We are at a time where the Metro Manila traffic threatens to undo all progress done during the remote work boom. Once again we see Filipino workers braving commutes and long queues.

While most offices have fully accepted the hybrid setup, some are still implementing a full onsite work setup. Reasons vary as to why companies choose their set-ups in the post-pandemic.

However, some have already acknowledged that onsite work is a thing of the past, which leads us to the question, “Can technology replace the sense of belonging people once found at the office?”

For tech companies like Lark, the answer is a quick yes, but only if the tools are built with empathy and equity in mind.

“I really believe that technology and workplace and tools in the workplace are there to bring people together and to really forge connections amongst each other,” Mark Dembitz, the General Manager for APAC at Lark, told PhilSTAR Tech.

“The new generations crave community and crave sort of togetherness. This can be physical togetherness but it doesn’t have to be.”

The myth of physical presence

The return-to-office debate might still be alive in corporate memos, but for workers scattered across Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao, the realities of fragmented teams have rendered that conversation obsolete.

What many leaders are waking up to is this: proximity doesn’t guarantee connection.

For Dembitz, he emphasized that Lark’s goal is to ensure seamless connection across all levels of an organization, from frontline staff to executives, regardless of their roles and location.

To further explain what he meant, he used Kumu, a social media app in the Philippines, as an example of a company with over 300 employees scattered in across different locations.

Lark helped Kumu dismantle the causes of several delays in their approval processes.

“A lot of their approvals took a long time. It took about a week to get an approval,” said the Lark General Manager for APAC.

“Having implemented Lark, that approval process is now two days instead of one week. Now, they can do it a lot faster than they used to,” He added.
This streamlining, Dembitz said, allowed employees to focus on more meaningful tasks, like talking to customers and aligning with colleagues because the processes now move much faster.

From the frontlines to the cloud

In traditional organizations, innovation is often boxed into a single department. An IT team, or a business unit tucked away from the daily grind.

But at Lark, innovation is something to be democratized, not centralized. The tools, the general manager said, should enable everyone to contribute ideas, especially those closest to real-world problems.

“An innovation group doesn’t really know what problems the waiters are having or the kitchen staff are having or the frontline groups are having. So, the best people to innovate are people from those groups,” he said.

And yet innovation can’t happen if the tools aren’t adapted to the way frontline workers operate.

As Dembitz put it, “Do they sit in front of laptops and PCs all day? No, they don’t. So what are you giving them? What tools can you give them that is adapted to the way they work, i.e. mobile first or on their cell phone?”

He recalled a story from the Philippines that still resonates across Lark’s global offices: a collections agent who used the platform to create new workflows on his own.

“He was a frontline worker in the field. He was able to create new processes for frontline workers by himself, being a frontline worker,” Dembitz said.

He continued, “And today, he was then promoted to being the head of innovation for anything that’s frontline.”

That one promotion created ripple effects. A frontline worker didn’t just help his company scale faster, he was elevated into the kind of role traditionally reserved for top management.

“That not only made a difference to the company, but what really pleases me is that this actually impacted his own life,” he shared.

Designed for inclusion

As digital tools become the backbone of modern work, the question is no longer whether to invest in technology, but how to ensure that investment includes everyone.

For Dembitz, designing workplace tech starts with a simple but often overlooked truth: not everyone works at a desk.

“This is what I find I think is critical today. It is about giving employees across the company the right tools so that they can innovate, and bring the best for their function,” he said.

Inclusion also means removing the friction that slows people down, not just in process, but in language. For companies operating across borders, or even across regions in the Philippines, shared understanding isn’t guaranteed.

“What happens when you expand beyond [Tagalog and English] and you have a production facility in Vietnam or you have a go-to-market team in Thailand?” Dembitz asked.

“Some of these people there speak local languages, but you want to drive this feeling of unity, of belonging, and of drive behind the company’s vision and mission and purpose.”

Lark’s multilingual support, he explained, is one way to meet that need: a message typed in English can be received in Vietnamese or Tagalog instantly.

For companies expanding within or beyond the Philippines, this kind of real-time translation isn’t just convenience, it’s culture-building. It’s how a factory worker in Calabarzon and a sales team in Cebu begin to feel like they’re part of the same mission.

“It really is a sense of belonging to a company that is going to drive, you know, growth in an outsized fashion,” Dembitz said.

Lark is an “all-in-one collaboration” platform that combines messaging, video conferencing, calendars, documents, cloud storage, and workflow automation into a single, unified suite.

It is part of ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, and has seen growing adoption across Asia-Pacific, including in the Philippines.