We Traded Rooms for Zooms… Was It Worth It?

We say we value connection.

Teamwork… collaboration… culture.
But what we’ve really built are screens.
And somewhere in that trade… pixels for presence… something essential went missing.
I’m just going to come out and say it: I like going to the office.
I like the idea of office space… I am a better “me” when I’m in a office structure.

That’s what I kept thinking while editing this week’s Thinking With Mitch Joel conversation with Peter Cappelli, the Wharton professor and co-author of In Praise of the Office.

Because the office was never just a building.
It was a kind of social technology… one we may have accidentally uninstalled.
A place that taught us how to read a room, not just a spreadsheet.
Where mentorship wasn’t scheduled… it happened in the spaces between things.
Where young people learned by osmosis and older ones stayed relevant by listening.

We’ve come to think of the office as a cost center… a problem that needed to be solved.

Square footage… rent… overhead… inefficient for “actual work.”
But that misses the point.
The office was the original platform for professional emotional bandwidth.
It was where empathy scaled.
Where learning spread by proximity.
Where the sound of someone’s sigh told you more than their Slack thread ever could.

Peter said something that stuck with me… that when we moved work online, we gained flexibility… but we lost friction.

And friction was the point.
Those awkward pauses in the hallway, the impromptu check-ins, the unplanned glances…
They weren’t inefficiencies.. they were information.
They told you who was struggling, who was thriving, who just needed a quiet word or a coffee.

Without that, leadership becomes a dashboard.

Feedback loops become data, not dialogue.
And culture turns into a mood board instead of a lived experience.
Yes, remote work gave us freedom.
Yes, there are many jobs that don’t require an office.
Yes, you can build a company without an office.
Yes, some people might be better if left alone with their work.
Yes, many companies have many offices in many different culture across a myriad of time zones.

I’m starting to feel that this whole ‘office bad’ ideology is wrong… that we’ve forgotten how much these shared spaces help us grow.

The social cues that refine us.
The humanity that humbles us.
The glances and camaraderie that create real lived experiences.
The small collisions.
Those moments don’t scale digitally… they barely survive email.
The office isn’t just about getting things done… it’s about becoming together.

When I think about my own career, I don’t remember the Zooms.

I remember the corridor conversations.
The post-meeting walks.
The small silences between decisions.
The person who popped into my office to show me something new.

Those were the places where culture (and professional growth) happened.

Not as a mission statement… but as a pulse.
Maybe what we’re missing isn’t productivity.
Maybe it’s presence.
Maybe the next evolution of work isn’t remote or hybrid or AI-assisted…

Maybe it’s rediscovering what the office was trying to teach us all along.

That just because there are other ways to get great work done doesn’t make this a zero-sum game.
That culture is a contact sport.
That proximity builds empathy.
That being together… really together… was never the inefficiency.

It was the point.

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