"You're Coming Back to the Office Because I Said So" – The Remote Work Debate Is a Leadership Debate

Finland is in the middle of a heated debate about restricting remote work. More and more organisations are tightening their remote work policies and asking staff to return to the office — some through incentives, some through mandates. In the public sector, the Ministry of Finance has issued new hybrid work guidelines for state administration, recommending an average of 12 in-office days per month. In the private sector, the mandates are often blunter.

The debate is usually pitched at the wrong level. People argue about square meters, productivity, and office furniture, when the real question is the quality of leadership.

Teams can handle the tasks – it can't build a team

Both defenders and critics of remote work actually agree on one thing: operational work — meetings, reporting, decision-making — functions just fine remotely. That was never really the point of contention.

The real point of contention is that a team — trust, shared culture, tacit knowledge, spontaneous learning — is not built through a screen. Research backs this up: hybrid work has been found to erode a sense of community in ways that slow innovation and can wear down trust, and physical presence has been shown to support spontaneous interaction and the sharing of tacit knowledge in ways that don't emerge as easily in a virtual setting.

That's a valid argument for in-person work. The problem isn't that organisations want people back in the office. The problem is how they say it.

"Because I said so" is not leadership

In many organisations, the message about returning to the office boils down to one sentence: you're coming in because I say so. No rationale, no transition period, no conversation — just the exercise of managerial prerogative.

That's understandable in the short term, but it's poor leadership in the long term. Good leadership comes down to three things: being predictable, communicating meaning, and enabling people to succeed. "Because I said so" delivers on none of them.

Experts in the field generally agree that mandates are unlikely to make office attendance more appealing on their own, and that a policy imposed unilaterally is easily read as a sign of distrust. A recent Nordic study similarly found that the pull of the office isn't determined by attendance policy but by whether the office actually meets people's real work needs — and in the same survey, more than a third of Finnish respondents said their employer had tightened remote work rules, which suggests that tightening the rules is common but isn't, by itself, a solution to anything.

You can't install change overnight

There's another fact that often gets forgotten: many current employment relationships were built around remote work as part of the deal — in the extreme case, someone was hired on the understanding that they'd live more than 200 kilometers from the office. That kind of arrangement can't be reversed on a week's notice without it being experienced as a unilateral breach of the agreement.

This isn't just an emotional issue — it's a legal one too. A material change to where work is performed can, in companies with more than 20 employees, require a notice period or a formal co-determination process. The law recognises the same thing good leadership theory does: you can't install a major change into an organisation with a single memo.

John Kotter showed as far back as the 1990s, in a large study spanning more than a hundred companies, that failed change efforts almost always follow the same pattern: an underdeveloped vision that's poorly communicated, and a rush to skip the stage where people are given time to understand and accept the change (Kotter, 1995). Three decades later, the same pattern is repeating itself as organisations try to walk back remote work arrangements with just weeks of notice.

What good leadership would actually look like here

If the premise is that being in the office produces something remote work doesn't — and there's research to support that — then the job isn't to order people back, it's to explain why it matters for this specific team, and to build a transition where people have time and room to adapt.

In practice, that means:

• Rationale before mandate. Why this team, why now, what it's meant to achieve.
• A real transition period, especially for people whose lives — housing, family, commute — were built around the current arrangement.
• An office actually worth coming into — not a punishment, but a place where being there produces something remote work can't.
• Dialogue, not decree. People commit to a change when they've had at least some say in shaping it.

The remote work debate, in the end, isn't really about square meters or furniture. It's a test of whether an organisation knows how to lead change — or only knows how to decree it. And that test is playing out right now, across Finland, very quickly.

Sources: Finnish Institute of Occupational Health; Castellum, Future of Work Life 2026 study; TEK (Academic Engineers and Architects in Finland); Finnish Ministry of Finance; Kotter, J. P. (1995). Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail. Harvard Business Review, 73(2), 59–67.