What has the return-to-office movement taught us? People, not technology help companies get ahead

Dr Dino Dogan, European Academy of Management (EURAM)

We like to believe that whatever ails a company can be fixed by digitising it. And technology is easy to swap. Rip out the old system, bolt in the new one, declare yourself modern. But a company is not its buildings, its machines, or its software. It is the people in it. Organizations do not change. People change or they quietly refuse to, and no amount of technology overrides that.

I learned this the hard way, leading corporate restructuring as a CFO and a CEO. You can redraw an org chart over lunch. Getting the human beings inside it to actually move forward is the real job, and there is no tool that will do it for you. The recent return-to-office wave is showing this right now, at enormous scale.

Through 2025 and into 2026, the big employers ordered everyone back. Amazon, around 350,000 people, full-time. JPMorgan Chase, remote work gone. Dell, hybrid scrapped. Mass change programs, imposed from the top, and look what they produced. Corporate guidance firm Gartner found nearly three quarters of HR leaders reporting internal tension.

Eight in ten companies admitted losing talent. And the number that says it all: required office time went up 12 percent between 2024 and 2025, while actual attendance rose 1 to 3 percent. People badged in. They withheld everything else.

That gap, between turning up and actually caring, is the whole subject of the “People” block in my book.

So let me say something unfashionable. Humans are creatures of habit. We claim to love change. We don’t. When it gets hard, most of us want stability and a predictable routine, and that includes your best employees.

Management, busy improving systems and chasing results, often never even notices that people are still walking the old paths in their heads.

People are the key drivers of change in the workplace

A company only moves forward when the individuals inside it make their own personal transition first. Not after. First.

Which raises the only question that matters here: What actually moves a person?

I have read plenty of theories. History is a hobby of mine. Out of the two, I arrived at an answer that is almost embarrassingly simple and that has never once let me down.

Three forces drive every one of us: love, in all its forms; power; and money. Sometimes it is just one. Sometimes two, or all three at once. The trap is assuming everyone is wired like you are.

The history of Daimler-Benz illustrates how the pursuit of power and personal ambition can strongly shape managerial decision-making. Edzard Reuter transformed the company into a diversified technology conglomerate in pursuit of growth and influence, but the strategy ultimately weakened the core business and led to major financial losses. His successor, Jürgen Schrempp, reversed this course through radical restructuring, only to pursue his own ambitious vision of building a global automotive empire through large international acquisitions. Although both leaders justified their decisions as strategic necessities, their contrasting visions and desire to leave a lasting legacy demonstrate how power ambitions can drive corporate actions, often with costly consequences for the organization.

The boss who is driven by power assumes everyone is, and misreads the entire room.

People change when they can see something in it for the person they really are, not the person you imagine them to be.

Now, the team. The quality of any restructuring is the quality of the people running it, full stop. Every compromise you make in picking them lowers your odds. And in cultures where nepotism decides who gets the job, that compromise is not just bad business. I will say it plainly: it is poison, for the company and for the society around it.

A study I ran (published in Croatian business journal Lider in February 2021), linking perceived corruption to GDP per capita over twenty years, found the obvious thing: low-corruption countries simply live better.

Restructuring is a team sport

To pick honestly, I use a simple grid for measuring competence and potential, the 4L-Matrix. The Competence–Potential Matrix is a management tool that helps organizations assess employees based on two key questions: Do they have the skills required for current and future roles? And do they have the willingness and ability to learn and develop?

Based on these dimensions, employees are classified as:

• Leaders (high competence/high potential)

• Learners (low competence/high potential)

• Loungers (high competence/low potential)

• Losers (low competence/low potential).

Each category requires a different management approach. The matrix provides practical guidance by promoting leaders into key positions, investing in learners’ development, managing loungers carefully while encouraging change and separating from persistent low performers when necessary.

Although the framework may appear mechanical, it supports more objective and rational personnel decisions during company restructuring, helping to build stronger teams and increase the likelihood of long-term success.

Executives consistently underestimate the emotional journey

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross built her famous model to describe how the dying come to terms with it. It maps almost perfectly onto how employees absorb the threat of losing their job.

Shock. Denial. Frustration and anger. Depression. Only then, eventually, acceptance.

Announce a change once and expect everyone to be aligned by week three, and you have simply not understood people. So communication cannot be an event. In the denial phase, you repeat the story again and again until it sinks in. In the anger phase, you do not take the hostility personally; you tell them instead how you are going to help them through it. And the hard messages you deliver yourself. Employees can smell it instantly when leadership hands the unpleasant work to outside consultants, and there is no worse start to winning them back. Consultants advise. They cannot borrow your voice. Authority you outsource is authority you have lost.

Return-to-office will resolve itself one way or another. The lesson underneath it will not change. Put people at the centre of the thing, or watch the thing fail quietly around you.

Dr Dino I. Dogan is an executive and academic who has held CFO and board roles at Vipnet (now A1 Croatia), Mobilkom Austria, Telekom Austria and Hrvatski Telekom, served as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Europlakat, leading major restructuring and merger efforts. He is the author of Seven Building Blocks of a Successful Corporate Restructuring (Springer books).

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