Of course, we could work remotely, we have everything for that: computers, internet, video calls, great people, and cozy homes with cats and dogs. Yet we choose the office because we believe personal contact matters for good work. It's our own experience, and research confirms it too. And we're not alone, we're part of a global trend. As of 2026, 55% of Fortune 100 companies (Amazon, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and others) now require five-day office attendance, up from just 5% in 2021. So why do we choose the office?

Collaboration and Speed

For complex tasks and fast decisions, nothing beats in-person contact. Research from Stanford GSB and Columbia Business School found that teams working in person generate 15 - 20% more ideas than remote teams, and their ideas score higher for originality.

Economists at the London School of Economics discovered that work gets done faster when colleagues can discuss a problem in person, and the effect is stronger the more complex and urgent the task. It sounds fun, but the authors claim that even the distance between desks within the same office mattered - the closer colleagues sat, the higher their productivity.

And according to JLL's Global HX Trends 2025, office attendance is rising - on average, employees now spend 3.2 days a week in the office, up from 2.7 in 2024. The main reasons people choose to come into the office are socializing with colleagues (63%) and internal meetings (55%).

Learning and Growth

Junior employees learn through observation, working side by side with others, and informal conversations - not through online instructions. NBER studied employees who started their careers either in the office or remotely. It turned out that those who started in the office asked for help more easily, built stronger relationships with colleagues, and went through more effective onboarding training. Their productivity outpaced that of employees who started working fully remote.

This effect is also confirmed by a large-scale 2025 Cisco survey of 21,500 employees and employers worldwide. 76% of employees believe that regular office presence has accelerated their career growth, and 86% of employees and 81% of employers call such presence critical for advancement, mentorship, and team inclusion.

Culture and Belonging

Culture is born out of shared space and time, the office creates a sense of team that's hard to replicate remotely. Microsoft studied data from 61,000 of its own employees after the shift to remote work and found that connections between teams weakened by approximately 25%, and teams became more closed off within themselves.

Interestingly, fully remote work is least popular specifically among Gen Z. According to a May 2025 Gallup survey of 19,000 employees in the US, only 23% of Gen Z would prefer to work fully remotely, compared with 35% for every older generation. The same survey shows that among working people, Gen Z experiences loneliness the most. It seems that young employees, just starting out in their careers, intuitively sense what research on mentorship and learning confirms - and they want isolation the least.

Work-Life Balance

Remote work promises freedom, but that freedom comes at a cost. A large-scale study in Science found that between 2011 and 2024, remote employees spent more time alone, and those living alone were more likely to spend entire days without any in-person human contact. According to the authors, remote work accounts for a third of the overall rise in mental distress among Americans in recent years.

The freedom from a fixed schedule that comes with remote work often means the workday simply never ends. Microsoft studied Teams usage among millions of employees worldwide and found that over the past year, meetings after 8 pm rose by 16% and the average employee sends or receives more than 50 messages outside working hours. The main driver of this rise is distributed global teams specifically.

How We Work at Smart State

We don't demonize remote work, and we recognize that it suits some companies and some tasks. But for our work, the office is the perfect fit. We made this choice for our people, their growth, and their work-life balance.

At the same time, we don't see the office as a place where you show up and sit in silence at your desk - in the same isolation as being at home, just with different decor. What matters to us is the chance to be around colleagues and work together in our comfortable, cozy office. We solve problems, drink coffee, laugh, brainstorm at the whiteboard, have lunch, and share news. What's more, we genuinely enjoy spending time with each other even after the workday is over.

Our people get generous vacation time and six sick days a year with no doctor's note required, we trust people to decide for themselves when they need to rest or recover. We want our team to come into the office because it's a great, interesting place to be. And that's exactly what we've managed to build.