🤔 Does a business only look serious if people are physically visible in the office? If they work from home they’re not professionals anymore?…
Old-school managers want to see people
“People of a certain age, of a certain income bracket, all uniformly really like to see people when they’re at work. They just like it… It makes them feel like work is going on.” — Frances Frei, Harvard Business School
I hear this kind of thinking all the time: the assumption that a company only looks serious if people are physically visible, walking around in an office, badges on, chairs in a row.
Honestly? To me, “Workplace = office” is just tradition wearing a suit.
Do you need an office?
The office is not the solution. It’s a leftover from an industrial-era mindset — a poor fit for knowledge work in 2026.
You don’t need a fancy office to get meaningful work done. You need focus, context, and clarity — not designers’ chairs in a room. Work happens when decisions happen — not when people gather in the same space.
For 19+ years, I’ve run Nozbe with a fully remote team — no daily commutes, no badge-swiping rituals, no management by observation — and we’ve created real outcomes because we treat work as a thing to do, not a place to go.
So what if the office isn’t the problem — but the mindset around it is?
Open spaces optimize visibility, not deep thinking.
Commuting is the most widely accepted productivity tax in modern work.
Presence is easy to measure. Progress isn’t — but that’s what actually matters.
The real question is:
are we ready to redesign work around outcomes instead of locations?