The Golf Course Manager Who Demands Five Days at the Office

There is a particular species of manager that has emerged from the great remote work experiment of the past six years. They are rarely in the office themselves. They attend meetings via video call while sitting in their car. They respond to urgent emails at 11 PM on Sundays, then disappear entirely on Wednesday afternoons. Yet they are seized by an almost religious conviction that their employees must sit in assigned seats, under fluorescent lights, for five consecutive days per week, between 8 AM and 5 PM sharp.

This manager, currently enforcing exactly that policy at their company, has taken the paradox to its logical extreme. According to accounts from employees who have watched this unfold, the manager spends most working hours playing golf. The irony is not subtle. Yet the mandate stands: five days, full hours, everyone in the office, status visible on Teams at all times.

When the company initially softened its return-to-office stance—three days a week with permission to leave at 2 PM and log on remotely afterward—things appeared to be stabilizing. That middle path, neither fully remote nor rigidly in-person, seemed to reflect a genuine compromise between operational needs and individual circumstance. Then the manager decided it was insufficient.

The new demand landed like a memo written in anger. Five days. Eight to five. No early departures. And because this manager is monitoring Teams status obsessively—keenly aware of who appears offline and when—employees cannot even pretend to comply while actually working flexibly. The surveillance is built into the mandate itself.

What makes this story significant is not the manager's hypocrisy, though that deserves its own article. What matters is what this reveals about the actual purpose of return-to-office mandates. It is not about productivity. If it were, a manager who spends their afternoons on a golf course would be the last person authorized to write productivity policy. It is not about collaboration—remote tools handle that adequately for most knowledge work, and this team has presumably been collaborating remotely for years.

The mandate is about visibility. It is about presence as proxy for control. It is about the manager's need to see bodies at desks, because seeing bodies at desks is easier than actually managing people. It requires no judgment call, no assessment of output, no trust. Just attendance. Just the performative theater of being somewhere between 8 and 5.

The broader numbers support this reading. According to recent data, 55 percent of Fortune 100 companies now require five-day office attendance. Yet between 2024 and 2025, while required office time increased 12 percent, actual attendance rose only 1 to 3 percent. Companies are passing mandates, but employees are finding ways around them or, more commonly, they are leaving.

There is a cost to that exit. Firms enforcing rigid return-to-office mandates experience 13 to 14 percent higher turnover. And the people leaving are often the ones with the most options—those talented enough to find remote work elsewhere. Meanwhile, 64 percent of remote workers say they would quit if flexibility was removed. This is not a hypothetical. This is stated preference, expressed in surveys, waiting to be acted upon at the next job market shift.

The absent manager's team has already expressed backlash. They understood, probably immediately, that this policy was not about them. It was about their manager's discomfort with invisibility, his need to establish dominance through control, his preference for the appearance of authority over its actual exercise.

There is a lesson here, one that corporate leadership seems reluctant to absorb. Attendance is not management. Presence does not equal productivity. Visibility does not prove competence. A person sitting at a desk from 8 to 5 might be doing excellent work, or they might be playing golf—metaphorically, or in this case, literally. The only difference is that golf requires them to leave the building.

The real question facing this company is not whether employees should work from home or the office. It is whether their manager is actually managing anything at all. And that question, by definition, cannot be answered by monitoring Teams status.