Should companies force workers to return to the office?

Over the past couple of years, I’ve watched a familiar pattern re-emerge. Businesses that once championed progressive working are quietly reinstating office mandates.

Some are doing it openly, others through subtle pressure: ‘anchor days’, compulsory in-person meetings, career-limiting signals for those who aren’t present in person often enough.

The rationale is always similar. Leaders tell me collaboration is suffering, culture is fraying, productivity is harder to see.

I understand the anxiety. But I also believe these decisions fundamentally misdiagnose the problem. The issue is not where people work. It’s how work itself is designed, measured and led.

Forcing people back into offices is not a return to stability; it is a retreat to familiarity. And familiarity is not the same as effectiveness.

My business partner, Alex Hirst, and I have spent more than a decade exploring a different approach, one we named ‘workstyle’: the freedom for individuals to personalise their work around their unique needs.

What is workstyle?

We didn’t arrive at this idea theoretically. We arrived there through burnout, parenthood, two cancer diagnoses, caring responsibilities, and running a business through engaging the people within it in a completely new way.

We run two organisations entirely through autonomous, workstyle working, have supported thousands of individuals to define and respect their own workstyles, and gathered longitudinal research into the impact of autonomy on wellbeing and productivity.

Our work has seen us named among the 50 most progressive organisations in the world by Thinkers50 - a global ranker of management ideas - and the Haier Model Institute, which is Chinese tech firm Haier's think tank, and among the five most influential HR Thinkers by HR Magazine in both 2025 and 2026.

Yet we remain frustrated. Because so many organisations are moving in the wrong direction at a time when the digital age is providing them with the opportunity to thrive in a new era of work design.

What we have learned is simple, but uncomfortable for many leaders: autonomy, not attendance, is the lever that drives sustainable performance and competitive advantage in the digital age.

Hybrid working is often presented as the ‘modern’ solution: a sensible compromise between the old world of offices and the new reality of remote work.

Is hybrid working the best model for companies?

In practice, it usually means flexing around an unchanged core assumption grounded in industrial-age thinking - that work happens at set times, in synchronous ways, and the only change is that sometimes this is at home rather than in an office.

Importantly none of these progressive working practices - hybrid working, flexible working, or the four-day work week - challenges the deeper question of why we still measure work through time and location.

Work design for the digital age requires more than a policy change about how many days employees can work from home. Workstyle is different. It is a redesign of the psychological contract between people and work.

It shifts the focus from hours to outcomes, from control to clarity, from compliance to trust. It sharpens accountability, reduces friction and enables sustainable contribution.

Workstyle offers a practical, embedded framework that supports managers, strengthens wellbeing and improves results.

By removing structural barriers that disadvantage many groups, inclusion becomes a natural outcome of work design that simply functions better for everyone, allowing everyone to be at their personal productive best.

Evidence for autonomous working is robust.

• Randstad’s 2025 global survey identified work-life balance as the top criteria for attracting talent
• Research on Best Buy in the US shows a 45 per cent reduction in attrition in results-only work environments
• Gallup found employees with high schedule control are 2.7 times more likely to be highly engaged at work
• Nick Bloom at Stanford University found that - when aligned with employee preference - self-chosen work arrangements can increase productivity by up to 22 per cent.

Workstyle working improves attraction, retention, engagement and productivity - so how do leaders make it happen in practice?

How to lead remote workers

Moving to autonomous working does not mean lowering standards. In fact, it demands the opposite. When time and presence are removed as proxies for effort, leaders must become much more precise about what they expect.

The first shift is letting go of presenteeism. Many of us were taught, implicitly or explicitly, that good work looks like being busy and visible. Autonomy exposes how flawed that assumption is.

Leaders need to replace it with explicit definitions of value: what outcomes matter, what quality looks like, and how success is measured.

The second shift is from control to clarity. Autonomy without clarity creates anxiety, not freedom.

The most effective autonomous organisations invest heavily in intentional work design and the culture that is needed to support it.

This includes a shared understanding of responsibilities, decision rights, roles and boundaries. It requires that empowerment and expectations are clearly articulated, and employees are upskilled in the behaviours to underpin this way of working.

How to implement autonomous working

Implementing autonomous, workstyle-led working requires more than policy change; it requires redesigning how individuals, teams and leaders operate.

Drawing on our Digital-Age Performance Model, the following five steps help organisations transition from traditional oversight to a system rooted in autonomy, trust and high performance.

1 Design freedom within a framework

Autonomy works best when grounded in well-defined parameters. Set out the essential organisational boundaries – purpose, priorities, outputs and decision rights – so everyone knows what matters.

Then give people real freedom to decide how they deliver within that structure. This balance of clarity and choice enables consistent performance without unnecessary constraints or wasted energy.

2 Accountability and autonomy go hand-in-hand

Autonomy does not remove interdependence. High-performing workstyle teams rely on transparent commitments, clear communication, proactive co-operation and strong collaboration.

Encourage individuals and teams to articulate not just how they work best, but how they will remain dependable to others. This clarity transforms autonomy from a solo endeavour into a collective capability.

3 Invest in the skills for autonomous working

Autonomy works when individuals have the right skills and self-awareness. Support people to develop the core capabilities at the heart of personal productivity: self-understanding, self-motivation, self-management and self-improvement.

These are not ‘nice-to-have’ traits; they are the building blocks that allow people to work in a workstyle way without losing focus or momentum.

4 Redefine leadership for the digital age

Leaders must shift from supervising activity to enabling performance. Digital-age leadership is defined by context-setting, trust-building, clarity of outputs and role-modelling the behaviours that support autonomy.

When leaders demonstrate confidence in their teams, set expectations around outcomes, and create psychological safety, they unlock both independence and alignment.

5 Create an environment that reinforces performance - not presence

Workstyle thrives when the environment supports it. Ensure your organisation has an authentic purpose that is lived and visible.

Create a familial culture that fosters shared beliefs and a sense of belonging.

And embed super-agile structures that define roles by output, embrace asynchronous practices, and provide ‘work-anywhere’ technology.

Why do bosses dislike remote working?

Resistance to autonomous working is rarely about employees. It is about leadership anxiety: fear of losing control, fear of reduced productivity, fear that culture will dissolve without proximity.

What our experience shows is that these risks are highest when autonomy is half-hearted. Partial flexibility creates ambiguity and mistrust. Full autonomy, designed intentionally, replaces informal assumptions with explicit agreements. Culture becomes something you articulate and live, not something you hope emerges from a shared space.

Another of the biggest fears I hear is that autonomy will advantage some more than others. In reality, opaque norms already do that. When progression, reward and recognition are tied to outputs rather than conformity, fairness improves, not deteriorates.

The debate about returning to the office is a distraction. The real choice facing leaders is whether they will continue to retrofit flexibility onto an industrial age model of work, or redesign work for the reality we now live in.

Workstyle is not about where people sit. It is about whether we trust adults to do meaningful work in ways that allow them to thrive. Organisations that embrace autonomous working are more resilient, more inclusive and better equipped for uncertainty.

The future of work is not something we are waiting for. It is already here. The real test for a leader is whether they are brave enough to embrace it, and design work intentionally for their organisation.

Further reading:

How to build and manage a hybrid team

Two strategies to avoid making yourself replaceable at work

How does hybrid working affect talent management?

Does hybrid working always improve equality and inclusion?

Lizzie Penny is a Warwick Business School alum having studied BSc International Business with Spanish. She is Co-Founder & Joint CEO of Workstyle CIC, a not-for-profit that helps organisations respond to the changing nature of work by providing the evidence, inspiration and guidance needed to optimise work design for the AI-era.

Develop the ability to lead with clear purpose with the four-day Executive Education programme, The Strategic Mindset of Leadership, at WBS London at The Shard.

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