Scene: an in-office day in 2026. After commuting in, you sit at your desk, log on, and join a virtual call. Your colleagues, who are also on the call, are actually just down the hall. It might sound strange, but in a recent Atlantic piece, “The Rise of In-Office Remote Work,” economists Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington describe just that. This absurdity is what happens when we mistake convenience for efficiency. (We touched on a similar subject in an earlier edition of SNP Monthly.) It might seem like an obvious mistake, but it’s understandable once you realize how we got to this point. The problem is, we keep focusing on how work gets done, and not the final product.
One step forward, two steps back
You can take a meeting anywhere, automate your inbox, and draft a proposal in a matter of seconds. Convenient. But how we interact with these tools, and the end result, don’t always hit the mark.
In that same Atlantic article, Emanuel and Harrington showed that more than 70% of the workers they surveyed had at least one teammate who wasn’t in the office with them on their most recent in-office day. And 52% of workers who had meetings reported at least one online meeting where everyone was in the same building. The commute hasn’t brought people together. It’s just changed the backdrop. Now what used to be convenient — you can take a meeting from anywhere — becomes an inefficiency. More time spent to reach the same end.
Faster isn’t always better
AI is exposing a similar blind spot. In an October report for Futurism, Joe Wilkins describes companies reconsidering their rush to adopt AI after finding that employees were generating low-quality output at considerable expense. Microsoft executive vice president Ryan Roslansky described receiving an AI-generated document, having his own AI summarize it, and finding that it contributed nothing new to the idea. He called the resulting cycle a “doom loop.”
That’s artificial efficiency in its purest form. The document was produced quickly. The summary was produced quickly. And yet, nobody learned anything.
How matters less than why
The reason businesses haven’t quite found their footing after all these years is that the emphasis is on nebulous things like efficiency and adoption and whether remote is better or hybrid or in-person. Instead the emphasis should be on creating understanding and intentionality.
Yet most workplace conversations leave little room for that kind of exchange. We discuss deadlines, deliverables, and next steps. We share information, but not always the thinking behind it—because it takes time—it’s not convenient. The irony of course is that while these exchanges can look inefficient in the moment, their value inevitably shows up later. Imagine two different teams. One uses AI to craft a beautifully designed deck packed with 30 slides-worth of information. Everyone skims it, and two weeks later no decisions have been made because they all still have the same questions. The other team creates a presentation, revises it again and again, hosts meetings, and takes the time to walk everyone through the findings and explain how they think they should move forward. The second team may look less efficient, but the end result is far better.
A few places to start:
- Check the room before you send the link. If most attendees are in the building, book a conference room. If the meeting is purely an update, send a doc instead.
- End every meeting with a readback. In the last three minutes, have someone other than the organizer state what was decided and why. If they can’t, the meeting isn’t done.
- Don’t blindly forward AI output. Before sending anything AI-drafted, add three lines in your own words: what this is, what you think, and what you need from them. If you can’t write those three lines, it’s not ready to send.
- Ask “How did you get there?” Once per review, ask about the thinking behind the work, not just the deliverable.
None of this requires abandoning remote work or rejecting AI. It requires being more deliberate about what we want our tools and working arrangements to accomplish.
We don’t need to make work less efficient. We need a better definition of efficiency.
If a tool saves ten minutes but leaves someone else an hour of cleanup, it hasn’t saved time. If a meeting is shorter but nobody leaves understanding the decision, it hasn’t moved the work forward. And if a team gets through the week without ever exchanging an idea that changes how someone thinks, it’s worth asking what all that convenience is buying us.
The goal isn’t to get people into offices or out of them, and it’s not to adopt more technology or to go analog. It’s to make the time people spend working together count.
At SNP, we help teams do that through practical work on storytelling, communication, and meeting facilitation. The tools will keep changing, but the ability to make an idea clear, connect with an audience, and think well with other people remains essential.
Interested in making your team’s communication more effective? Reach out at info@snpnet.com.
