more than a disagreement about commuting or employee preferences. It exposes a deeper management question: does the way an organization engages knowledge workers still fit the way its work is produced?

Information and communications technology has loosened the connection between productive contribution, a particular location, and a shared working schedule. AI adds another uncertainty: which contributions will continue to require people, and how many?

For management, this is not simply a workplace-policy problem. It is an operating-model problem, with implications for employment, organizational capability, offices, and business travel.

The inherited model bundles together things that can now be separated

The conventional office-based model brings several arrangements together. The organization employs people, assigns responsibilities, establishes working hours, and requires attendance at a designated workplace.

That bundle provides a familiar structure for supervision and coordination. But its components need not remain inseparable.

A worker can be available without being in the office. A team can interact in real time without sharing a location. People can contribute at different times to a common undertaking. Physical gathering can serve a particular purpose without becoming a daily requirement.

The strategic question is therefore not simply, “How many days should employees attend?”

It is, “Which parts of our work require shared time, shared place, continuing employment, or a defined project arrangement?”

Start with the activity, not the attendance policy

An attendance-first approach establishes where people must be, then organizes activities within that requirement.

An activity-first approach examines the work and establishes the conditions it needs.

This does not mean eliminating offices or assuming that every task should be remote. It means distinguishing among concentrated individual work, routine coordination, exploratory collaboration, learning, relationship development, and client engagement.

Research illustrates why that distinction matters. Experiments found that videoconferencing inhibited creative idea generation, but did not make groups less effective at selecting which ideas to pursue.1 “Collaboration” is therefore too broad a category to justify a single location rule.

A useful test for gathering is:

What becomes possible or materially better because these particular people are together, and is that benefit worth the travel, time, and disruption?

Brainstorming, apprenticeship, resolving disagreements, and social reinforcement can all be legitimate purposes. They should be designed as such, rather than left to justify undifferentiated attendance after the fact.

RTO tension reveals a missing management agreement

Management has legitimate responsibilities for performance, coordination, organizational learning, and accountability. Staff have legitimate interests in avoiding unnecessary travel, protecting concentrated working time, and understanding why attendance is required.

The conflict becomes difficult to resolve when the two sides are discussing different things.

Staff may be asking whether their activities require physical presence. Management may be asserting its authority to establish attendance as a general condition of employment.

Neither an employee’s individual productivity figures nor a general appeal to “culture” necessarily resolves that disagreement. What is missing is an explicit agreement about how the organization will coordinate work, develop capability, and assess contribution.

Asynchronous work makes that agreement particularly important. It needs clear decision ownership, dependable handoffs, accessible records, response expectations, and ways to identify blocked work.

The alternative to attendance-based coordination is not the absence of structure. It is a different structure, designed deliberately.

Employment itself belongs in the redesign

The deeper issue is not whether employees can work from home. It is which continuing commitments make employment the appropriate relationship in the first place.

A useful redefinition for knowledge work is:

Employment is a continuing relationship through which an organization secures expertise and capacity for evolving responsibilities, while providing compensation, resources, security, and agreed limits on that commitment.

Under this definition, continuity and adaptability justify employment. Physical attendance does not define it.

Project contracting serves a different purpose: a person or group accepts responsibility for a bounded undertaking or agreed result. The group may organize its own methods, schedule, location, and contributions.

Organizations could consequently use a combination of continuing employees, persistent specialist groups, and autonomous project teams. The appropriate mix would follow from the responsibilities involved, rather than a presumption that every capability must be staffed internally.

This also changes the meaning of working time. Defined hours can establish the boundary of an employer’s claim and the availability needed for coordination, rather than serve as proof that productive work has occurred.

Removing attendance requirements must not create an unlimited obligation to be available. Nor should outcome-based assessment overlook experimentation, mentoring, or maintaining capabilities that matter beyond the next deliverable.

AI makes the staffing question unavoidable

AI introduces a second dimension of change: not only where knowledge work happens, but how much human participation particular activities require.

There are warning signs worth monitoring. Stanford’s August 2026 employment analysis found that young workers in highly AI-exposed occupations were falling behind less-exposed peers, primarily through reduced hiring rather than increased separations. The researchers did not find widespread economy-wide displacement and described their findings as indicators rather than causal estimates.2

For management, the implication is to plan across several possibilities: augmentation of existing teams, lower staffing requirements, new service demand, and changing pathways into professional work.

A smaller employed workforce does not automatically create a thriving project market. Automation could reduce demand for work previously purchased from contractors as well.

The planning challenge is to preserve the expertise, learning pathways, and accountability an organization needs while changing how work is produced.

A practical agenda for management

Over the coming decades, no single attendance policy or staffing forecast will provide a durable answer. A structured advisory process can help management connect decisions that are too often made separately:

  1. Map the work. Identify human contributions, dependencies, timing requirements, and the purposes of physical gathering.
  2. Design coordination. Establish decision rights, documentation, handoffs, availability, and accountability.
  3. Choose engagement arrangements. Determine which capabilities require continuing employment and which suit external groups or projects.
  4. Align spaces and travel. Make office requirements and gathering budgets consequences of the work model.
  5. Test and adapt. Evaluate arrangements against performance, learning, client outcomes, cost, and worker experience.

Geography follows these choices. Weekly attendance keeps workers tied to a practical commuting region; occasional gatherings permit a wider residential and recruitment range. Location policy is therefore also a talent and organizational-design decision.

The next management challenge is not restoring the office or abolishing employment. It is establishing what each is for.

Organizations need help making sense of these changes before committing to policies, staffing structures, and property decisions that may reinforce yesterday’s assumptions. The starting point is a better question: what work must we accomplish, what continuing responsibilities must we retain, and what arrangements best support both?

References

  1. Brucks, Melanie S., and Levav, Jonathan (2022). Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation. Nature, 605(7908), 108-112. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04643-y
  2. Stanford Digital Economy Lab employment research summary

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s now longer about whether to CCO or not. New model of knowledge work needed.

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When knowledge workers worked in centralized offices, they commuted to them because that’s where the tools of their trade were. Typewriters, mimeograph machines, photocopiers, plug and PBX switchboards and desk telephones and later, facsimile machines.

When desktop microcomputers emerged in the 1980s and later laptops and cell phones known as “personal communication devices,” their portability enabled their use in home offices just as easily as centralized commuter offices (CCOs). That was the beginning of the end of the office as it was known for a century.

It was the next development in information and communications technology that obsoleted the commute to CCO routine: the mass market Internet in the 1990s. That allowed these portable devices to transmit and receive and later virtually process (in the cloud and with generative AI) all forms of information: documents, data, numbers and voice and video communications.

The CCO’s primary function then became a gathering place for group work. How much gathering is necessary is currently a topic of much discussion and debate among knowledge organizations and their staffs. Every workday? Just some days of the week? For those who live within 50 miles of the CCO?

The topic has cleaved into two camps: office centralists and virtualtists.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, laments the Internet that disintermediated real time communication out of CCOs via “fucking Zoom” videoconferencing as it put it in a viral online rant. Dimon and other old school leaders like him believe co-located gathering is essential to knowledge work and career development. They’re willing to invest substantial amounts of money to create office space resembling first class hotel suites and associated amenities to facilitate assembling in person. There’s some practical rationale for this position relative to career development and training for younger workers.

For the other school of thought, gatherings requiring a commute to a CCO should be limited and purpose driven and not the everyday mode of working. Commuting to a CCO simply to do work that can be done in a home office isn’t worth the personal time and expense incurred. It’s a very strong utilitarian argument.

Resolving this split going forward will require the development of a new model of knowledge work disposes of quotidian office attendance and focuses on purposefully defining the need for gathering and the expected outcome, i.e. reaching a consensus or reaching a decision. That’s in line with the view of knowledge organizations as “decision factories” as Roger L. Martin described them in a 2013 Harvard Business Review article.

Knowledge workers saying no to the negative externality of commuting. Push back has implications for employment.

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As has been widely reported, tensions have erupted over the past two years or so between knowledge workers and their employers regarding expectations regarding office attendance. The tensions are largely economic over what economists call “negative externalities.”

Negative externalities are costs created by organizations as a consequence of their activities that are not directly borne by them but instead by external parties and society at large. A commonly cited example is environmental pollution by industrial activity. Or carbon emissions from commuting.

Post pandemic, knowledge workers have come to view the costs of personal time, transportation and other expenses of commuting to an office as a negative externality borne by them. Moreover, a negative externality that doesn’t make sense for them to incur in order to sit at a computer desk in a cube farm when they can just as easily do the same at home.

The push back has broader implications for employment since as traditionally defined, employers determine when, where and how work by employees is performed. For knowledge work, that has meant in a centralized, commute in office and mandatory attendance during specified hours.

Knowledge workers are effectively renegotiating the terms and conditions of employment. They are willing to do the work but are not as inclined to bear the costs of commuting to an office to accomplish it. For knowledge organizations, the situation may prompt them to reassess employment and question whether the industrial age model based on presence in a centralized office setting continues to make sense. They might instead rely more on contract work with agencies and individuals, seeing more value in paying for project deliverables and outcomes rather retaining large permanent staffs.

ICT’s disruption of traditional employment relationship basis of RTO tensions

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Advances in information and communications technology (ICT) over recent decades are fundamentally altering our perceptions of knowledge work: what it is and how and where it’s performed. Particularly in the context of the employment relationship between knowledge workers and knowledge organizations.

As legally defined in the United States, employment empowers the employer to determine when, where and how employees do their jobs. For knowledge work, that has traditionally meant 8-5, Monday through Friday in a commute in office setting owned or leased by the employer.

ICT advances have virtualized and decentralized knowledge work to the point that arrangement makes less and less sense. Knowledge workers can increasingly get their work done outside of those constraints of time and location. That gives them more ability to choose when and where they work.

Having that agency – the ability to decide – is at the heart of the return to office tensions between knowledge workers and their employers. To employers, it appears to undermine their traditional role to direct how, where and when work is performed.

Knowledge workers are now claiming agency over those domains, recognizing going through the motions of commuting daily to an office to use computers and phones in a sea of cubicles during a set time frame no longer makes much sense.

It really hasn’t since the dawn of the commercial Internet in the 1990s. The social distancing public health measures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic broke the habit of the daily commute to the office for both knowledge workers and knowledge organizations.

Habits change when behavior changes. The pandemic forced a change in behavior, making knowledge work less dependent on transportation of knowledge workers to commute in office locations. Modifying habits is how change fundamentally begins and becomes the new norm.

Organizational change: Shifting communication culture from real time spoken to async, writing-based.

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The current tensions between knowledge organizations their thought worker staffs over office presence didn’t start with the social distancing public health measures taken in response to the 2020 viral pandemic. They began decades earlier in the 1980s and 1990s with the widespread adoption of personal desktop – and later laptop – computers.

Those tools gave desk workers what Apple founder Steve Jobs called a “bicycle for our minds.” That freed them from relying on handwritten memos that were typed up and later, word processed. Memos, projects, financial documents, project and plans could now be created independently.

Then in the following decade came the mass market Internet. It effectively created bicycle lanes for all those new bicycles and personal communication devices like mobile phones and a decade later, smartphones.

Those bicycle lanes allow information to be created, collected, analyzed and decisions based upon it wherever a thought worker could “pedal” their devices. The paved concrete and asphalt motor vehicle lanes that once physically transported workers to centralized, commute in offices were no longer needed. Even meetings can be conducted without being seated around the traditional conference table.

For knowledge organizations, this is an enormous shift requiring adjustment. That transition from the pre-early 1980s office hasn’t been an easy one. That’s why organizations only gradually implemented it over four decades until the pandemic’s public health measures forced their hand.

That forcing function is generating the pushback we are seeing presently in the form of “return to office” mandates requiring everyone to commute into the office five days a week. But it goes against the longer-term trend wrought by the rapid advances in information and communications technology. They’ve come so fast — and to a head in 2020 – that organizations are undergoing what futurist Alvin Toffler termed “future shock” in his 1970 book of the same name.

Perhaps the most critical adjustment knowledge organizations must navigate on the bicycle lanes lies in their communication culture. In earlier decades when everyone gathered in centralized commuter offices, the communications culture was largely spoken more than written. Hence, lots of meetings. That supports a mindset that knowledge work requires co location so people can speak to one other face to face real time, whether in meeting rooms or passing by another’s desk on the way to the restroom or break room.

The spoken communication culture remained in place as organizations shifted meetings to videoconferences during the pandemic, leading to “Zoom fatigue” from hours of back-to-back online meetings. Here, the bicycles operated like their analog counterparts like when used by children to meet up in real time at a friend’s house.

But that’s not the best use of the digital bicycles and bike lanes. It’s using them like analog devices and not the digital ones they are, facilitating written and asynchronous communication. One company has outlined a communications framework that could serve as a framework knowledge organizations can use and modify as needed.

This is not to say real time spoken communication isn’t valuable. It certainly is and honors our human nature as social beings. However, it must be intentionally organized and conducted and not the default mode as it was in the pre-digital era.