Return to Office? Try Mandated Remote Instead. Before You Mandate Return to Office, Mandate Remote Weeks
We need to stop thinking about remote work as a luxury for knowledge workers.
It’s not just about letting someone work from home.
It’s about testing whether your organization actually runs on systems—or just hallway conversations.
If you’ve got multiple offices, branches, warehouses, or field teams, remote work isn’t optional. It’s diagnostic.
It shows you what’s broken.
Where the spokes of your hub-and-spoke model fall apart.
Where process gives way to proximity.
Proximity Bias Is Real—and It’s Costing You
Let’s be honest:
If your HQ employees get promoted faster, make more decisions, or get better information than people in other locations, you don’t have a talent problem. You have a structure problem.
And the worst part?
You probably don’t see it—because you’re at the hub.
When decisions get made by whoever’s closest to leadership, and not by the people closest to the work, everything slows down. Trust erodes. Good people leave.
Use Remote Weeks the Same Way Banks Use Forced PTO
In banking, certain roles are required to take mandatory time off every year. Not for rest—but for fraud detection.
The person’s access is cut. They can’t log in.
Why?
Because if something shady has been going on—manual workarounds, quiet coverups, unsanctioned hacks—it’ll come to light when they’re not around to prop it up.
The same principle applies here.
Send your HQ team home for a week and see what they’ve been patching manually, solving informally, or hoarding context on without even realizing it.
You’re not trying to catch someone doing something wrong.
You’re trying to see if the organization works without invisible scaffolding.
We Did This at Scale—And It Worked
At SHIELD Illinois, we built one of the largest COVID testing infrastructures in the country—with thousands of testing sites and millions of tests processed—entirely remotely.
Not in spite of remote work.
Because of it.
When your leadership team isn’t sitting in a central office, you’re forced to think differently. You can’t fall back on hallway conversations. You have to document everything. Communicate with intent. Build with structure.
It made us better.
Because we didn’t just think about the Field Ops team—we learned to think like the Field Ops team.
Remote work gave us empathy.
It gave us discipline.
And it gave us scale.
What Mandated Remote Weeks Reveal
- Who your information actually reaches
- What “visibility” means in your org
- Where decisions happen (and who’s excluded from them)
- Whether success is a function of talent—or geography
If your systems fall apart when someone’s out of the room, you didn’t design a process.
You designed a dependency.
If It Can’t Work Without You There, It Doesn’t Work
If your business only runs when leadership is in the building, it’s not built to scale.
True operational maturity means people have access to the same tools, context, and decision-making logic—regardless of location.
Remote work reveals your blind spots.
Don’t resist it. Mandate it. Learn from it. Fix what breaks.