You’re being told that going back to the office will fix collaboration.

It might not. You may find yourself in the office more often while your team is still scattered across locations and schedules. In that scenario, “being together” becomes a slogan, not a description of how you actually work.

You’re back in the office, but your team isn’t

In a few weeks, I’ll be back in the office four days a week. I’m fortunate in that it seems I will likely be able to work from an office that is a 15-minute drive in the morning; the shortest commute I’ve had in nearly three decades of my working life. On paper, this looks like the return to collaboration and culture we’ve been hearing about.

In practice, my team is still distributed. Some are at home. Some are in other offices. Very few will be in the same place at the same time. So the promise of “being together” collapses pretty quickly; I’m back in a building, but still working through screens.

If you’re in a similar spot, that tension matters. You’re being told that being “back” will fix collaboration, while your actual work is still happening across screens, offices, and time zones. Which means, for you and for me, that we still need to rely on remote facilitation and basic workshop design skills if we really want to co-produce effectively with our staff and colleagues.

Some executives never took remote work seriously

During the work-from-home era, many executives treated remote work as a temporary workaround, not a serious way to run an organization. It was the era of “business on top, pajamas on the bottom” jokes; remote work was a punchline, not a discipline. They weren’t trained to manage remotely and they didn’t push to learn. They simply waited to get “back to normal.”

What they were waiting for was a return to proximity: people within line of sight, the ability to walk over and make a request at any time. This is despite the fact that their work days already lived in meetings and email; the tools were there. The shift was never technical, it was behavioural.

If you’re a manager or facilitator in the middle of that, you’re working between two realities: leaders who still equate presence with performance, and teams whose work is already digital and distributed. In that gap, workshops are one of the few tools you have to redesign how your team spends its time together.

The problem did not go away

Now we are in a different version of the same situation. People are back in offices, but not the same office, not on the same days. Teams are fragmented across locations and schedules.

The constraints of remote work are still here:

• You cannot rely on proximity.
• You cannot assume shared time.
• You cannot default to spontaneous alignment.

And yet the expectation of “collaboration and culture” remains. Without changing how work is designed, this just creates friction: more meetings, more duplication, more passive time on calls. The work is still hybrid; only the commute has changed. If you don’t make deliberate choices about workshops, meetings, and asynchronous work, everything collapses into the same grey sludge on people’s calendars.

What actually works in a distributed office

Spoiler: this is where workshop skills start to matter.

The teams that will function well are not the ones that simply return to the office. They are the ones that redesign how they work.

They treat collaboration as something to design, not something that happens automatically because people are nearby. In practice, that shows up in a few specific ways:

They use different modes of collaboration intentionally.

• They choose between synchronous and asynchronous work based on the task, not habit. Not everything needs a meeting. Not everything should be a message thread. Workshops become one of several deliberate formats, not a fancier meeting.

They structure working sessions around outcomes.

• Workshops, working sessions, and meetings have a clear purpose. People know why they are there and what will be produced.

They reduce passive participation.

• They avoid long calls where most people are listening. If someone is in the session, they are expected to contribute. That is a workshop mindset: design for contribution, not attendance.

They balance co-work and focus time.

• They create space to work together and space to work alone. Both are necessary. Neither is treated as secondary.

They use workshops as real work, not side activities.

• Design jams, retrospectives, and practice sessions are not extras; they are how teams build capability and alignment. When you treat these as core work, not “off-sites” or “nice-to-haves,” you stop wasting your limited together-time on status updates.

Successful teams will be led by leaders who finally embrace these different means of collaboration: synchronous and asynchronous, structured and unstructured, formal and informal. These leaders will not assume that being in a building together is enough; they will acknowledge that most of their team’s collaboration still happens through screens and tools.

The most successful teams will design the way they work to maximize their time together and apart. They will structure working sessions and workshops to solve problems in a focused way, driven toward outcomes, and to reduce the participation fatigue that comes with sitting on video calls passively all day long.

They will create a culture where co-work is encouraged as much as blocking off deep focus time. They will reward collaboration that produces tangible results and discourage aimless meetings that lack a clear goal or agenda. They will use workshops as team-building exercises such as design jams, retrospectives, learning and practice opportunities. None of this requires everyone to be in the same room; it requires leaders who are willing to treat collaboration design as part of their job, and to use workshop formats as one of their main levers.

Return to office is not a reset

The assumption behind return to office is that proximity fixes collaboration.

It does not.

Return to office doesn’t mean a return to pre-2020 ways of working because the reality of being in the office has changed. In many organizations, office days are just another node in a distributed network of people, tools, and time zones. Even inside an office, you are still working across distance.

If you do not design how your team collaborates, you will default to meetings that drain time and produce very little. If you do design it, you can use both in-person and remote time more effectively. Workshops are one of the few places where you can change the pattern on purpose, instead of letting it happen to you.

The shift is simple to describe and hard to do: stop relying on where people are, and start designing how they work together. You don’t control the policy. You do control how you use the hours you have with your team. If you can get intentional about that, and treat workshops as real work, you can make hybrid work less punishing and more productive for the people who actually have to live it every day.

Workshops as a lever, not a luxury

If you’re the one thinking about how your team spends its time together, treat workshops as one of your main levers, not a nice-to-have. Use them to replace at least one recurring “talk about work” meeting with a “do the work together” session each month; the goal is not more workshops, it’s fewer, better-designed moments of real collaboration.