There's a line that circulates among executives who've spent years managing teams, and it captures the problem well: there's a whole generation that entered the workforce during the pandemic and never knew what it meant to go to an office.
They're not only reluctant to work in person or to change their hours and routines — they lost something they don't even know they lost.
That line sums up one of the quietest — and most profound — challenges organizations face today.
For quite a while, we talked about the pendulum between in-person and remote work as if it were a matter of preferences or productivity. Companies swung back and forth, employees negotiated, and the hybrid model settled in as a reasonable balance for many organizations. But the pendulum kept moving. Today, more and more organizations are pushing toward greater in-person presence (an estimated 64% of CEOs expect their employees back in the office full time this year), and that decision brings with it a question few ask out loud: What got lost along the way?
The answer isn't in the KPIs or the engagement surveys. It's in something harder to measure and more expensive to replace: implicit culture.
What a screen doesn't convey
An organization's culture doesn't live solely in values handbooks or corporate speeches. It lives in the gestures, in the glances, in how a leader reacts when something goes wrong, in how a conflict gets worked out in the hallway, in what's never said but always understood. That invisible fabric — made of observation, imitation, and everyday socialization — is what gives an organization coherence and what lets its people act with sound judgment even in situations no protocol anticipated.
All of that is learned by being present. And in exclusively digital work, it gets lost.
It doesn't disappear all at once or in any obvious way. It erodes slowly, in every conversation that didn't happen in the hallway, in every gesture that never got read through a screen, in every informal moment replaced by a scheduled meeting. For those who had already internalized that culture before the pandemic, remote work was an adaptation. For those who started working in that context, that foundation never existed.
And now, when they're asked to "come back" to the office, they aren't coming back to anywhere. They're arriving for the first time at a place everyone assumes they already know.
The onboarding no one designed
That's the crux of the problem. Companies are managing the return to in-person work as if it were simply a question of days per week. Three days in the office, two remote. Or four and one. As if being physically in the same space were enough for the culture of change to start flowing again.
But culture doesn't come back on its own. It has to be conveyed deliberately, especially to those who never had the chance to absorb it naturally. In other words: you have to onboard people into in-person work.
That onboarding isn't a training session or a workshop. It's a process of consciously designing experiences that let new generations take in not only the formal rules of organizational culture, but its deeper codes. It means understanding that companies today lead teams whose members have entirely different emotional connectors and ways of socializing, and that putting them in the same physical space isn't enough for them to understand one another.
The real leadership challenge
Given this landscape, the challenge for organizations is concrete: leading teams that are diverse not only in experience or expertise, but in how each person builds relationships, processes authority, understands collaboration, and makes sense of work.
That requires actively fostering empathy and connection among people who operate by different logics. Not passive tolerance of differences, but genuine curiosity about how someone who came to work in a radically different context sees it. And it requires designing environments where that diversity isn't neutralized but amplified: where each generation can operate at its full potential, and where organizational neuroplasticity provides the channels for implicit culture to be transmitted again.
The pendulum has swung once more, and the ones holding it up are, in many cases, the same custodians as always: the middle managers, the team leaders, the people who translate strategy into everyday behavior. The question is whether organizations will simply follow that motion, or seize this moment to rebuild something that, quietly, had been slipping away.
By Alejandro Goldstein, Partner at Olivia.