Rockstar Games, a division of Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., will ask employees to return to the office five days a week beginning in April as the video-game maker enters the final stages of development on its next game, the hotly anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI.
You can value it, but that doesn’t mean it should be mandatory for everyone. When I have to go to the office my day is lost, not just because I’m not productive in the office, but also because I can’t do anything for myself. Also half of my team works 8 timezones away, our manager lives 4 timezones away, unless half the team gets on a transatlantic plane the more tram won’t be in the same office, how is making people go to two different offices in three different timezones twice a week going to help collaboration?
That’s why I said this:
It seems your team was not put together with the intention of working in an office, so it would not make sense to require your team to come to the office.
My team has decided that in-office work is valuable, so we only hire locally or pay to relocate people. We do have four full remote team members, and those exist because of extenuating circumstances (two need to work with customers in their region, and two have legal/family obligations), and we fly them out every few months at company expense (e.g. for project kickoff meetings). But the rest of our 20-ish people live locally.
We have two other teams in two different time zones (one in Europe, one in Asia; we’re in the US) that are part of the overall team, and they meet in their respective regions. We do remote sync calls with them, but otherwise they are independent.
If your work doesn’t benefit from in-office collaboration, there’s no reason to come into an office. Ours does, so we do. But at the end of the day, it should be the team that decides, not management.