When a distributed team struggles to collaborate, the first response is often a push to co-locate. It sounds reasonable, but it skips the most important step of figuring out what the real problems hurting collaboration are.
A treatment before a diagnosis
“Struggling to coordinate” isn’t the problem to fix, it’s a symptom.
When people complain about a lack of coordination, we have to ask: Who’s making this complaint? What specific behaviours are they seeing? What outcomes are breaking down?
A team struggling to work effectively might be suffering from unclear ownership, a lack of shared context, conflicting priorities or something else entirely. Intervening without first getting a sense of the actual problem you are trying to solve and defining how you’ll evaluate success is just guessing.
Co-locating the team might temporarily mask certain issues, but that’s only because it’s a change, not because it addresses the root cause.
What’s supposed to happen after everyone sits together?
Not only is a “lack of co-location” a poor way of describing the problem, but it also encourages an equally shallow way of treating it: Forcing people to work from the office.
But what’s expected to happen after a team co-locates? The actual mechanisms of improvement are rarely explained.
What impact does physical proximity have? What’s the mechanism? Does it speed up feedback? Does it increase organic information sharing? Do people share more or better information than they would have over Slack? Or is it about making it easier for managers to know where people are and what they are doing? Without identifying the mechanisms, we cannot connect co-location to the solutions we hope to achieve.
If it turns out the real problem is structural or process-related, then forcing everyone to the office won’t help.
Team-space Topologies
Companies like to mandate a return to office in the name of strengthening collaboration and culture, but the offices they’re sending people to are rarely designed around the team dynamics that support flow.
Even modern, open office floor plans are seldom designed with specific team interactions in mind. What teams need are:
- Dedicated spaces to work together
- Rooms that fit the size and context of their meetings
- Proximity to the other teams they depend on
- Spaces for team ceremonies and workshops
- Social spaces to connect
Co-location also introduces new frictions: commuting, traffic, weather, and the reality of travelling to the office only to meet virtually with colleagues in other offices or time zones.
Without thoughtful workspace design that supports how teams actually work, return-to-office and co-location swaps out one set of challenges for another.
Fix the Real Problem, No Matter Where People Sit
Before focusing on where people sit, focus on how the work flows. What’s the bottleneck? Where are handoffs breaking down?
- If the problem is unclear ownership: Clarify your architectural, product, and team boundaries.
- If the problem is handoffs: Map your value streams and eliminate the dependencies.
“Let’s co-locate” carries the same energy as “Let’s do Agile” or “Let’s use AI.” They’re not bad ideas, but they’re bad as solutions without a specific problem to solve.
In the end, all teams, whether remote or co-located, should seek to continuously improve their collaboration. Responsible autonomous teams need the freedom to experiment and discover what works for them. Rigid mandates of any kind, including a return-to-office, might do as much harm as good.
