“Some of the challenges CIOs face include losing top-tier talent, limiting the pool of candidates available for hire, and damaging company culture, with a team filled with resentment,” says Lacey Kaelani, CEO and cofounder at Metaintro.
Despite possible resistance, it makes sense for some IT jobs to be tied to an office, says Lena McDearmid, founder and CEO of culture and leadership advisory firm Wryver. Some IT roles, including device provisioning, network operations, and conference room IT support, are better done in person, she notes.
She sees some other benefits in specific situations. “In-person work is genuinely valuable for onboarding and mentoring early-career technologists, especially when learning how the organization actually operates, not just how the codebase works,” McDearmid says. “It’s also powerful when teams need to think together in high-bandwidth ways: whiteboards, war rooms, architecture reviews, incident response, or when solving messy, cross-functional problems.”
