The Contradiction of the Return to Office

We’re seeing a generalized movement of “Return to Office” (RTO) in many companies, and it’s a difficult trend to understand. Official justifications usually mention “culture”, “collaboration”, or “innovation”. However, for those who have spent the last few years working from home and delivering results, these reasons seem weak, especially when remote work has proven efficient.

The most recent and contradictory case is that of Nubank. The company has just become Brazil’s most valuable, surpassing Petrobras and Itaú. The irony is that it reached this milestone operating, as they themselves admit in the statement, in a “primarily remote environment”. It was in this model that the number of customers doubled and they reached record revenue. The success that brought them to the top was built remotely.

Now, at the height of this success, Nubank announces a mandatory hybrid model starting in 2026. The contradiction is clear. The entire value proposition of Nubank to the customer is to eliminate the physical: solve everything through the mobile app, without branches, without needing to go to a location. They preached and proved that the physical is unnecessary. But now, for their employees, the internal policy is the opposite: the physical location is mandatory. It doesn’t make much sense for the product to be about “not needing a place” and the work to be about “needing a place”.

And, for me, we need to be clear about what this “hybrid model” actually means. It’s not a middle ground. In practice, it’s an in-person model. Calling it hybrid is just to fool people. From the moment you are required to go to the office, even if it’s for two or three days, all logic of remote work breaks down. The dynamic of your life becomes in-person. You can no longer travel. You can’t work from another city or country. You are forced to live (and pay the cost of living) in the headquarters city and spend time and money on commuting. The real flexibility that really changed the game disappears.

I am one hundred percent in favor of remote work because the work that millions of people perform simply does not require physical co-location. Writing code, analyzing data, planning strategies, or creating designs are focus tasks. They depend on a brain and an internet connection, not on a body present in a specific floor of a building. In many companies, in-person work has become a farce: people commute for hours just to get to the office and do exactly the same thing they did at home. They sit at their desks and join Google Meet meetings with colleagues who are in the same room or in other cities. In the end, in-person work adds no meaning to the work. Forcing this return is, in many cases, an inefficient decision.

This RTO movement, even disguised as “hybrid”, doesn’t seem to be a business decision based on productivity data. It seems more like an attempt to restore an old order, perhaps to justify the costs of expensive offices (the “sunk cost fallacy”) or to satisfy a management style that needs to “see” employees to believe they are working.