Remote work succeeds by recreating the kitchen, not the conference room
Why surveillance software and forced returns reveal management failure rather than employee problems
Wells Fargo just fired employees for faking mouse movements. Amazon is dragging workers back to offices five days a week. Meanwhile, GitLab runs a $15 billion company with 1,500 employees who've never shared the same building.
The difference isn't technology. It's that most companies are solving the wrong problem entirely.
They install keystroke monitors when they should be building virtual water coolers. They mandate physical presence when they should be designing digital belonging. They're trying to recreate the conference room online whilst completely ignoring what actually made offices work: the kitchen.
What remote work actually requires
Real work happens in kitchens, not boardrooms. The invisible work of turning strangers into allies, transactions into relationships, colleagues into people who'll cover for you when your laptop dies.
GitLab figured this out early. They explicitly pay people to spend hours weekly on social calls with random colleagues. Buffer created a Slackbot that lets workers gift each other virtual tacos. These aren't Silicon Valley quirks—they're productivity infrastructure.
The numbers are devastating for traditional management. Workers who trust colleagues to cooperate are 8.2 times more likely to give discretionary effort. High-trust companies see 42% higher productivity than surveillance-heavy workplaces.
But trust doesn't emerge from Zoom meetings or monitoring dashboards. It accumulates through a thousand small moments. Learning your Norwegian colleague obsesses over Star Trek. Discovering your manager struggles with the same deadline pressure. The digital equivalent of bumping into someone by the coffee machine and realising they're human too.
The veteran developer who inspired this piece watched it work firsthand. At Opera, IRC channels buzzed with both code reviews and casual banter. Colleagues became people through shared jokes about commutes and excitement about weekend plans. Later, when the pandemic hit and his consultancy went remote, the transition felt seamless. They already knew how to be human together online.
The open source proof
Linux runs everything. Your phone, your bank, your car, the servers hosting this article. It's built by 1,500 developers from 200 companies who've never met in person. Intel and AMD engineers—bitter commercial rivals—collaborate daily on kernel patches.
No surveillance software. No mandatory office days. No management hierarchy demanding physical presence. Just results, reputation, and relationships built through competence rather than proximity.
They solved remote work decades ago because they had no choice. Every major technology company now depends on software built this way. Yet when it comes to their own employees, these same companies reach for monitoring tools instead of copying what already works.
The secret is transparent processes and documented everything. Linux developers know exactly how decisions get made, who has authority over what, and how to contribute meaningfully. No hidden politics. No unwritten rules that favour office presence. Just clear systems that anyone can learn and follow.
This isn't utopian theory. It's how the world's most critical infrastructure gets built. But somehow, when corporate managers can't see their employees at desks, they assume the entire system has collapsed.
When surveillance replaces social bonds
The surveillance market hit $600 million selling digital cattle prods disguised as productivity tools. Screenshot every five seconds. Log every keystroke. Track bathroom breaks. Wells Fargo's recent firing spree for "simulated keyboard activity" shows how far this madness has spread.
Here's what these companies bought: the exact opposite of productivity.
Workers under surveillance show higher stress, lower morale, and—deliciously—reduced actual output. They become virtuosos at gaming the system rather than solving problems. Forty-three percent now spend over 10 hours weekly on "productivity theatre"—work designed purely to impress algorithms rather than achieve anything meaningful.
The surveillance intended to eliminate time-wasting has institutionalised it.
One worker described the dystopian reality perfectly: watching her mother, employed by a monitored call centre, frantically end a personal call because the system tracked every second away from official tasks. The daughter needed support during a difficult moment. The mother wanted to provide it. The software made both impossible.
This is what happens when management confuses motion with progress, presence with productivity, surveillance with leadership. They've weaponised the technology that should enable human connection and turned it into a barrier.
The psychology behind forced returns
Return-to-office mandates reveal management's most embarrassing secret: they never learned how to manage.
S&P 500 companies are more likely to force returns after stock prices drop—treating physical presence as a magic productivity cure. The mandates correlate strongly with male CEOs who "feel they are losing control." Not losing productivity. Not losing quality. Losing control.
This is revealing. Good management was never about control. It was about clarity, feedback, and creating conditions where people do their best work. Physical proximity just made it possible to fake these skills.
Ninety percent of companies plan office mandates by the end of 2025, despite evidence that high-trust remote companies outperform surveillance-heavy offices by enormous margins. It's a collective admission that management doesn't know what management actually is.
The tell is always the same: vague appeals to "collaboration" and "culture" without any specific explanation of what requires physical presence. Real collaboration happens when you know how to design it. Culture exists when you know how to define and reinforce it.
The return-to-office movement isn't about productivity. It's about executives who built careers on proximity bias discovering they have no other management skills.
Building trust in digital spaces
Companies that succeed remotely do simple things that anyone could copy but most won't try.
They document everything ruthlessly. GitLab's entire operating manual is public—radical transparency that builds trust instead of eroding it. They design for asynchronous work rather than demanding constant availability. They create explicit social infrastructure: virtual coffee chats, cross-team Q&As, channels dedicated to dogs and weekend plans.
Most crucially, they hire and promote based on documented performance rather than political navigation skills that favour office presence.
The alternative requires admitting that good remote management is just good management, full stop. Clear communication. Consistent feedback. Outcome-based evaluation. Treating people like adults capable of managing their own time and energy.
These aren't revolutionary concepts. They're basic competencies that physical proximity previously allowed managers to avoid developing.
Companies monitoring every keystroke while demanding loyalty have created a psychological impossibility. They've built anxiety-inducing environments where people optimise for appearing busy rather than being effective. The very surveillance meant to boost productivity has made productivity impossible.
The talent market decides
The remote work debate is already over. The market is choosing.
Companies building genuine remote cultures are accessing global talent pools and seeing dramatically higher productivity. Those installing surveillance or forcing returns are advertising management incompetence to exactly the people they most need to attract.
The best performers recognise the signs: vague collaboration requirements, monitoring software, mandates without evidence. They're voting with their feet.
Demographics will accelerate this trend. Tighter labour markets mean companies offering genuine flexibility will systematically out-recruit those clinging to proximity bias. The question isn't whether remote work is productive—Linux and GitLab settled that debate years ago.
The question is whether traditional management can evolve beyond presence theatre.
When companies demand office returns "for collaboration," they're confessing they never learned to build the social infrastructure that makes teams effective. Remote work isn't a problem requiring surveillance solutions. It's a diagnostic test exposing which managers actually understand human motivation.
The kitchen was always more important than the conference room. Companies finally grasping this will dominate the distributed future. The rest will keep monitoring keystrokes while their best people vanish into companies that know how to build trust instead of install spyware.
The choice is simple: learn to manage humans, or keep managing presence. Only one of these scales.