After a bumpy start to 2025, the return-to-office wars that have been plaguing offices for years show no signs of letting up.
Earlier this week, Donald Trump signed an RTO executive order for millions of federal employees demanding that they give up remote work and return to the office five days a week. Other major companies like Amazon and JPMorgan have also recently instituted hardline policies, despite the pleas of their workforces.
Fritz Lanman, CEO of wellness booking platforms ClassPass and Mindbody, has some thoughts on the debate. In 2021, ClassPass was acquired by Mindbody and Lanman now leads both companies and a workforce of around 2,000 worldwide—but that doesn’t mean that he believes they need to be in the office. In fact, he thinks that RTO mandates are roughly the equivalent of “forcing people to fax instead of email.”
Fortune sat down with Lanman to hear more about why he champions flexibility for his employees, and his thoughts on the future of work. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Fortune: Tell me about your companies’ approach to the in-office versus remote work debate
Lanman: We are a remote-friendly company. But we also have offices. We have no mandate about how often you have to go to offices or not. For example, I go to an office five days a week. I find that is what works best for me. But we don’t require people to do that at all. The majority of people are primarily remote, but we have clusters of folks who are around our offices, some of whom go in one day, three days, five days.
Our philosophy is: be where you need to be to be the most productive and energized. And as a wellness company, we also try to make sure that we’re maximizing people’s productivity and ability to maximize their wellness, to go get a workout.
What is the breakdown of employees who are going back into the office? Where are they?
Our main offices are in New York, Missoula, Montana, London, Sydney and Singapore. And then we have smaller offices regionally.
We’re upwards of 2,000 people globally, and I would say maybe a third of the employees are in a region near one of the major office areas. And probably only half of them–so probably only 10% of our employees–would regularly visit an office.
As we’ve grown into more and more countries, we want to have people who live in the places that we operate our business in. As a global company, it doesn’t really make sense for just Americans to design a product that’s serving 31 different countries.
Have you noticed a difference in employees after going fully flexible after COVID restrictions were lifted?
What’s best for you is different from what’s best for me, right? So our philosophy has been to try to provide people with options and let them decide what works best for them. By having a very flexible approach, we tend to have really happy and energized employees. We don’t force people to work out or anything, but we do encourage them to take care of their wellness. And I think that having a flexible approach has helped people do that.
Our talent pool has grown so dramatically. I think the average person here is probably better than companies I’ve worked for previously, when you could only select from people who are willing to live right next to an office physically.
Can you speak more to that growing talent pool? Why do you think it has increased?
In our earlier days, we were very concentrated in New York and San Francisco, and while we were flexible and would let people kind of take a day or two to work from home, the norm of the company was to be in the office in one of the major offices. Then COVID happened. And we saw two things: one is that we started having employees who wanted to leave these places, and so more of the workforce was becoming distributed as people naturally moved. So we then started just hiring all over the place, still mostly in the geographies that we were operating in.
Then we expanded geographies. And we started to realize: ‘Gosh, let’s not constrain ourselves to countries. Let’s hire people in similar time zones. Why can’t we hire people in Latin America or throughout continental Europe or Southeast Asia?’
We’ve really found that by finding the right people who are extraordinarily talented and really want to be at the company, having a performance culture where we hold them accountable, treating them like adults and letting them decide where they need to be the best version of themselves, we’ve been super successful doing that. We’ve gotten more and more flexible over this arc, and it’s worked. It’s showing up in our financial results.
Have you added any additional workflows because you’re remote?
I’m not one of the people who says there’s no benefits to being together in person, or there’s no benefits to being remote. Each person has a different model for what’s best for them. And by the way, those needs change, right? What we try to do is find opportunities to get people together in person. And that is hard when you have 2,000 employees across many different functions and different brands.
We adapt our policy every year about how we get together and we have themes. We did a year where the big emphasis was to get everyone together to have a total global off-site. Then last year we had a different approach. We called it “off-site paloozas,” and we had four big off-sites and different leaders and teams could choose which ones they wanted to attend. And then this year, we’re going to a totally decentralized model where the leaders and teams can decide, ‘I want to do a bunch of small get-togethers, or one medium and one small.’
What we do is we give a budget to people to make sure we can get together in person for those brainstorms, for that bonding [and] white boarding. But we’re constantly changing the approach, because it’s just not one-size-fits-all.
What are your thoughts on private and public actors, like Amazon, JPMorgan, even President Trump, mandating a five-day return to office?
With these return-to-office mandates, you’re saying that you are willing to constrain the talent pool. That’s like Notre Dame football saying they’re only going to recruit people from Indiana, right? Or, if you’re dating, that you’re only going to date people from your church or from your high school. Like, why would you constrain your pool in such an artificial way?
Second, I think the RTO mandates—and again, this is coming as somebody who likes to be in an office environment and have separation from home and work—to me, that’s just symptomatic that you don’t have a performance culture. If you have to look over someone’s shoulder to make sure they’re working, you’ve got the wrong person. I don’t believe that people who are working remotely are playing games online. I think there’s faffers and there’s doers. And faffers are gonna faff whether they’re in an office or at home, and doers are gonna do whether they’re in an office or at home,
What do you think the future of work looks like in 2025 and beyond?
I do think it’s going to go more like the direction of ClassPass and Mindbody just because of the competitiveness in the market. We are a better company than we were before, undoubtedly because of taking a global talent recruiting approach, from being hybrid-flexible, from allowing remote and providing in-person, from having a budget to prioritize people getting together for great in-person experiences, but not requiring it. You’re just going to lose to your competition if you don’t do that.
I just don’t understand how you’re going to be competitive unless you just pay 10 times more than everybody else. Maybe that’s what Amazon’s going to do. Or maybe that’s what Elon does. Maybe Elon is an exception. He has some amazing companies. He can find some of the world’s best talent to come sleep in an office. I’m not Elon. I try to make sure I just have an environment that a lot of really talented, hard working and mission-driven people are excited about.
