The real divide isn’t remote versus office, but whether employees have any genuine say in how they work.
For the past few years, boardrooms and executive teams have been locked in a debate about where people work. Return to office or stay remote. Hybrid by policy or hybrid by exception. Three days or four. Badges swiped, desks counted, occupancy tracked.
A lot of heat. Relatively little light. And according to Athalie Williams, a global CHRO who has led substantive change at the highest levels of ASX50 and FTSE companies, it may be the wrong conversation altogether.
“The biggest gap isn’t really about flexibility or location,” she says. “It is about agency. People want a bit more say in how work fits into their life.”
That distinction matters more than it might appear. Flexibility, as most organisations practise it, is something granted from above — a policy, a percentage, a set of approved arrangements. Agency is different. It is the lived experience of having genuine influence over the conditions of your own work. For many employees, that experience has been conspicuously absent, regardless of what the policy says.
The Control Default
Williams has spent more than three decades working across some of the world’s most complex organisations in resources, telecommunications, financial services and consulting. She has watched the return-to-office debate unfold with a clear-eyed view of what is actually driving it.
“My sense is that much of this comes from a place of fear rather than a deep understanding of the drivers of human performance,” she says. “When leaders can’t see or directly control the work, it can feel safer to bring people back into the office.”
That impulse is understandable. Uncertainty makes leaders reach for what feels familiar. Visibility becomes a proxy for productivity. Presence passes for evidence of engagement. But she argues that this logic, while intuitive, tends to undermine the very thing organisations are trying to protect.
She is not dismissive of the case for in-person time. “There is also truth in the argument that younger employees learn by being around more experienced colleagues, and that a sense of community is easier to build when people spend time together.” That argument has merit. Using mandated attendance as a substitute for genuine leadership is a different matter.
What Trust Actually Requires
The organisations that have navigated this well share a common approach. They have been willing to trust their people with something meaningful: the ability to shape the conditions of their own work.
“When teams are trusted to shape and govern what hybrid looks like for their work, performance often improves,” she says. “It creates ownership, accountability and a more adult relationship with work.”
That phrase — “adult relationship” — points to something that gets lost in most flexibility debates: the quality of the conversation between employer and employee. Too often, that conversation is conducted through policy documents and announcements. The result is a workforce that feels managed rather than trusted, and leaders who wonder why engagement scores won’t budge.
“Bridging that gap requires transparency and honest, adult conversations,” she says. “Leaders need to be able to hold tension without defaulting to control.”
Holding tension means sitting with ambiguity, tolerating outcomes you cannot fully predict, and trusting people to make good decisions when you are not in the room. For leaders who have built careers in environments that reward certainty, it requires a genuine shift in how they think about their role.
Clarity as the Alternative
The shift she describes is not from control to laissez-faire. It is from control to clarity, and that distinction is worth holding onto.
“Leaders need to move from oversight to empowerment and from hierarchy to clarity,” she says. The organisations that make this transition are not the ones that remove all structure or abandon accountability. They are the ones that get far more precise about what they actually need from people, and then step back.
“I have watched teams shift gears almost overnight once their goals were clear and tied directly to the organisation’s priorities,” she says. “When you line up the inputs and outputs across teams, people stop tripping over each other and start focusing on the work that actually matters.”
When people understand what is expected, why it matters and where their contribution fits, the need for oversight shrinks. The energy that was going into monitoring presence can go into something more useful.
The Stakes Are Rising
She is clear that this is not simply a post-pandemic adjustment. The arrival of AI and automation is making the agency question more urgent, not less.
“AI will handle tasks, while leaders will handle meaning,” she says. As more routine work is absorbed by technology, the distinctively human contribution — judgement, relationships, the capacity to navigate ambiguity — becomes more central. Those capabilities do not thrive in environments built around compliance and control. They require genuine trust and room to operate.
For boards and executive teams, the implication is direct. Workforce culture and the conditions for human performance are not HR matters to be delegated. They are governance questions with real consequences for long-term value.
“The organisations that build it will be the ones that move faster and hold on to their best people,” she says.
The debate about where people work will run for a while yet. But the organisations already asking the more important question — whether their people have genuine agency over how they contribute — are playing a different game entirely.