Nik Froehlich is the CEO and Founder of Saritasa, an Information Technology and Services company, since 2005.
The return-to-office debate clicked for me at Saritasa when the pandemic dust settled and I watched who voluntarily came back. Some of our most trusted people rushed in to rebuild what one of them called a “burnt-down farm,” craving the gravity of shared space. Other equally valuable leaders stayed home and stayed highly productive. Watching our best people thrive in opposite environments convinced me that a sweeping location mandate would answer the wrong question.
That moment stayed with me because it captured what I’ve come to believe about the entire return-to-office debate: when leaders reach for mandates, they’re usually responding to a real problem. They can feel that something has slipped. Maybe work takes longer than it should, commitments go soft, or nobody seems quite sure who owns what. The office feels like the answer because it’s the most visible lever available, but in my experience running a software development firm through the full arc of remote work, the office was never the variable that mattered; accountability was.
Accountability Makes Location Trivial
Here’s the pattern I’ve seen repeatedly across our teams and our clients’ teams: when a person consistently defines what they’re going to do, does it and raises their hand early when something threatens the plan, nobody asks where they’re sitting. It genuinely stops mattering. The question of location becomes an administrative detail, like which laptop they use.
The reverse is harder to accept, because there’s a legitimate management instinct underneath the mandate. Seeing someone at their desk is real evidence of engagement, and being nearby lets a manager catch confusion in the hallway before it becomes a missed deadline. That visibility has value. What it can’t do is substitute for accountability, because when accountability is absent, proximity doesn’t restore it. A developer who misses commitments from home will miss them from a desk twenty feet away from you. You’ll have more visibility into the missing, which can feel like progress, but watching someone struggle is a different thing from fixing why they struggle. I’ve watched companies bring everyone back and find the same delivery problems waiting for them in the building.
This is why I’d encourage tech leaders to reframe the debate they’re having. The interesting question was always whether your organization has the capability to define outcomes, track commitments and address slippage directly. Companies without it will underperform in any configuration, and the office will simply make the underperformance easier to ignore, because attendance starts to substitute for evidence, while companies with that capability can work from anywhere.
What Clear Commitments Look Like In An Engineering Org
Making accountability real in an engineering organization starts with outcomes that are specific enough to be checked. “Making progress on the integration” is not a commitment. “The payment API will be in staging by Thursday, and I’ll flag by Tuesday if that’s at risk” is one. The difference sounds small in writing, but it changes the entire texture of management, because the second version creates a moment in the future where reality either matches the plan or it doesn’t.
I’ve seen this show up as a rhythm rather than a system. Work is scoped into commitments that fit within a short window, usually a sprint, and each commitment has a name and a definition of done that a person outside the team can verify. When something is at risk, the expectation is that the person raises it before the deadline, because surfacing a problem early is seen as a sign of ownership.
I want to be clear about what this is not, because the surveillance software industry has given accountability a bad name. Tracking commitments means knowing what was promised and whether it arrived. It does not require monitoring keystrokes, taking screenshots of laptops, or measuring hours of visible activity. If your accountability model depends on watching people work, you’ve built a model of activity and activity was never the thing you were paying for.
The Conversation The Office Lets You Avoid
The hardest part of all this has nothing to do with tooling or process. When someone’s performance slips, a manager has two options. They can sit down with that person and say, specifically, “You committed to these three things and two didn’t happen, so let’s understand why.” Or they can find a structural change that feels like action, and requiring office attendance is the most socially acceptable structural change available. It lets a manager respond to a performance problem without ever naming it to the person who has it.
I understand the appeal. The direct conversation is uncomfortable, and the mandate feels decisive, but the mandate outsources a management responsibility to a building. In my experience, managers who avoid direct conversation at home will avoid it in person too, just from a shorter distance.
So my advice to leaders wrestling with RTO decisions is to run a simple diagnostic first. For any team where you’re tempted to mandate attendance, ask whether you could list what each person committed to last month and whether it shipped. If you can’t, the office won’t fix that, because your problem is upstream of location. And if you can, you may find the mandate solving a problem you don’t actually have.
There are good reasons to bring people together. Communication moves faster in shared space, mentorship happens more naturally and complex collaboration benefits from a room and a whiteboard. I’ve invested in offices for exactly those reasons. But those are affirmative reasons. Attendance as a substitute for accountability serves neither, and the sooner leaders separate the two questions, the better their answers to both will be.
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