The pandemic might be disappearing in the rear-view mirror as we head into 2024, but a lot of organizations are still struggling with the question of whether or not to mandate a full-time return to the office. For me, however, it was a no-brainer: I’d rather close my company down than go back to the way things used to be.

My reasons for this are multi-layered.

On a personal level, spending all day in the office is not something that suits me anymore, neither from a practical perspective nor from a motivational one.

Tokyo, where Attuned is headquartered, is a huge, sprawling city, and I live pretty far from the center, meaning that commuting to and from our office would eat up at least two hours each day. Being stuck in the office during business hours would also deprive me of the flexibility I need to take care of and be with my young kids. The opportunity to experience and appreciate their fleeting childhood, and to be present with them every day, is something I am fiercely protective of, and not something I’d give up lightly.

At the same time, Autonomy is very important to me, motivationally speaking.

At Attuned, we measure intrinsic motivation across 11 categories defined by psychologists, and Autonomy is my own top motivator. This means that I prize personal freedom particularly highly, and am more motivated when I can make my own decisions over how, when, and where to work. The notion of having that freedom restricted by returning to the office full-time is therefore pretty demotivating.

From an organizational perspective, meanwhile, remote working isn’t something that started for us out of necessity during the pandemic—we were already experimenting with remote and hybrid working styles before 2020. And while we may not have planned to go all-in on it quite so rapidly, it was a strategy that was already bearing fruit in terms of employee satisfaction without any discernible downsides.

Many of our team members have obligations of care, whether—like me—toward young children, or for elderly or ailing family members. And, for them, having the flexibility in their schedule to pick up their kids from school, or take a relative to hospital, is golden. Were I to insist they return to the office full-time, it would force them to make a very difficult decision, and I would run the risk of losing talented, committed people for negligible benefits—a situation that is playing out all around the world right now.