The controversy over attendance in centralized commute-in offices is currently centered around return to office (RTO) policies and when knowledge workers should be them.

Advances in information and communications technology since the 1980s are virtualizing and decentralizing knowledge work, making when and where it’s done less relevant. Knowledge workers can develop their ideas, analyses, projects and plans and collaborate with others most any time and any place.

The trend developed slowly. Offices had been in place for many decades before and were still being built as ICT developed and matured. For knowledge organizations, they were the primary place staff work was done.

Social distancing measures taken to tamp down COVID-19 pandemic infections in 2020 suddenly accelerated what had been a very incremental trend with about 95 percent of knowledge workers commuting into offices each workday. Now that many more have worked outside of the cube farms of analog edifices of office buildings since then, circumventing time sucking commutes has taken the place of potentially dangerous viral infections. They are questioning the need for them as digital ICT replaces the analog scheme of transporting knowledge workers to them.

Some organizations including Amazon, JP Morgan, AT&T and most recently the U.S. federal government have adopted strict RTO policies that some have cautioned pose organizational risk for the attraction and retention of knowledge workers. But these organizations don’t necessarily see that as a negative but rather a positive with separations even welcomed and encouraged.

That raises the larger question how knowledge work in organizations is defined: what it is and who is needed to do it. This extends beyond RTO, “remote” or “hybrid” knowledge work itself. It’s about how it’s organized and accomplished.