Hi Reader,
Roughly 30% of US companies have now ordered everyone back to the office full time, and nearly a third more plan to by the end of this year. They are calling it a productivity decision.
It is not. It is a confession. And it is still going to fail.
Here is what every one of those mandates is quietly admitting: we cannot see the work our people are doing. We have lost visibility, and we want it back.
That admission is correct. It is the most honest thing leadership has said in years. The problem is real and almost nobody will name it out loud: in most companies, nobody can actually see who is doing the work.
The reason it will still fail is that the office was never where that visibility came from. They are reaching for the wrong cure.
And I say that as someone who believes in the office. People lift each other in a room. The team carries you on a hard day. A lot of good work happens better shoulder to shoulder.
Bring people in for that. It is a good reason.
Just know it will not give you back the thing you lost. Because the office never gave it to you in the first place.
I ran sales floors for years, the whole team in the room, and I still could not tell you who was working. Everyone looked busy. Buried in paper, on calls, serious faces. One of them was closing the business. Another was warming the chair beautifully. From the doorway, identical. The office did not show me the truth. It showed me a room full of people performing the look of work.
So bringing everyone back does not restore visibility. It just moves the guessing to a place that feels easier to watch.
A fair point before I go further. Some roles show their own output. A coder ships code, you can see what came in. But most roles are not like that. For most of your team, at a desk in your office or a table in their kitchen, you are still guessing. The chair told you nothing either way.
This is the gap the entire debate is standing on and refusing to see. The question was never desk versus home. The question is whether the real work is visible, wherever it happens.
That is the only thing TAME does. It puts the one daily action that actually moves your business on the wall, counted, in front of everyone, every day. Once that number is visible, location stops being the argument. At a desk or in a kitchen, the work is on the board or it is not, and everyone can see which.
So the companies are half right. They have finally admitted the visibility problem. They have just confused the cure. The answer was never the office. The answer is making the effort visible.
Count the work, not the chairs.
Name the results. TAME the effort.
BJay
See you next week!
PS – If a friend forwarded this to you, you can subscribe at tameyourgoals.com.
