Why leaders considering return-to-office mandates are asking the wrong question

The return-to-office debate has dominated business headlines for years now. Executives issue mandates. Employees push back. Back-and-forth headlines declare the death or revival of remote work. Rinse and repeat. While some are distracted by arguments about where people should sit, the world’s most competitive companies are doing something far more worthwhile: hiring the best people, wherever they are, and building genuinely distributed teams as a strategic advantage.

Speaking from experience (I run a global HR and payroll company with over 7,000 employees in 110 countries): the current debate over remote work is the wrong conversation.

The real question is whether your company knows how to operate as a distributed organization – because whether you’ve chosen to or not, you already are one.

Imagine a company headquartered in New York that also has a sales team in London, engineers in Berlin and a support team in São Paulo. Is that an “in-office company,” with a cohesive culture of employees that all sit on the same floor? It’s not. It’s a distributed organization with a return-to-office policy. The moment you have teams across time zones, offices, or even two floors of a building, you’re navigating the core challenges of distributed work: asynchronous communication, cross-cultural collaboration and managing output rather than presence.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced this reality into view, but it didn’t create it. Companies have been distributed for decades. But where there was once a maze of infrastructure nightmares, there’s now technology that can fill the void and make distributed work seamless.

When people hear “global hiring,” they often assume that cost-cutting is the reason. Deel’s 2025 State of Global Hiring Report, which analyzed over one million worker contracts, shows that is not the case.

Among nearly 100 start-ups founded between 2020 and 2025 that raised $100 million or more in funding, the top destinations for cross-border hiring are the UK (12.2%), Canada (11.9%), Germany (8.8%), Australia (5.8%) and Spain (5.2%). These are high-cost, high-skill markets – not destinations start-ups would naturally gravitate towards if they were trying to save on labor costs. The broader SMB population leans more heavily on the Philippines, Mexico, Colombia and India, by contrast.

Software developers make up 28% of their cross-border hires, followed by tech sales and AI engineers. Top-funded start-ups are 13.6% more likely to hire software developers internationally than the average small business. This is a strategic talent acquisition decision to seek rare skills that command premium prices. For these top-performing start-ups and beyond, geography shouldn’t be the reason leaders can’t access them.

Perhaps the most telling signal: seven of the top 10 cross-border roles globally are in sales, marketing or customer-facing functions. Local market knowledge – understanding how customers in a specific region actually think and buy – remains nearly impossible to replicate from a distant HQ. So companies hire locally for it, wherever that happens to be.

There’s another persistent myth worth dismantling: the idea that remote workers fled to spacious plots of land far outside of their closest city and have since stayed there. Again, our research shows this is not the case.

The average distance of remote workers from their major urban centers has declined every year since 2022. In the US, workers are now as close to cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and San Francisco as they were in 2021. Similar patterns appear in London and Paris. Remote workers still want proximity to the energy, community and opportunity that these cities offer.

This should be a wake-up call for how leaders think about their distributed teams. The assumption that “remote” means “scattered” is misplaced. Workers are clustering in familiar urban corridors – they’re just not exactly within walking distance to your building.

The entrepreneurs I talk to who are still wrestling with whether or not to issue return-to-office mandates are asking a question that, in many ways, has already been answered. With clues from the market, their own hiring decisions and from where their best people have chosen to live – the answer is clear.

The better questions are: Do you have the systems to hire and manage people across borders compliantly? Do you know how to build culture when your team spans time zones? Are you letting geography limit your access to the people who would make your company exceptional?

In 2026, the companies winning the talent war aren’t necessarily the ones with the best office perks or the strictest attendance policies. They’re the ones that have figured out how to find exceptional people anywhere in the world, and how to make them feel like they’re part of something worth showing up for, wherever they are.

The return-to-office debate will continue. But the companies that will define the next decade aren’t waiting for it to resolve. They’re building teams that are a far cry from 2019’s org charts. And they’re treating distributed work not as a concession, but as a competitive advantage.

Every company does remote work. The only question is whether you’re doing it right.