Recently, companies have been implementing return-to-office policies to various degrees. People have mixed feelings about RTO: some people prefer to work from home or in hybrid mode, while some prefer going to the office.

Personally, I’m a staunch supporter of going to the office 5 days a week, and doing away with remote work altogether. Here’s why:

In the office, I can come up with better ideas

As a tech company, we’re in the business of innovation. We survive or die based on the quality of our ideas.

Working together in person is not just more efficient. More importantly, the quality of ideas you come up with in person is a lot higher.

Some of the best ideas we’ve ever come up with as a team were through in-person white-boarding sessions where we bounced idea off each other. Each person could build on another’s idea, and you can just feel the creative juice flowing. It was so much fun, too.

Sure, you can do these meetings online too. But in my opinion, online meetings are 50% the efficiency, 10% the creativity, and 5% the fun, compared to offline meetings.

You can still brainstorm online, but this is what will happen:

  • People will be distracted (63% of people multitask during video meetings).
  • People will speak over each other (Sorry, you go ahead first. No, you can go ahead.)
  • People feel less relaxed and engaged, so they might be less inclined to say what’s on their mind.
  • Strings of thought will be interrupted by “Sorry can you hear me?” “Your connection is down” “Can you see my screen?”.

Of course, you can do stuff like “sync ups” or “status updates” online. But these meetings are usually so boring that people are not listening anyway.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI – arguably one of the most innovative companies on the planet – said that remote work was a “huge mistake” and it should be “over”.

I’m happier in the office

Being able to talk to colleagues in person makes me happy. Only when you go to the office can you truly make friends at work, and research has found that having friends at work is a key contributor to workplace satisfaction.

Casual exchanges with colleagues also give me a lot of business insights. I can hear the latest customer visit stories from the customer success team, the pitch stories from the sales team, anecdotes on interesting customers… Since people are more relaxed, they share more. I’ve found that the best way to get to know a business or a team is to grab casual lunches with its members.

In contrast, video calls must happen for a reason and have a set topic, so you usually can’t really just chat casually without a particular agenda. This makes the interaction very formalized and prevents spontaneity.

I also like being able to just walk to someone’s desk and quickly run an idea by them. No idea can be generated alone. Everything good I’ve produced, it’s because I ran it by or brainstormed with someone else. They are the collective wisdom of members from multiple areas of specialty.

Some people say that they get interrupted a lot in the office. But even when you’re at home, you’re still interrupted hundreds of times a day by messages, emails, or other people living in your household. I find that the in-person exchange of ideas far outweighs the cost of occasional interruptions.

When I work from home, I feel lonely—probably because I’m looking at a screen all day long. To make yourself happy, look at people, not screens.

In the office, I actually work fewer hours, but am more productive

I still remember the days during the covid lockdown. I would wake up, start working at my desk, and work all the way until when I go to bed. The only time when I paused was to pick up my lunch and dinner deliveries. Even then, I was often eating while doing video calls at the same time. It was quite depressing. And my health also suffered from the lack of movement and exercise.

When I work at home, I tend to do nothing else. Since I’m doing messages and meetings from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, it’s extremely difficult to unplug. And since everyone needs to constantly keep everyone informed, I was often in back-to-back meetings all day long (sometimes up to 12 meetings a day), without any break.

It was also inefficient. Something that takes a 2-minute in-person conversation to clarify can often stretch into a 10-minute back-and-forth messaging storm.

When I’m in the office, I can get more done in fewer hours, inject some light exercise into the day (walking to office, walking to lunch, walking to meeting rooms etc), and actually have a life.

The above is just my personal opinion, which is shaped by my circumstances. I don’t have kids or family members to take care of at home, and I don’t have a super long commute. I totally understand if people wanna work from home for these reasons. But I still believe that when circumstances allow it, people should try to work in person as much as they can.

This is especially the case for young people who are fresh out of school. I recently read that Gen Z is more interested in working from the office than any other generation. This makes so much sense.

If I were a new grad today, I would refuse to work from home and try go into the office every day. When you’re just out of school, you should optimize for learning and growth. And the best way to learn is through osmosis. That requires being around other colleagues, face to face. And the opportunities for informal chats will give you a chance to actually find mentors within your company. You also need to build trust within your organization which is hard to do over video calls. Also you most likely don’t have family or kids yet, so it will be easier for you to go into the office. So I would literally live in an apartment close to the office and go in every day.

Published by Zara Zhang

Zara Zhang works at ByteDance in its Beijing office. Previously, she was an investment analyst at GGV Capital (first in the Menlo Park office, then in the Beijing office), a venture capital firm that invests in companies in the US, China, and other emerging markets. She has interned as a reporter covering China’s tech industry for The Information. Her writings have been published on The Harvard Crimson, Harvard Magazine, Foreign Policy, Huffington Post, and China Personified. She has also worked as a marketing intern at ZhenFund. Zara graduated from Harvard University Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in psychology. At Harvard, she wrote and edited for The Harvard Crimson, led the organization of Harvard China Forum (a 1,000-people conference featuring leaders from China and the US), and ran a weekly newsletter about food around the university. Zara grew up in Changchun, a city in northeast China, and received her secondary education in Singapore. A language enthusiast, she is trained in Chinese-English interpretation and translation, speaks French and Japanese, and can sing in Cantonese. Zara co-hosted “996”, a podcast where she and GGV managing partner Hans Tung interviewed leaders in US-China cross-border tech and entrepreneurship. Listen on iTunes, Overcast, Spotify, SoundCloud, or search “996” in any podcast app.

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