Last year marked a major shift in return-to-office mandates. For the first time since the pandemic, more than half of Fortune 100 companies moved from hybrid setups to fully in-office policies. But Mark Dixon, CEO and founder of International Workplace Group (IWG), has a message for JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, and any CEO demanding a return to the office: You’re not serious about AI.
From his vantage point, running the world’s largest flexible office provider—with more than 8 million users across 122 countries and 85% of the Fortune 500 among its customers—Dixon believes that bosses clinging to rigid, five-day mandates are defaulting to a “factory-style approach.”
In other words, it ignores the most basic reality: Work has changed.
“Those sort of days of clocking in, clocking out in office work? That was when you had typists. You don’t have them anymore,” Dixon tells Fortune. “Tech advances now mean you can manage everyone. It doesn’t matter where they are.”
CEOs clinging to rigid mandates are effectively re-creating an industrial-era mindset—swapping punch cards for swipe passes—even though the measure of success is no longer how many hours someone sits at a desk, but what they actually produce.
