After five years of experimenting with labor flexibility, the corporate scenario today faces its starkest paradox: the ‘home office’ is no longer an undisputed flag of efficiency, but rather a puzzle that many organizations still cannot put together with the same precision with which they managed assistance. There is a growing tension between talent that defends its autonomy and companies that, after exhausting the model, tighten their policies seeking to regain control of their culture and productivity.
Expectation vs. reality. According to the latest Randstad report, 83% of Argentines today work completely in person, but 51% would prefer a hybrid scheme, combining days in the office and days at home office. The gap between desire and reality is evident.
One of the main arguments to justify the return to presence is productivity. But the data doesn’t always support that narrative. The study by the Family and Business Conciliation Center (CONFyE) of the IAE Business School, carried out in 16 countries in 2025, yields conclusive results in the Argentine case: 45% stated that since working remotely they have exceeded the objectives established by their company; 53% claimed to have fulfilled them; 76% consider that their productivity increased working from home and 79% say they are more effective remotely.
In addition, 9% would resign if they were required to return to full presence and 53% would begin to look for another job with greater flexibility. An unappealable result.
The business arguments. Meanwhile, a recent Resume Builder report of nearly 1,000 business leaders in the United States anticipates that one in three companies plan to eliminate remote work entirely by 2026. Nearly half expect their staff to attend the office at least four days a week. The reasons given are the “team spirit”, the supposed accelerating effect of face-to-face work and justifying the cost of already contracted offices. This last point contrasts with “location expenses” which, in Argentina, are usually one of the great benefits of remote work for the company. The trend towards rate rebalancing in recent months also gives support to the savings factor combined with a design that assigns spaces and tasks based on real possibilities.
In Argentina, the dominant scheme in large companies continues to be the hybrid – 69%, according to PwC -, although with increasingly more structured rules.
Bad habits of the home office. Research by the Inter-American Open University (UAI) on teleworking in Argentina reveals that the phenomenon is much more complex than a simple dichotomy between home and office.
Teleworking brought obvious advantages: savings in travel time, greater autonomy and better work-life balance in some cases. But it also exposed significant risks.
Many organizations began to realize that these imbalances also had operational consequences. Extended hours that are difficult to audit, discussed overtime, differences in the interpretation of shifts, problems validating assistance in hybrid schemes and tensions in settlement under complex agreements began to form part of the new normal.
What at first seemed like a simple cultural challenge ended up revealing a structural void: the lack of clear tools to manage a work modality that was no longer completely face-to-face or completely remote and that transcends the mere fact of control as an objective in itself. Then, the debate stops being ideological and becomes technical. How is assistance controlled in hybrid models? How is access managed in organizations with multiple locations? How do you audit compliance without invading privacy?
Tools. The answer to those questions did not come from a return to the past, but from a silent transformation in the way we understand control.
Faced with this scenario, companies specialized in access management and assistance began to close this gap, with platforms capable of integrating different layers of control within the same system that allow validating the presence of a collaborator from a cell phone when working remotely, registering access through sensors or biometrics when doing so in a physical headquarters and, at the same time, automatically processing complex variables such as rotating shifts, night shifts or time tolerances. “Organizations are no longer looking to just record income and expenses, but rather to integrate presence management, remote work, regulatory compliance and automation of complex calculations into the same platform, with auditable data in real time,” explains Alejandro Monforte, Research and Development Manager at Cronos, a company that develops this type of solutions. The most in-demand technology in the face of this new work reality is that which functions as a central nervous system that connects distant points. “While a mobile device or a biometric sensor validates an identity through geolocation or physical features, software processes that information in real time by crossing it with the company’s ‘control theory’,” adds Monforte.
But the discussion is no longer black and white. Evidence indicates that remote work can be highly productive. It also shows that, without adequate organizational design, it can erode well-being and bonds.
In 2026, the challenge is not to choose between home or office, but to build intelligent hybrid models, with clear rules, adequate technology and conscious leadership. Because if the global home office experience made anything clear, it is that work has changed forever. The question now is whether organizations will know how to manage and are willing to invest in this transformation without repeating the mistakes of the past.
by Marcelo Alfano
