When the productivity case for the office wobbles, the culture case steps in, and it is the more serious of the two. The claim is that something essential, trust, belonging, the shared understanding that lets a team move fast, is forged in physical proximity and cannot be fully reproduced on a screen. This is not obviously wrong, and treating it as reactionary nostalgia is a mistake. The honest task is to separate what the argument gets right from what it quietly assumes.
What it gets right
Culture, in the sense that matters for performance, is largely about whether people feel safe enough to speak up, admit error, and take interpersonal risks. Amy Edmondson's research established that this psychological safety is what enables the learning behavior that in turn drives team performance; the team's shared beliefs about safety are not a soft nicety but a mechanism with measurable consequences. And those beliefs are built through interaction, through the accumulated experience of watching how colleagues respond when you are wrong or uncertain. Shared time is one powerful way to accumulate that experience. To that extent, the culture argument is standing on solid ground.
The office also does real work that is easy to undervalue: the unplanned conversation, the fast repair of a misunderstanding, the sense of a shared endeavor that a grid of video tiles struggles to convey. A new hire absorbs norms faster by being around people who hold them. None of this is imaginary, and a leader who cares about culture is right to care about how it gets built. The question is whether the building is the thing doing the building.
What it gets wrong
The error is the slide from "culture needs shared experience" to "culture needs this office, on these days, for everyone." Psychological safety is produced by how people treat each other, not by the walls they treat each other within. A team can have high safety and rare colocation, or daily colocation and a culture of fear, where people stay silent because speaking up is punished. The mandate assumes the room supplies the safety. It does not. A toxic team in an open-plan office is still toxic, and forcing it to gather more often intensifies the toxicity rather than curing it.
Semler saw the office-as-culture equation collapse most clearly when he judged a best-employer award. It went to a bank where the tellers were not allowed to sit while a vice-president served kombucha, a workplace arranged to look like it had culture. Certifications of that kind, he noted, are paid for: the company pays the fee, runs its own survey, and hangs the plaque. Semco never had the plaque; it had a hammock in the middle of the office. The lesson is that culture is constantly confused with its trappings, and the office is the most expensive trapping of all, a physical stage set that can be mistaken for the thing it houses.
Build the mechanism, wherever it lives
The useful synthesis is to take the culture argument seriously enough to attack its actual mechanism rather than its proxy. If what a team needs is trust and safety, then the questions are how those get built and how much shared time this particular team requires to build them, which may be considerable for a new team and minimal for a settled one. That is an argument for deliberate, purposeful gathering, offsites, onboarding, the specific moments where colocation earns its cost, not for a standing five-day rule justified by a vague appeal to culture.
The companies that get this right invest in the mechanism directly. They design for psychological safety, they gather with intent when gathering serves the work, and they do not pretend that a full parking lot is the same as a healthy team. The ones that get it wrong hang the plaque, fill the building, and call it culture. The office can help build a good culture. It has never been able to substitute for one, and no mandate can make attendance do the work that only trust can.
Sources
- Edmondson (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams (ASQ). Team psychological safety enables learning behavior, which mediates team performance; culture's performance effect runs through shared beliefs, not physical space. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2307/2666999
- Frazier, Fainshmidt, Klinger, Pezeshkan & Vracheva (2017). Psychological Safety: A Meta-Analytic Review (Personnel Psychology). Work design and leadership, not location, are the primary antecedents of psychological safety. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12183