Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

This is a hot take. As much as grumpy engineers are loathe to admit it, physical proximity matters. Companies haven’t fully thought through their RTO implementations, and that’s hurting both sides of the argument.

My friend – let’s call him Ben – and I are getting Ginger Beer at a nearby Capitol Hill bar¹. It’s his employer, you’ve heard of them, that’s making him unhappy. He is a senior engineer at the BigTechCo here in Seattle. They recently implemented a stricter RTO (Return to Office) policy. All our competitors are doing it, they told him, our way or the highway. It’s not even the commute, he admits. The commuter buses are fine, they have wifi and he can focus. “Not everybody can!” he says. It’s the people.

More than half of Ben’s team works out of the area. He’s going to be seeing them a lot more often. They’re busy with chitchat and small talk all the time, he grumbles. “I just want a quiet place to focus on heads-down work! Why do you want to put me in a place where I’m more distracted than a cafe!?” he asks. I nod. I take a long breath as if to say something. I stop on my tracks. I know better than to get my hot take out when my friend just wants to unload.

I don’t dare say what I’m writing here to Ben’s face. That’s probably why I’m writing this piece.

I have worked fully remotely for the last five years. I have to go to the office, but my team is geographically distributed. No casual chitchats for me. Every so often I make it a point to go to our local office. To see human faces and remind myself the work extends beyond my Mac screen.

Couple of weeks ago, I was at the office giving a big presentation². As an example, I used a project that isn’t yet public within the larger company. After the talk, somebody came up and introduced themselves. Nate, we’ll call him. He had saved my ass massively two years ago, but I didn’t know what he looked like. He thought the ‘secret’ project I didn’t mean to leak was pretty exciting. In fact, his squad had been exploring similar approaches themselves, he said. I was still sweating. I mumbled something about our whole plan being to pave way for them and rushed out.

Later, I told my team about how I’d met Nate the Great at the office. Everyone was thrilled to hear he seemed receptive about our idea. Maybe it’s a great idea after all, our lead mused. We setup a call with Nate’s larger org. Perhaps some germ of collaboration would come out of our meeting.

But it’s not just about the collaboration.

Colocation is important because it’s the human relations that keep the company together. Most professional relationships aren’t bare-minimum transactional ones. To grow the organizational bonds, people must come together and trust each other. It’s quite a role in itself.

To put it differently, employees have two roles in a company.

The first role is that of a technical contributor. The second one is as a social contributor.

The technical work is work that’s done as a part of the job description. It’s what is expected by the managers. Nobody I know questions if this technical role must be taken seriously to remain employed. Everybody understands you work diligently and contribute to the company’s overall wellbeing and growth.

There’s a lot less clarity around the second role. The one as a social contributor. That’s because companies aren’t explicit about this expectation. It’s almost never clearly brought up, perhaps because it’s so obvious. Nobody tells you that you are expected to interact with other employees. That you need to create strong social relations within work boundaries. That you need to mentor others, and create opportunities for others, is implied but rarely written down. You are implicitly expected to create a healthy and vibrant social working environment.

They don’t tell you “Hey, you can’t just be awesome at your job, but be invisible or annoying to others.” They expect you to figure it out.

But why do our employers need us in the social role?

I’m theory-crafting here, but I’m fairly certain decades of organizational research backs me up. As employees, we are not just individual contributors working by ourselves. Companies are networks of people, teams, and larger organizations that interact with each other in complex ways. Technical work runs a company, but the social network of the company is what keeps it stable over years and decades. And very often, individual contributors work and dedicate themselves not out of an abstract sense of loyalty or a transactional duty, but for the well-being and support of their fellow coworkers.

Nobody fights for the uncaring, formless, abstract entity. But everybody does, as they say in armed forces, fight for the fellow soldier.

When people care for each other, there’s less institutional friction at work. Communication is clearer and work gets done better when people know each other and are on good terms. When old hands train and help new hires, the implicit cultural values are transmitted forward. The heart and soul of an organization live within these interpersonal relationships. This social network is what creates a ‘culture’, hopefully a positive one.

You tend to like and trust the people who you’ve met in-person more. Physical interactions are therefore so important. I am yet to hear of a parent who believes videochatting their children is the same as seeing them in person. “Why do you need to go hang out with your friends, you can just meet them on Zoom” is fortunately not yet an argument that a provocative employer has made.

Employee roles have a social component behind them, which is easily fulfilled by being in-person. Even the large, wealthy corporations seem to have missed out this callout in their RTO conversations.

Bolstering the RTO argument with the ‘social role’ framework to justify ‘butts-on-the-seats’ will make folks who’re resistant more amenable. It’s not the Corporate Real Estate mafia pulling the strings, it’s part of what you’re meant to do.

But let’s be fair. Not all employees have to fulfill their social roles. An entire class of employees doesn’t need to bother itself with the social role! Contractors. Contractors often have very similar (if not higher) pay and performance structures as direct-hires. And very often, they are not integrated socially into the company. No chitchat, no small-talk. Get in, get the job done, take your paycheck, case closed!

For those of us resistant to being in the office, contracting is quite the deal! Contractors are not expected to mentor or shape organization culture! Pure hardcore work. It’s perfect for us who feel commuting time is uncompensated work. Contractors often bill hourly, so your butt on the car or train seat can be making money too!

Contract work is perfect for those of us wanting to work full-time remote, feel work should be about heads-down work and not chit-chat, and want to be compensated for the commute time. After all, companies are in the end, a bunch of people working with each other. ‘Work’ isn’t objective transactional technical steps done by autonomous independent systems with limited interactions. We are social creatures, we need social structures, and we need to be socially engaged. If we so desire.

Socializing and networking is important for workplace growth and personal development. It’s not about just us, but creating a fun and enabling environment for others. Being social a fundamental psychological need. Even if we have complete social lives outside of work, it’s general decency and courtesy to make work a socially engaging place.

I didn’t say any of this to Ben. Instead, I agreed with him. You see, all of the above argument falls apart when you go to the office to take Teams calls. And you don’t get a permanent seat. And the reservation system somehow has all the cool ‘window’ seats reserved months in advance. But that’s a different conversation for another day.