The Benefits of the Return-to-Office Policy

Although many big tech companies announced various return-to-office (RTO) policies in recent months, it is still widely considered the norm in the IT industry to work remotely. It is hard to argue that office work brings benefits when people have gotten used to their routine, and most, if not all, tasks can be performed from just about anywhere.

Research done by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found that "72% of employees who shifted to remote work during the pandemic said their return to the workplace was a somewhat or a very positive experience."

According to another SHRM report, 2024 was indicated as the year when many employers tried to reach a compromise between fully remote and fully in-person work.

The main concerns

Looking at the current trends and TestDevLab’s internal culture, in the first half of 2025, we opted for a policy that combines both remote and in-office work while offering flexibility. With such a policy, we aimed to keep most of the remote work benefits intact while bringing people closer together regularly. Therefore, all our employees were asked to work from their nearest office once per week (or two weeks, for our HQ, where the capacity to host the large number of employees is limited).

Unsurprisingly, even a partial return to the office announcement last month attracted a lot of attention. Employees expressed various concerns, requiring thorough investigations and conversations to reach a mutual understanding of expectations from both sides - the employer’s and the employee’s.

Here are some of the aspects that we considered within the leadership and HR teams to promote a positive internal culture around this topic and showcase the value of office work:

1. Employees living far from the office are at a disadvantage

Logistics was one of our first considerations. Of course, no one enjoys long commutes, additional fuel costs, and limited transportation options if they reside far away from big cities.

In Latvia, TestDevLab has six offices across the country, making it relatively easy for employees to meet and see each other in person. This proved not to be a problem for the majority of our employees based in Latvia, since most reside within a relatively short distance to either of our six office locations, and we allow employees to choose which office they work from.

However, we also have one office in Vilnius (Lithuania), one in Tartu (Estonia), and one in Skopje (North Macedonia). It was therefore decided that only those who live within 60-70km of any of our office locations will have to come in; the rest are exempt from this policy. Considering that all of these countries are not large, most of our workforce is based around capital cities, and in most cases, there are decent public transportation options, this restriction also means that the policy applies to most.

This meant that those who had moved further from big cities or capitals would not have to make major adjustments to their lives and keep working remotely, although we agreed that they would still try to visit the office from time to time, or whenever possible.

2. Teams are scattered across multiple locations

Of course, coming to the office to see your closest project colleagues is more motivating, good for building stronger teams, and simply put, more fun as you can stay around the people that you already know and work with. However, we do not allocate projects or teams based on someone’s location and see a lot of value in having international teams of engineers.

The other major benefit of working from the office is having exposure to colleagues from all sorts of roles, teams, and departments. Those whom they do not get to see on daily calls and meetings. Those who might be less active in company chats, but have a lot to offer outside of them. Those that one can learn from and advance, exchange ideas with, and perhaps work together in the future on a different project or internal initiative. A lot of the benefits, in my opinion, can be simply attributed to visibility.

In the past, we saw a lot of ideas being born on office premises. The ideas could be very different, from hosting a board game night to creating workshops for experience sharing between employees. That is also how employees came together to participate in hackathons, built solutions together, and played around with hardware (which is not our primary focus but has been growing bigger through the work of the Research and Development team). Without office premises, many ideas and improvements might have never been brought to life.

R&D Engineer Ņikita Niks Daņilovs recalls:

During the development of a phone holder concept, I was inspired by an idea from another colleague involving an electrical counter on a railing, which I adapted for my own project. Additionally, many of the 3D printing concepts I’ve worked on were sparked by something I saw in the office or by suggestions from colleagues that I spontaneously interacted with.

With the current policy, we are hoping to see employees more active and engaged in company matters and bring new initiatives forward. Even before this policy, some teams self-organised co-working days in the office, and we saw a lot more feedback, engagement, and new ideas coming specifically from them. They were simply more vocal, as they knew each other better and felt more at ease sharing their thoughts.

If you don’t get to know others in the company, how else would you discuss the problems you encounter and create potential solutions?

3. Introverted employees are not willing to engage as much when working from the office

Continuing with the previous point, it was brought up by some employees that they are not extroverted; therefore, they will have nothing to do in the office. Quoting the feedback that I received, “it will be a regular working day for me, just from a different location”, some employees expressed.

This is a perspective I contemplated the most. Being extroverted and working with people all my life, I’m the complete opposite of that, and thrive around others the most. However, introversion and extraversion being a spectrum means that even the most extraverted people have days when they are better off not talking to anyone, and socialising seems like the last thing they want to do.

We are all different and have different characteristics when it comes to interacting with others. There are plenty of people around me who are not the most outgoing and loud, and would qualify as primarily introverts, yet it does not mean that they are not looking to make meaningful connections and get to know their colleagues. From the company’s side, we are looking to foster these connections as much as possible to build a positive internal culture. We don't want to focus on numbers, resources, and productivity metrics alone, without valuing the people who do the work that can easily become purely transactional if done fully remotely.

It's also important to recognise some of the personal benefits that come with bigger engagement, including professional and career growth.

According to the Harvard Business Review, introverted people can sometimes be less visible in the workplace as they tend to stay “behind the scenes”. We believe that showing up to the office can help anyone be more visible, present, and engaged, even if it happens little by little.

In other words, being on one or the other end of the spectrum does not change the fact that socialising in the workplace is beneficial to both extraverted and introverted employees, as it simply pushes everyone to be more involved in whatever is happening around them.

Final thoughts

Although it seems that there is a public backlash about many of the recent RTO policies in the IT industry, upon a closer look, it mostly revolves around organisations that do not offer any flexibility or mandate that employees return to the office for 3-5 days per week. Hence, we opted for an approach that requires work from the office only one day per week, maintaining a lot of flexibility and letting employees choose themselves when it is convenient for them to come in. There are designated co-working days that employees in each office picked themselves, and, in case, for whatever reason, they cannot come on a specific co-working day, they are allowed to change it up from time to time.

Considering all aspects, we decided that the common benefits of such a policy in the long term outweighed some of the individual concerns. We need to adhere to our values of collaboration, innovation, and growth - all of which happen more when people are seen, heard, and feel a sense of belonging to others in the company.

Step by step, we are aiming to improve in these areas, already seeing way more smiles and chit chat around office premises these months than in the past few years combined.

We’re building teams driven by collaboration, creativity, and continuous learning. Visit our careers page to see how you can be part of it.