Aug 4, 2026 · 29 min · 9 segments
About This Episode The debate over remote work versus office work continues, but many organizations are asking the wrong question. Instead of focusing on where employees work, leaders should be…
Frank CottleHost
Ranya NehmehGuest
Because at the end of the day, as we said before, you can have the best laid out plans of any kind, but one poor manager will ruin everything.
So if I were to say, you know, for somebody's organization, go and evaluate your management and then see who is really doing a good job and who is not, and if it can be, they can be improved or not.
We're really excited to have you here today and, uh, interested to hear all about your new book and the research you've been doing, uh, uh, overall.
Um, in your book, "In Praise of the Office," it's not really a anti-remote argument, uh, overall, but it does bring the forward the question of the conversation of either/or.
It tries to, to go away from that a little bit, saying you don't have to be in the office, you don't have to be remote.
How do you blend remote, hybrid, in the office, et cetera, all together and have a reasonable conversation that wins the battle for talent at the corporate level?
Um, so I love that question because, you know, obviously when we chose the title "In Praise of the Office," it sounds very much like, um, we want everybody to come back to the office, right? But in fact, um, one of the biggest misconceptions of this debate is that it's not really about coming back to the office, but more about how organizations create value.
And this is really what we were saying in the book, is that, um, it's not about whether you're now working at home or in the office, it's about the work that you're doing.
And it's about if we are gonna continue with hybrid, how do we make hybrid work? Because we have seen that actually hybrid has a lot of challenges, and these are the challenges that we also tackle in the book as well.
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Because at the end of the day, as we said before, you can have the best laid out plans of any kind, but one poor manager will ruin everything.
So if I were to say, you know, for somebody's organization, go and evaluate your management and then see who is really doing a good job and who is not, and if it can be, they can be improved or not.
We're really excited to have you here today and, uh, interested to hear all about your new book and the research you've been doing, uh, uh, overall.
Um, in your book, "In Praise of the Office," it's not really a anti-remote argument, uh, overall, but it does bring the forward the question of the conversation of either/or.
It tries to, to go away from that a little bit, saying you don't have to be in the office, you don't have to be remote.
How do you blend remote, hybrid, in the office, et cetera, all together and have a reasonable conversation that wins the battle for talent at the corporate level?
Um, so I love that question because, you know, obviously when we chose the title "In Praise of the Office," it sounds very much like, um, we want everybody to come back to the office, right? But in fact, um, one of the biggest misconceptions of this debate is that it's not really about coming back to the office, but more about how organizations create value.
And this is really what we were saying in the book, is that, um, it's not about whether you're now working at home or in the office, it's about the work that you're doing.
And it's about if we are gonna continue with hybrid, how do we make hybrid work? Because we have seen that actually hybrid has a lot of challenges, and these are the challenges that we also tackle in the book as well.
