What Returning to the Office Taught Me About Diversity in Tech | by Anna Li | Jun, 2026 | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in
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What Returning to the Office Taught Me About Diversity in Tech
Anna Li
5 min read·<br>4 days ago
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Photo by Bruno BD on UnsplashWhen my company announced a full return to the office, I expected the usual discussion.<br>Productivity.<br>Collaboration.<br>Culture.<br>The same arguments that always seem to appear whenever remote work comes up.<br>What I didn’t expect was that it would make me think about diversity.<br>Because the more I listened to the conversation, the more I noticed something strange.<br>When companies talk about diversity, they usually mean accepting that people are different.<br>Different backgrounds.<br>Different personalities.<br>Different needs.<br>Different ways of thinking.<br>At least that’s the theory.<br>Because the moment the conversation turns to where and how people should work, those differences often disappear surprisingly quickly.<br>Suddenly the answer becomes:<br>Everyone back to the office.
Same place.<br>Same schedule.<br>Same expectations.<br>And that’s where I get confused.<br>Because if diversity matters, shouldn’t it matter here too?<br>Not Everyone Experienced Remote Work the Same Way<br>One thing that always stands out in return-to-office discussions is how differently people experienced remote work.<br>For some people, working from home was miserable.<br>They felt isolated.<br>They missed spontaneous conversations.<br>They struggled with motivation.<br>They wanted clearer separation between work and home.<br>For them, returning to the office felt like getting something back.<br>And that’s completely valid.<br>But there was another group of people.<br>People who suddenly had more energy.<br>People who spent less time commuting.<br>People who could finally focus.<br>People who weren’t constantly interrupted.<br>People who could work in an environment designed around their needs rather than around everyone else’s.<br>People whose social batteries weren’t drained before lunch.<br>People who could finally control the noise, lighting, interruptions, and distractions around them.<br>Those experiences were valid too.<br>Yet somehow, when organiations discuss workplace flexibility, one group’s experience often gets treated as everyone’s experience.<br>The Problem With Treating Everyone Equally<br>This might sound strange, but treating everyone the same isn’t always fair.<br>In fact, it’s often the opposite.<br>Imagine two employees.<br>One lives ten minutes from the office.<br>The other spends two hours commuting every day.<br>One has a private office.<br>Another sits in a noisy open-plan environment.<br>One gets energised by constant social interaction.<br>Another spends significant energy managing it.<br>One thrives in face-to-face collaboration.<br>Another does their best thinking alone.<br>If we force both people into exactly the same setup, have we created equality?<br>Or have we simply ignored their differences?<br>This is where I think organisations often confuse equality with inclusion.<br>Equality says:<br>Everyone gets the same thing.<br>Inclusion says:<br>Everyone gets what they need to succeed.
Those are not the same thing.<br>And if diversity is genuinely something we value, that distinction matters.<br>As a Developer, My Job Isn’t Meetings<br>This is where I sometimes feel disconnected from the return-to-office conversation.<br>Because not all jobs are structured the same way.<br>Some roles involve presentations, workshops, stakeholder discussions, and meetings all day long. For those roles, being physically together may create obvious benefits.<br>But many developers spend large parts of their day doing something entirely different.<br>Thinking.<br>Reading.<br>Investigating.<br>Debugging.<br>Building.<br>Trying to hold complicated systems in their heads long enough to solve a problem.<br>That kind of work often requires long periods of uninterrupted focus.<br>And anyone who has ever spent an hour tracking down a bug only to be interrupted three times knows how expensive those interruptions can be.<br>The environment that helps someone facilitate six meetings a day isn’t necessarily the same environment that helps someone solve a difficult technical problem.<br>For me, some of my most productive work has happened in environments where I had more control over noise, interruptions, and distractions.<br>That doesn’t mean everyone should work remotely.<br>It means different work sometimes benefits from different environments.<br>The Diversity Conversation We Don’t Have<br>As someone with ADHD, I find this especially frustrating.<br>Not because remote work is perfect.<br>It isn’t.<br>But because remote work gave me something I didn’t realise I was missing:<br>Control .<br>Control over distractions .<br>Control over interruptions .<br>Control over noise .<br>Control over my energy .<br>Control over my environment .<br>And once you’ve experienced that, it’s difficult not to notice how much energy gets spent adapting yourself to an environment that wasn’t designed with you in...