Since the corona period, working from home has become a kind of acquired right. And I understand why. It gives people focus, saves them a commute, and lets them shape their day around their life instead of the other way around. I wrote about the value of staying connected during those disconnected times in How to stay connected during disconnected times, and a lot of what we learned then still holds.

But something has shifted. Getting a team together in the same room, even now and then, has become surprisingly hard. It can feel like you are asking for a favour rather than organising a normal day of work.

Let me be clear about one thing: I am not saying we should go back to the office every day. That ship has sailed, and honestly, it should have.

What I am saying is that we have lost something, and it is worth naming what that something is.

Some of the most valuable things about working together do not show up in a planning tool.

There are the coffee machine conversations, the ones nobody scheduled. Half of them are about the weekend, but the other half are where problems quietly get solved.

There is the difference in explaining something while you stand next to each other. At a whiteboard, with a pen in your hand, you understand your own idea better by the time you have finished drawing it. Something comes out of that shared space that a screen share rarely gives you.

And there is the feeling of not having to solve a problem on your own. At home there can be a threshold before you ask for help. You do not want to interrupt, so you send a careful message, or you decide to struggle on for another hour first. In the same room you simply turn your chair around.

There is a tempting shortcut here. If it is hard to reach a colleague, why not ask the AI instead?

AI can help with plenty, and I use it regularly. But a conversation with an AI is not the same as a conversation with a colleague. It tends to agree with you, build on your framing, and hand back a tidy version of what you already thought.

I called this the echo chamber effect in AI’s Impact on Team Dynamics (Part 1). A colleague does the opposite. They push back, ask the question you were avoiding, and bring a perspective you did not have. That friction is exactly what you miss when you work on your own.

So what is the answer?

I do not think it is a mandate. "Everyone coming into the office three days a week" treats presence as the goal, when presence was never the goal. Good work and a healthy team are.

I think the answer is a natural rhythm. A team comes together when the situation calls for it, and stays apart when it does not. Kicking off something new, untangling a hard problem, welcoming a new team member, or simply feeling the temperature of the group again. These are the moments that are worth the trip. A quiet day of individual work is not.

This asks something of the team. It asks for the maturity to judge when being together actually helps, and the trust to let the team make that call rather than having it dictated from above. As I wrote in Team dynamics to the rescue!, the real power of a team lives in something deeper than its tools. This is part of that something.

So how do you find that rhythm without slipping back into old habits?

It starts with tying the moments you come together to the work itself. Meet for a kickoff, a hard design problem, or an onboarding, the kind of thing where being in the same room clearly helps, and let the quiet days of individual work happen at home. Presence should mean something, otherwise it is just a commute with extra steps.

Where you can, let the team own that calendar. The people doing the work usually know when they need each other, and trusting them to make that call beats any rule handed down from above.

And when you do come together, protect the informal. Do not pack the day so full that the coffee machine conversations have nowhere to happen. Those unplanned moments are half the reason to be there in the first place.

As for AI, keep using it, but keep a person in the loop too. When something feels important, take it to a colleague as well, and give them the space to disagree with you.

Working from home is here to stay, and I am glad it is. But we should be honest that something got lost when we stopped standing in the same room.

The overheard remark at the coffee machine, the whiteboard, the chair you turn around when you are stuck. Small things on their own, and together they are a big part of how a team actually works.

None of this is a call to go back to how it was. It is a call to be deliberate about coming together when the work asks for it, and relaxed about staying apart when it does not. Your team can feel that difference. Give them the room to act on it.