Playing up: how to fix a disconnect between RTO and collaboration

What happens when companies mandate Return to Office (RTO) policies under the banner of collaboration, yet fail to address the fundamental barriers that prevent collaboration from taking place?

Mandating RTO is often justified on the grounds that in-person interaction is essential for effective collaboration and a thriving organisational culture. Sometimes it is framed as a way to ensure employees are engaged and productive, with the implication that remote work equates to laziness or distraction.

But consider this: what’s the point of insisting on RTO if the concept of collaboration itself remains poorly understood, especially by leaders? When organisations fail to distinguish between input-oriented work (where tasks are divided and executed separately) and outcome-focused collaboration (which thrives on shared goals and creative co-creation), they’re missing the crucial foundation for real collaboration. It’s not enough to just be in the same place – the way people work together must fundamentally change.

Division of labour

Having said that, one needs to understand that many companies still operate with a siloed structure, based on an understanding of the organisation as machine, where tasks are divided and executed according to strict procedures and rules. This is where cooperation is well suited.

Cutting a job into pieces, have each person work on one of those pieces, and then put the parts together… that’s what might be considered as cooperation. In other words: cooperation works well with the division of labour. In addition, this division of labor is reinforced by incentive systems that reward isolated work. Therefore, simply calling for collaboration without addressing the fundamentally different work structures underlying collaboration is misleading.

Ironically, the people most vocal about RTO and collaboration are often the least capable of fostering true collaboration. It’s like asking the colour blind to paint in colour. The real challenge isn’t the location, it’s the mindset and practices that stand in the way of collaboration itself.

No coaches for collaboration

Here’s the real kicker: learning how to collaborate, while being given a safe space to explore. All of this supported by coaches instead of being controlled by supervisors. Currently we can broadly differentiate three types of leaders: those who do not see developing collaboration as part of their role and have little to no experience in cultivating genuine collaboration within their teams;
those who would like to develop collaboration but are themselves without support to evolve into the role of a coach; and finally those, definitely a minority, who have embarked on this journey but are facing headwinds from the organization in terms of its structures and policies.

Imagine this scenario: a soccer team hires a new managing director, and the board invests heavily in a top-tier stadium with all the bells and whistles, plus invests heavily in new players. Does that change the way the team plays? Most likely not.

The team would need to invest in learning to play a new way—with training, coaching and practice. This is the essential work that makes any change sustainable. It’s a no-brainer in sports, as we might assume that the coach already understands his or her role accordingly. But this kind of investment in learning is often ignored by companies.

Ready to play

Consider this: if you suggested that employees devote just 5 per cent of their time to improving how they work together—about two hours a week or a day a month—most executives would likely consider that a waste of time. Yet, if a soccer team spent fewer than 100 hours a year on training, people would call it bizarre or even insane.

Add to this the reality that an organisation might only have a small percentage of leaders who can embody the role of a coach needed to help find a way into collaboration, and there might be all kinds of obstacles on the field that make it harder to move forward. To use the sporting analogy, we need to level the playing field and have coaches ready to help the team play in a collaborative way.

Growing and evolving

As a thought starter on what leadership might mean now, it is worth reminding ourselves how the American systems thinker and scientist Peter Senge described the leader’s role. Senge referred to a leader as a designer, coach and steward, later morphing the steward into a teacher or a gardener.

So, the leaders’ role is all about creating a safe space for collaboration (consider the soccer field with all kinds of obstacles which need to be removed to allow for a smooth play); helping the team learn new ways of doing things; and maybe the hardest part of all, providing a greenhouse for new ways of working to emerge. Consider a leader as someone taking the heat so that the process of growing and evolving is not interrupted all the time.

But we’re not done yet, because this is where it gets even more complicated. We’re not talking about stable, well-oiled machine-like organisations here. We’re talking about disruptive times with AI and other innovations driving major shifts in the way we work. So, yes, coming back to the office as a reason to learn and practice a new way of working might make good sense – provided you have the coaches ready, the obstacles to collaboration identified, and the decision-makers prepared to tackle them.

This does not mean that people need to be onsite all the time. Just as athletes can go to the gym themselves wherever they are, so employees don’t need to be at it at the same time in the same place all the time. The most important thing is to devote time to learning the new way of playing the game.