Did remote work break company culture?
Working from home didn't break culture. It exposed it. If your company only works when everyone's in the same room, that's proximity, not culture. But fully remote has gaps too. Trust builds faster in person. Ideas are sharper when people are together. Urgency is easier to feel side by side. Remote is great for focus. In person is amazing for alignment. The whole game is knowing the difference between the two.
Let me start with the uncomfortable part, because it's the part most leaders skipped past during the last five years.
What is the difference between proximity and culture?
When offices emptied out, a lot of companies discovered that whatever was holding them together didn't survive the building going quiet. Teams that seemed tight fell apart. Communication that seemed strong turned out to be hallway osmosis. The culture everyone bragged about turned out to be a function of everyone being in the same place at the same time. Take away the place, and there was nothing underneath.
That's the thing people got wrong when they said remote broke their culture. Remote didn't break anything. It removed the prop the culture had been leaning on, and the culture fell over on its own. If your team only works when they're forced into proximity, proximity was the product. The culture was a story you told about the proximity.
Real culture is what survives the building being empty. It's the shared standard people hold when nobody's watching. It's the way someone on your team treats a customer at 9 PM from their kitchen table with no manager in sight. That either exists or it doesn't, and the office was hiding the answer for a lot of companies. Remote just turned the lights on.
Is remote work or in-person work better?
Now, I want to be fair to the other side of this, because the fully remote crowd has its own blind spot, and it's just as real.
Something does get lost when a team is never together. I've felt it. Trust builds faster in person. There's no version of a video call that builds rapport the way sitting across a table does. Ideas are sharper when people are in a room, because the best thinking often happens in the messy back and forth that does not survive a scheduled thirty-minute Zoom with an agenda. And urgency, real shared urgency, is easier to feel when you're side by side. When the person next to you is heads down on something that matters, you feel it. Through a screen, you mostly don't.
So both camps are half right, which is why the debate never ends. The remote camp is right that you can get more focused work done at home. The office camp is right that something irreplaceable happens when people are together. The mistake is treating it as a war with a winner. It's not. They're two different tools for two different jobs.
What does the research say about hybrid work and productivity?
Here's the framing I keep coming back to. Remote is for focus. In person is for alignment.
Focus is solo work. Deep, heads-down, uninterrupted execution. The thing you need three undisturbed hours for. Home is better for that than the office almost every time, because the office is an interruption machine. There's research that backs this up. Stanford economist Nick Bloom, who has studied this longer than almost anyone, ran a large randomized trial published in Nature in 2024 and found that hybrid schedules produced no loss in productivity at all, and cut quit rates by about a third. The focused work does not suffer when you let people do it where focused work actually happens.
Alignment is the opposite kind of work. It's getting a group of people pointed in the same direction, building the trust that makes hard conversations possible, making the judgment calls that need everyone in the room reading the same body language. That work is worse over video, not because the technology is bad, but because alignment runs on signals that the screen flattens. The room carries information the call drops.
How should leaders decide between remote and in-person work?
So the leaders who are winning right now are not the ones who picked a side. They're the ones who figured out which kind of work they were asking for, and matched the setting to it. They bring people together on purpose, for the things proximity is actually good for. Strategy. Hard decisions. Trust-building. New teams forming. And they leave people alone for the things that need focus, which is most of the actual execution.
The failure mode on both ends comes from confusing the two. Drag everyone into the office five days a week and then make them sit on video calls with people in other cities, and you've got the cost of proximity with none of the benefit. Go fully remote and never bring anyone together, and you slowly lose the alignment that makes a group of talented people into a team instead of a collection of contractors. Both are the same mistake. Both come from not knowing the difference.
I think about this constantly as I build, because I'm making these calls in real time. When do we need to be together, and when am I just imposing proximity out of habit because it feels like control. The honest answer is that most of the time, the work is focus work, and people do it better left alone. But the moments that actually set the direction of the company, those are worth getting everyone in a room for. Not because the office is sacred. Because alignment is, and the room is the best tool I have for it.
Previously I wrote that the best AI doesn't add to your workload, it leaves the process cleaner than it found it. The same logic applies to how you structure a team. The setting should serve the work, not the other way around. If your in-person policy is creating more friction than alignment, it's failing the same test a bad AI tool fails. It's adding cost without adding value. And if your remote setup is quietly eroding trust because the team never connects as humans, that's a cost too, just a slower and more invisible one.
The leaders who get this right over the next decade won't be the loudest voices on either side of the return-to-office fight. They'll be the quiet ones who stopped arguing about where work happens and started asking what kind of work they were trying to do. Focus or alignment. Solo or together. Once you know which one you're after, the answer about where it should happen is obvious.
Working from home didn't break your culture. It told you the truth about it. And the office was never the culture. It was the place you kept the culture you actually built, or the place you hid the fact that you hadn't built one yet. The leaders willing to hear that are the ones who come out of this era with teams that work anywhere, because the thing holding them together was never the room.
*Judd Hoffman is CEO and Co-Founder of Ethica AI, building AI-powered tools for real estate transaction workflows.*