USA 
United Kingdom
The return-to-office debate has been an ever-present in boardroom discussions since the end of the pandemic, with executives issuing mandates and employees pushing back. But, according to Alexandre Bouaziz, CEO of payroll specialist Deel, the entire argument is misdirected and flawed.
“The current debate over remote work is the wrong conversation,” Bouaziz wrote in a piece for the World Economic Forum, pointing instead to a deeper structural shift in how organizations function.
He argued that most businesses are already operating as distributed organizations, whether they acknowledge it or not.
“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.”
RTO debate misses structural reality
Companies with more than one office, or even more than one floor in the building are distributed organizations, he said.
A company with teams spread across cities and time zones is not an “in-office company” in any meaningful sense.
“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.”
And while the pandemic may have suddenly and rapidly accelerated remote work adoption, Bouaziz insisted it did not create distributed work.
“Companies have been distributed for decades,” he wrote, adding that technological advances have removed many of the historical barriers to managing global teams.
Talent strategy replaces location debate
Bouaziz reinforced his argument with data from Deel’s 2025 State of Global Hiring Report, which analyzed more than one million worker contracts, challenging the assumption that global hiring is primarily about cost reduction.
Among nearly 100 start-ups founded between 2020 and 2025 that raised $100 million or more, the top destinations for cross-border hiring include the UK (12.2%), Canada (11.9%), Germany (8.8%), Australia (5.8%) and Spain (5.2%). All are high-cost, high-wage, markets, indicating that companies are pursuing talent rather than savings.
“Software developers make up 28% of their cross-border hires, followed by tech sales and AI engineers,” Bouaziz wrote, adding that top-funded start-ups are “13.6% more likely to hire software developers internationally than the average small business.”
Equally telling is the distribution of roles.
“Seven of the top 10 cross-border roles globally are in sales, marketing or customer-facing functions,” highlighting the importance of local market knowledge. Companies are not centralizing talent but embedding it where it can be most effective.
Bouaziz also challenged assumptions about where remote workers live.
“The average distance of remote workers from their major urban centers has declined every year since 2022,” with workers in the US now as close to major cities as they were in 2021.
Similar trends are visible in London and Paris he said, suggesting that remote work has not led to geographic dispersal so much as a reconfiguration around urban hubs.
Taken together, it undermines the logic behind rigid return-to-office policies. If talent is already distributed and clustered around key markets, mandating presence in a single location risks limiting access to that talent.
The ‘wrong question’ and what replaces it
The core issue is not where people work, he argued, but how organizations operate. Leaders debating return-to-office mandates are, in his view, asking a question that has already been answered by market behavior and workforce trends.
“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?”
Bouaziz’s approach makes return-to-office a secondary concern and, instead, prioritizes building the infrastructure, processes and leadership capability required to manage distributed teams effectively.
Right now, he stated, competitive advantage lies not in office perks or attendance policies but in the ability to access and integrate talent globally.
“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 is unlikely to disappear, he said, but he believes it is increasingly irrelevant to the companies shaping the future of work.
“The return-to-office debate will continue,” he wrote. “But the companies that will define the next decade aren’t waiting for it to resolve.
“Every company does remote work. The only question is whether you’re doing it right.”
