The Hypocrisy Of RTO In A Growing Offshored Workforce
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Return-to-office mandates are back, and they’re louder than ever. CEOs are penning company-wide memos about the “magic of collaboration,” middle managers are booking mandatory in-person brainstorms, and badge-swipe data is being analyzed like it’s a key performance metric. But there’s a question hanging in the air that no one at the top seems interested in answering: If half the team is offshore, why does my physical presence in this office matter?
For years, companies have justified offshoring teams as a necessary move to cut costs and stay competitive. Talent in India, the Philippines, Eastern Europe—equally capable, more affordable, and increasingly integrated into core operations. Zoom calls at 8 a.m. and Slack messages with a twelve-hour lag are the new normal. That alone has made location irrelevant. So what’s with the sudden obsession with being back at your desk in Midtown, or WeWork in San Francisco, or a converted warehouse in Austin?
The defense for in-person work—spontaneity, creativity, serendipitous conversation—evaporates when half your collaborators are in another hemisphere. You can’t exactly tap someone on the shoulder when they’re asleep across the ocean. The presence of off-shored labor fully collapses the “we need to be in a room together” argument. The room, functionally, doesn’t exist and yet employees are still being told to “show face.”
It’s not just about productivity. It’s about optics, control, and performance. Being in the office signals loyalty. It’s become a new kind of workplace theater. Executives want to see their troops in formation, even if the battle is being fought on Google Meet.
The irony is loud. Employers who claim the moral high ground of culture, cohesion, and innovation are often the same ones who slashed local headcount and quietly rebuilt teams overseas. They’ve said “work is not a place” when it benefited the bottom line—but now that workers have tasted autonomy, suddenly the office is sacred again.
It’s hard to ask employees to believe in the spiritual value of the office when the company itself has gone global and remote by design. Harder still when those decisions were made not for culture, but for cost.
Still, there is a reason for employees to show up. Not because proximity breeds better work, but because visibility still matters in corporate environments. Being seen by leadership can accelerate careers. Presence creates proximity to opportunity. Like it or not, being in the office can function as a quiet signal: I’m here, I care, I’m ready. And in a climate where layoffs are routine and promotions rare, workers feel pressure to differentiate. Sometimes that just means showing up.
The return-to-office push isn’t about collaboration—it’s about control. It’s a visual reassurance for leadership, a culture marker for investors, and a message to employees: you’re still on our clock. But in a world where the org chart spans continents and time zones, the idea that a physical desk equals impact is outdated at best, disingenuous at worst.
Until companies reconcile their global workflows with their local expectations, the hypocrisy will keep echoing through open-concept offices: show up, even though it doesn’t matter—because it looks like it does.
