op-ed vs public-statement

Topic: Arguing a public position on return-to-office
Axis varied: format
A: Op-Ed B: Public Statement

What to notice

Same policy, opposite obligations, and the bylines tell you which is which.

A is signed by a person and built to be argued with. ”# The Return-to-Office Debate Has Only Two Options. We Refused Both. By Priya Ahluwalia” - a headline making a claim, an author owning it, and an opening that positions itself against everyone currently re-litigating the question.

B is signed by an organisation and built to be relied on. ”# Millbrook Software - Statement on Our Work Location Policy” with a date, and then the operative fact in the first line: two mandatory office days, Tuesday and Thursday. No argument at all.

The sharpest single tell. A has a byline; B has a date. Ask what each is for six months later. The op-ed is a position someone took at a moment. The statement is what the policy is, and it needs to be quotable without distortion, which is why it refuses the rhetorical framing the op-ed is built on.

A: op-ed

The Return-to-Office Debate Has Only Two Options. We Refused Both.

By Priya Ahluwalia

Every organization currently re-litigating its return-to-office policy is being handed the same two options: mandate everyone back full time, or let the ad hoc flexibility of the last few years harden into permanent policy by default. Both are wrong. I lead the working group that spent the better part of two quarters proving it, and I want to make the public case for the option nobody was offering us.

The reason this keeps resurfacing is that almost nobody actually wrote a policy when offices reopened. They wrote a placeholder called “flexible” and let each manager interpret it however the moment demanded. That ambiguity was survivable for a while. It stopped being survivable once two groups inside the same company started building incompatible expectations on top of it: leaders who wanted proximity back because they could point to specific coordination failures, and employees who had restructured their actual lives, housing, childcare, a partner’s job, around an arrangement they were told was durable. Neither group invented their complaint. Both are responding to something real, which is exactly why picking a side settles nothing.

Start with the case for shared space, because it is stronger than most remote advocates want to admit. I watched a disagreement that would have taken four minutes to resolve face to face take four days to resolve over a chat thread, for no reason other than the two people who needed to talk were never in a room at the same time. New employees absorb this cost hardest. Nobody schedules a meeting called “overhearing how decisions actually get made here,” and that is precisely the kind of orientation that used to happen by proximity and mostly does not happen at all now. When someone on our own team raised, unprompted, that junior colleagues seemed to be missing something the rest of us took for granted, we did not have a rebuttal. We had a gap to close.

Now the case for flexibility, which is not really about comfort, whatever the office-first argument likes to imply. We tested a five-day-in-office requirement against two consecutive hiring cycles before we backed away from it, and watched strong candidates outside commuting range decline before the first interview both times. That is not a hypothetical cost - it is a name on a list of people we needed and did not get. And the employees who had already relocated on the strength of an earlier flexibility commitment were not being sentimental when they pushed back on reversing it. They had made real decisions on the strength of what they were told. Treating that as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a promise to be kept is not decisiveness. It is a broken commitment wearing decisiveness as a costume.

Here is the part I most want other leaders to hear before they announce their own policy: stop calling the middle option a compromise. A compromise is what both sides walk away from unsatisfied, and a policy explained that way gives both camps permission to reject it on principle. What we landed on instead is two fixed anchor days a week, Tuesday and Thursday, where everyone who can reach an office is expected to be in one, and three days that are genuinely flexible, no approval required and no exceptions logged. That is not splitting the difference. It is deciding, on purpose, which problem each part of the week exists to solve. We spent nearly as long arguing about who inside the company owned that decision as we spent arguing about the decision itself - settle ownership before you settle policy, or you will re-litigate both at once.

If your organization is still stuck choosing between full return and full flexibility, notice what you are actually choosing between: two policies that have each already failed somewhere, quite possibly inside your own building. Pick a small number of anchor days and mean them. Protect them from individual opt-outs for at least a full quarter before anyone is allowed to renegotiate. Then design the rest of the week around trust instead of attendance. The binary was never the honest choice. It was just the one that required no design work, and design work is the part of this decision most leadership teams have been trying to skip.

Priya Ahluwalia leads the work-location policy working group at her company, where she spent two quarters building the anchor-day model described here.

B: public-statement

Millbrook Software - Statement on Our Work Location Policy

July 17, 2026

Millbrook Software’s work location policy is two mandatory office days each week, Tuesday and Thursday, and three fully flexible days for every other office-eligible employee. Employees hired into remote-eligible roles are not subject to the anchor-day requirement. That is the whole policy, published in full on July 14, and it has not changed.

Over the past few days, a Facilities email from the week of June 16 has been circulating publicly, including among some of our own remote-hired employees, describing an expectation of five-day-a-week office attendance. That email is real. It went out during a routine space-planning cycle that started before our work-location policy was finalized, and it reflected an assumption Facilities was operating on independent of the policy decision underway at the time. It does not describe our policy, and it never did. We understand why a document describing five-day attendance, surfacing days after we publicly announced a two-day policy, reads as evidence that the two-day framing is not the real plan. That is a fair question, and it deserves a direct answer rather than silence.

The June 16 email was superseded internally on July 6, when Facilities and our People team issued joint, corrected room-booking guidance aligned to the anchor-day policy, more than a week before we said anything publicly. We have published that timeline, and a direct answer to this specific question, in the FAQ accompanying the hybrid-anchor framework. Employees hired into remote-eligible roles remain fully excluded from the anchor-day requirement, exactly as documented at hire; nothing in this correction changes that. Anyone with a question about what actually applies to their role can reach our People team directly.

We published this policy, and the reasoning behind it, because people are owed more than the ambiguous “flexible” arrangement this organization operated under since offices reopened - one that meant something different in every manager’s hands. An old, superseded internal email resurfacing without its context is a reasonable thing to ask us about, and we would rather answer it plainly than let it sit unaddressed. The policy stands as announced: two anchor days, three flexible days, and no change to what we committed to the people we hired under remote-eligible terms.

Dana Okonkwo Chief People Officer Millbrook Software