As a business owner, I am fundamentally skeptical about standardizing full remote work.
Writing this might lead some to think I am an ‘old-fashioned manager’ or that I ‘just want to control my employees.’ However, my concern is not whether employees will slack off at home.
For tasks that can be completed individually, there are many situations where remote work actually increases productivity. Creating documents, analyzing data, writing, or attending routine online meetings—I do not believe everyone needs to gather in the same place every day for these tasks.
On the other hand, if we consider a company not just as a ‘collection of people processing work,’ but as a place where people grow, new ideas are born, and knowledge and culture are accumulated as an organization, the story changes.
In October 2026, Business Insider Japan published an interesting article considering the relationship between remote work and innovation. The Nature study introduced there (which analyzed approximately 20 million research papers and 4 million patents over the past half-century) confirmed that geographically dispersed teams tend to have a lower probability of producing groundbreaking results compared to teams working in the same location.
What is particularly interesting is that while remote teams can collaborate sufficiently on technical execution and downstream processes, they showed weaknesses in generating new ideas or conceptualizing the direction of research itself.
Of course, this study cannot be treated as direct proof that ‘innovation does not occur in full remote work.’
This is because the subject of the study was not corporate work systems themselves, but geographically dispersed research and invention teams. Even so, I believe this result offers important implications for thinking about organizational development.
What I want to re-examine is whether ‘individual work productivity’ and ‘the strength of the entire organization’ are truly the same thing.
‘Being able to work alone’ and ‘an organization becoming stronger’ are different things.
In discussions about remote work, the word ‘productivity’ is often used. No commute, easier to concentrate, fewer useless meetings, easier to balance with childcare or nursing care.
These are clear benefits.
In fact, there are studies suggesting that hybrid work has not negatively impacted performance or promotions while reducing turnover rates. It would be reckless to lump full remote and hybrid work together and argue that ‘remote work lowers productivity.’
Therefore, I do not want to deny the work style of remote work itself. However, much of the productivity measured here is about ‘how efficiently existing work was processed.’
Is that all that is needed for a company to remain strong sustainably? Creating documents in a short time, replying to emails quickly, making meetings more efficient. Of course, these are important. However, what determines a company’s strength in the long term includes things that are much harder to quantify.
New employees learning how to work naturally by watching their seniors, or someone speaking up after a meeting saying, ‘About that earlier point,’ leading to a deeper discussion.
Overhearing conversations from other departments and realizing unexpected connections to one’s own work, seeing someone else’s judgment error and thinking about what one would do, or seeds of new projects being born from casual lunch conversations. These events cannot be turned into KPIs.
However, people and organizations are surprisingly strengthened by this accumulation of invisible learning.
People do not grow only by what they are ‘taught’.
From the perspective of human resource development, I consider this part to be extremely important. When we talk about « nurturing people » in a company, our eyes inevitably turn to mechanisms like training, OJT, and 1-on-1 meetings—in other words, « systems where someone teaches someone else. »
Of course, those are necessary, but the process by which people actually learn their jobs is much more ambiguous and messy.
Learning how to choose words while listening to a senior colleague handle a phone call, learning how to take responsibility by watching a supervisor apologize to a client, seeing how those around them help when someone gets stuck for words in a meeting, or learning what a capable person prioritizes and what they discard when work piles up.
These things are difficult to put into a manual. They are close to what is called « tacit knowledge » in management studies.
In the Nature study mentioned earlier, while geographically dispersed teams could collaborate on technical tasks that are relatively easy to formalize, they showed weaknesses compared to face-to-face teams when it came to new ideas and conceptual formation.
Things that are easy to convey online should be conveyed online. However, I have significant doubts about whether judgments made before they are put into words, or the nuances of work that even the person themselves hasn’t explained, can be sufficiently transferred just through a screen.
Especially for young employees, « learning before asking questions » is necessary.
In a full remote environment, people are sometimes told, « If you don’t understand, just ask on Slack or Teams. » It is true that for someone who knows what they don’t understand, that can solve quite a lot.
However, people with little experience do not even know « what they don’t know » in the first place. This is the important part.
It is only by watching a senior colleague work that they realize, « Oh, they check that far, » or by listening to a phone call that they learn, « So that’s how you phrase it. » By sitting in on a meeting, they understand, « This is the stage at which you consult your supervisor. »
It is only after such realizations that questions are born. In other words, human resource development involves not just « answering questions, » but also a stage of learning that exists before questions are even formed.
In a remote environment, there are more situations where information will not reach the person unless they actively go to get it. In contrast, in an office, there is information that feels like « noise » at first glance, which reaches the person even if they don’t seek it out.
However, it is precisely within that noise that a vast amount of opportunities exist for inexperienced people to notice « things they didn’t know. » I believe that for a new employee, the workplace is not just a place to do work, but also a place to observe how work is done.
Is « small talk » really a waste of time?
The same can be said for small talk in the workplace.
Conversations like, « By the way, what happened with that matter? », « Something like this happened yesterday, » or « That industry seems to have changed a bit recently, » might look like they aren’t work at first glance.
However, important information for the organization flows through those casual exchanges. There is a vast amount of information in a company that isn’t worth setting up a meeting for or writing a formal report about, but if you know it, your judgment might change slightly.
When things become centered online, while the precision of delivering necessary information to the necessary people increases, opportunities for « things I didn’t think I needed, but which led to something else because I happened to learn about them » decrease.
I believe this is quite important.
New ideas are not necessarily born in a conference room by starting with, « Let’s discuss innovation today. »
They are born when information that seemed unrelated connects by chance, or when people with different perspectives from different departments talk to each other. It is difficult to create these coincidences with only completely scheduled communication.
That said, just coming into the office doesn’t mean people will grow.
This point is extremely important. If you gather employees in an office, it does not automatically mean people will grow and innovation will occur.
Even if they come to the office every day, if they wear headphones and face their computers all day, talk to the person next to them via chat, have no interaction with other departments, only the same people talk in meetings, and they cannot voice objections to their superiors.
In this case, there is almost no point in physically gathering in the same place. That is why I think there is little point in discussing work styles based solely on the binary choice of « remote or office. »
What we should really be asking is, « What does the company want to create by having people gather in the same place? » Do you want to train young employees, exchange ideas across departments, create new projects, share organizational culture, or discuss difficult decisions on the spot?
If you say, « It’s office-based in principle, so please come in » without that purpose, it will look like a mere company convenience from the employee’s perspective. Conversely, if you decide solely based on « it’s easy to work, so full remote is fine, » you may not notice the organizational capabilities being lost over a long period of time.
« Current employees » may be comfortable, but « the next generation » may not grow.
As a manager, this is my biggest concern with full remote work.
For experienced employees, full remote work is extremely rational. They know how to proceed with work, have built internal relationships, know who to ask for what, and understand the company’s culture and judgment criteria.
In other words, they can work alone precisely because they have already received so much from the organization.
So, what happens if you apply that environment as is to someone who has just joined the company? They have no opportunity to observe their seniors’ work, they don’t know what conversations are happening around them, they don’t talk to anyone unless they reach out themselves, and they only chat when they are in trouble.
In such an environment, how can we pass on the organizational wisdom that existing employees have spent years acquiring to the next generation?
I believe that the system that allows current employees to work comfortably and the system that allows the next generation to grow are not necessarily the same.
A company is not something that is completed only by the members currently present. Therefore, in management, it is necessary to think not only about today’s productivity, but also about what kind of people will be growing five or ten years from now.
What I feel strongly precisely because I see the front lines of childcare
I myself have been involved for a long time in the field of « childcare, » where expertise is passed from person to person.
The expertise of a childcare worker is not something that can be fully acquired just by reading a textbook. How to observe a child’s expressions, whether to speak to a crying child immediately or wait a little, where adults should intervene in conflicts between children, and what to convey and how long to wait when consulted by a parent.
There is a vast amount of information in these judgments that cannot be easily put into words. New employees gradually acquire this by watching their seniors.
Naturally, childcare itself cannot be done remotely. However, I believe that the structure where « one’s own judgment is refined by observing the judgments of others » is not a special case unique to childcare.
It is common to sales, planning, management, and business administration as well. The higher the value of the work, the more situations arise that cannot be handled according to a manual in the end.
The judgment required there can be fostered online, but it is also a fact that more learning opportunities are created by having an environment where one is exposed to the work and judgments of others on a daily basis. That is why I feel uncomfortable with viewing work merely as « task processing. »
What is required is not the « compulsion to come to the office » but the creation of « meaning in gathering »
To state it again, I am not against remote work itself. There are jobs that are better done by concentrating alone, and there are benefits to eliminating commuting costs.
Depending on a person’s circumstances, such as childcare, nursing care, or medical treatment, remote work becomes an important option for continuing to work. Therefore, I do not think that returning everyone to the office every day will solve everything.
What I am against is the idea that « since work can be done online, there is no longer any meaning in people gathering at the company. »
A company has roles other than processing tasks. People grow, organizational culture is created, human relationships are formed, experiences are shared, accidental information exchanges occur, and tacit knowledge is passed on to the next person.
These values hardly appear in short-term productivity figures. That is precisely why they will be lost if management does not consciously design for them.
And the company side that demands office attendance also has a responsibility. If, after coming all the way to the company, employees spend the whole day in separate online meetings, discuss nothing with anyone, meet no new people, and learn nothing, it is only natural that they would think, « It is better to work from home. »
If you are going to demand office attendance, the company must create « things that can only be obtained by coming here. » I believe that designing the way of working includes that as well.
Remote work is not bad. The office is not justice either. However, if you decide how to work based only on efficiency and ease of working, you may lose important assets that do not appear in the numbers.
Where to work. I do not think the essence of that question lies in the location itself. What kind of people do you want to raise, what kind of organization do you want to build, and what do you want to create from that organization?
The way of working is something that should be decided by working backward from those answers. That is what I think.
Therefore, I basically take a skeptical stance on full remote work. It is not because I want to monitor employees. People receive things that cannot be obtained by just processing tasks alone while working with others.
This is because I believe that the answers and hints we have been searching for, as well as the organization that is a company, also gradually become stronger by passing on such invisible learning and relationships to the next generation.
