For many white-collar workers, how often your boss expects to see you in the office is the defining debate of our times.

It’s the question that continues to divide business leaders and workers. At its heart, it’s a debate about culture, growth and productivity. But are these decisions steeped in personal bias or real data?

For now, the back-to-the-office movement is gaining pace. Nearly 80 percent of U.S. CEOs say remote work will be dead within three years.

Meanwhile, remote-only roles are dwindling post-pandemic. Just 13 percent of Brits worked from home full-time in 2024, down from nearly 40 percent during the Covid-19 pandemic peak in 2021. The same is true in the United States: only 13.8 percent of Americans now work primarily from home, down from 17.9 percent in 2021.

“Remote work is not compatible with a high ambition level plus high speed,” Carl Pei, founder and CEO of Nothing, a producer of smartphones and accessories that’s received investment from EQT Ventures, said in a company-wide email in the summer of 2024.

Nothing is not alone. The pro-office camp also includes PC maker Dell, retail giant Amazon, consultancy PwC and Wall Street stalwart Morgan Stanley, who argue that in-person working boosts productivity, creativity and innovation.

Ollie Purdue, who founded UK fintech Loot and now runs restaurant rewards app Shuffle, argues the office isn’t just important for big banks, it’s also key for small companies like his.

“It’s definitely better – especially before product-market fit – to have everyone in the same room. Stuff happens much faster,” he says. “In-person, you get way better communication and alignment.”

Purdue’s equally down on hybrid working, where staff split their time between home and office.

“Hybrid is bullshit,” argues Purdue. “With hybrid, you just pay London salaries for people to sit at home…it’s the worst of both worlds.”

Remote working data

There’s one issue with the productivity argument: the data is fuzzy. A meta-analysis of 108 studies found remote workers generally have better outcomes than their office-based colleagues. Still, prestigious studies from the U.S. National Bureau of Economics argue remote is worse.

For some execs, it’s simply a case of gut feeling that workers lose motivation when they aren’t closely scrutinized.

It’s not just execs who love the office; a strong contingent of employees do too. Thirty-seven percent of UK workers say they never want to work from home. This group – largely made up of under 35s – stresses that business is a networking game, and in-person interactions foster stronger relationships and mentorship.

The courts are also on-side. In June 2024, a UK judge rejected the case of a senior manager who sued her employer for forbidding her to work from home full-time. The judge’s ruling stated that there were “weaknesses with remote working.” It followed dozens of UK employment spats in the past two years. HR consultancy Hamilton Nash says they expect more to come. That means return-to-office mandates could come with a fight – one that not even free office food can pacify.

The case for remote working

On the other end of the debate is the staunchly anti-office contingent. The “work from anywhere” camp is embraced by Shopify, Airbnb, Gitlab, Coinbase and Zapier.

That’s prompted a seismic change in how business is done. Startups like Deel have boomed amid the need to onboard and pay workers who aren’t physically in the same country or office. Meanwhile, dedicated recruitment platforms now exclusively list remote jobs to attract anti-office talent.

Jason Fried, a serial U.S. entrepreneur and author of It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, says there are clear productivity benefits to being remote, including eroding presenteeism.

“In-person organizations are usually mired in meetings and distractions because it’s so easy to just pull a bunch of people into a room. Huge waste,” he says.

Firms do seem to get more bang for the buck from remote work. The average remote working day now runs from 8:45 a.m. to 5:22 p.m., over 30 minutes longer than the traditional 9-5.

Fried says remote work has also proven helpful in attracting top, diverse talent.

“It’s ridiculously short-sighted only to hire people who are within a commute’s distance,” he says. “We’ve been able to hire exceptional people in dozens of countries,” something that would have been impossible if they’d only looked inside “a 30-mile radius.”

The data seems to support this. A 2022 LinkedIn report found that remote-work positions attract four times more candidates than their in-office counterparts.

Remote work’s appeal for employees is more obvious: without a commute, there’s a chunk of extra time in the day. But the fully remote set-up is less popular with staff than you might think. Just 20 percent of Brits currently want to work fully remotely, according to a McKinsey study.

This may be because few companies have managed to master remote-first culture, says strategist Laurel Farrer, highlighting the need to replace clunky old processes to suit the “virtual” set-up.

“Successful remote work requires updates to knowledge and performance management,” she says. “Business (cannot) operate the same way it always has.”

Today, going remote is broadly a philosophical preference, built around maximizing trust in staff and their freedom.

Ellen Donnelly, who writes on the future of work, believes that to settle the debate, a fundamental shift in thinking around employment is needed.

“The future of work will require organizations that want to attract the best talent to acknowledge they do not ‘own’ their employees,” she says. “Rather, they can hire talent (permanently or temporarily) on terms that are mutually agreed.”

The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of the EQT AB group ("EQT") itself or any investment professional at EQT.