RTO is not about collaboration. It’s about trust and measurement.
Take a look at this chart. It represents one of the biggest disconnects in the modern workplace.
Source: “Hybrid work is just work. Are we doing it wrong?” Work Trend Index Pulse Report, Microsoft, 2022.
On one side, you have the lived experience of your employees. On the other, the perception of your managers. According to a landmark 2022 study by Microsoft, a staggering 87% of employees report they are productive working remotely, while only 12% of leaders have full confidence that their remote team is productive.
Microsoft coined a term for this chasm: Productivity Paranoia.
Now, it's fair to analyze this data with a critical eye. Critics rightly note that Microsoft has a clear business interest in the future of hybrid work and that "productivity" is a subjective, self-reported metric. But to focus only on that is to miss the forest for the trees. The key insight isn't the objective truth of a single number, but the massive chasm in perception it reveals. When the overwhelming majority of your workforce believes they are productive and leadership fundamentally disagrees, you have a crisis of trust and alignment.
A crisis in accountability
This leadership paranoia doesn't exist in a vacuum. It’s a symptom of a much deeper issue: most companies lack a credible way to measure what truly matters, so they default to measuring what’s easy: presence.
The old model of performance management is fundamentally broken. Data from Gallup reveals that only 14% of employees say performance reviews motivate them to improve, and an abysmal 5% of managers are satisfied with their company’s performance management system.
Source: Ben Wigert and Jim Harter, “Re-engineering performance management.” Gallup, 2017.
This isn't just a morale issue; it's a performance issue. Employees want to be held accountable. When you build better systems to do so, the results are transformative. Organizations with effective performance management are 1.5 times more likely to financially outperform their peers. When managers hold their teams accountable, employees are 2.5 times more likely to be engaged.
1.5
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Organizations with effective performance management are 1.5 times more likely to outperform peers financially
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Employees are 2.5 times more likely to be engaged when their manager holds them accountable for their performance
Sources: 1.5 times more likely to have financial results that are significantly better than their peers: Gartner, Inc. (2018). The guide to continuous performance management; 2.5 times more likely to be engaged: Ben Wigert and Jim Harter, “Re-engineering performance management.” Gallup, 2017.
Deconstructing the RTO narrative
With this context, the official justifications for RTO mandates – enhancing collaboration and productivity – begin to look less like strategy and more like a solution in search of a problem.
RTO advocates are right about one thing: productivity is more than just individual task completion. It includes complex elements like mentorship, cultural cohesion, and spontaneous innovation. The critical flaw in their logic, however, is believing that mandatory attendance is a reliable strategy to generate these outcomes. It mistakes proximity for performance, leaving collaboration to chance encounters at the water-cooler.
The real goal: shifting from proximity to collective intelligence
The question isn't "How do we get people back in the office?" The question is, "How do we solve for complex challenges like collaboration and innovation in a deliberate, scalable way?"
The answer lies in building your organization's Collective Intelligence (CI). It's not about where you work, but how you work together. This requires a new leadership playbook: an "operating system" for CI.
Foundational culture: It starts with leader humility and curiosity and a culture of psychological safety where teams can engage in blameless learning from failure.
Intelligent interaction: This requires processes that guarantee equality of conversational turn-taking and intentionally weave in perspective diversity to avoid groupthink.
Execution architecture: This final layer embeds CI into your organization's DNA. It means implementing structured collaboration processes and modern performance intelligence systems. This layer is often the most challenging, as it requires moving away from the archaic annual reviews that, as we've seen, have lost all credibility.
Reconciling RTO with a high-trust culture
This brings us back to the RTO push. If the goal is a high-trust culture built on psychological safety and collective intelligence, a mandate rooted in a lack of confidence can feel like a contradiction.
The executive push for RTO is often perceived by employees as an exercise in power and control. This is a massive problem because a strategy based on mistrust is philosophically incompatible with the high-trust environment leaders claim they want to build.
The path to a high-performing, engaged workforce isn't paved with office mandates. It's built on a foundation of trust, accountability, and a genuine commitment to measuring what matters.
About the author
Mark McCarvill is the Founder and Lead Facilitator at Mind Meeting Group, a strategy consulting firm based outside Vancouver, Canada. Mind Meeting Group helps business, government, and non-profit leaders align departments and mobilize teams through collaborative workshops that deliver execution-ready strategies.