Martha Stewart said America will go down the drain if people don’t go back to the office full-time. President Bill Clinton told attendees at SHRM’s annual conference that we need people to go back to work (apparently remote doesn’t count). Google is cracking down on attendance. Salesforce will donate $10 a day to charity for each employee who comes into the office.

What’s in the water? Well, leave it to a VC with zero domain experience but lots of opinions on what’s happening to the workforce to chime in based on anecdotal stories.

“I’ve talked to multiple founders recently who have changed their minds about remote work and are trying to get people back to the office,” Paul Graham, cofounder of Y Combinator, wrote on Twitter. “I doubt things will go all the way back to the way they were before Covid, but it looks like they will go most of the way back” 

He surmised that “smart people (were) fooled” into thinking remote work works because it does work, at least initially, until it doesn’t. He joins other VCs — a class of people who routinely work anywhere other than an office and pat themselves on the back for innovation — who think that everyone else should be working at an office every day, because it makes VCs more money. 

It’s no fun picking on Graham. On the sliding scale of obnoxious VC know-it-alls, he seems pretty good at staying in his lane. At the same time, it’s just lazy.

There’s a much simpler explanation why organizations think, fairly or not, they are worse off remote or hybrid than they are back in the office: They haven’t done jack shit to adapt to a new normal. They are willing remote work toward failure, whether it’s intentional or not.

Outside of buying a Zoom subscription and offering up some sort of virtual hangouts on occasion, what have these suddenly remote-hesitant organizations done to make things better?

• They complain about the productivity of people hired over the last three years, but have they invested substantially in additional training?
• They decry the lack of connection, but have they done anything intentionally to foster it?
• Have managers changed their approach to management at all? Have employers helped those managers adjust their approach?
• Does anyone realize that undoing seven decades of office culture takes more than a couple of half-hearted attempts at figuring out how to run a remote organization?

With some exceptions, the answer to every one of those questions is no. Most companies are firing up their flux capacitors and going back to 2019, assuming it will make things all better. It’s so dumb.

The answer to this is simple: Most organizations will likely find they need to have a mixture of in-office and remote work, and not because it’s what’s best for them, but because it’s what’s best for employees. I know for me, remote work works. I’m celebrating 14 years doing what I love from wherever I am. For others, the situation isn’t as good.

But organizations can actually try to adapt, or they can complain without trying. I’ve yet to see an organization that has taken significant steps to make remote or hybrid arrangements work and then go straight back to five days a week in the office. If I’m wrong, let me know.