The office plant is always at its desk. It is available for photographs, never complains about commuting, and contributes no software. The joke is not that offices are useless. It is that being easy to observe is a very low standard for performance.
Leaders deciding how a team should work need to connect the arrangement to outcomes. Attendance can establish where someone was. It cannot, by itself, establish whether a customer problem was solved or a team became more capable.
Keep the research in its actual context
A 2024 Nature paper reported a randomized trial at Trip.com in which a hybrid arrangement with two home-working days per week reduced quits by about one-third, with no detected performance damage in the study's measures.
This was one company and one hybrid arrangement. It is not a verdict about every role, every fully remote team, or every office policy. The relative reduction in quits is also not a reduction of one-third of the whole workforce.
The useful leadership lesson is to evaluate an arrangement with evidence relevant to the work, rather than treating either office presence or remote flexibility as a complete explanation of performance.
Define what good work looks like before changing location
Agree on the outcomes the team owns and the quality constraints that matter. Include customer impact, delivery reliability, collaboration, and access to information. For roles with different responsibilities, avoid pretending that one simple output count makes everyone comparable.
Clarify working agreements too. When must people be available for decisions? How are urgent issues handled? Where do technical decisions live? A remote arrangement with undefined communication can be difficult, but that does not make unclear expectations an inherent property of remote work.
The same applies to an office: physical proximity does not ensure that decisions are recorded or that quieter colleagues receive the context they need.
Investigate a problem before attributing it to location
If delivery deteriorates, examine what changed alongside the working arrangement. Scope, staffing, management, dependencies, and product uncertainty can all affect the result. Ask which specific interaction became harder and whether the proposed remedy addresses it.
For example, a difficult onboarding experience may point to missing documentation or unavailable mentors. More shared working time could help. It still needs an owner and a plan, rather than an assumption that a desk nearby will automatically transfer knowledge.
Use employee experience as evidence as well, while keeping it distinct from measured delivery outcomes. People can value an arrangement that needs operational improvement.
Hire for the work your arrangement requires
For distributed engineering, assess the ability to clarify requirements, explain tradeoffs, manage commitments, and ask for help. EnzRossi screens technical and soft skills and helps US companies work with senior LATAM talent in overlapping hours.
Discuss the working model your product needs. The aim is a team you can trust through its work and communication, even when you cannot see every desk.
