The return to office continues to be one of the biggest workplace debates since the pandemic. Some of the world’s largest employers now want their people back at their desks. Many made it a requirement rather than a request, though some have since softened their stance.
Amazon told its corporate staff in September 2024 that they would be expected in the office five days a week from 2 January 2025, up from three. Its chief executive, Andy Jassy, said it was easier for teams to “learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture” in person. In India, Infosys began requiring employees to work from the office at least 10 days a month from 10 March 2025. In the United Kingdom, most civil servants are expected to spend at least 60 per cent of their working time in the office.
Yet mandates are not the whole picture. Studies show that while the office is coming back, it is mostly as part of hybrid work rather than instead of it.
Do Mandates Work?
The evidence is not entirely comforting for supporters of mandates. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh studied S&P 500 companies that announced return-to-office mandates and found that the mandates hurt employee satisfaction, including views of work-life balance and of senior management, without improving firm performance. In the researchers’ words, their findings were consistent with employees’ concerns that managers use a return to office for “power grabbing” and for blaming employees for poor performance.
Attendance data tells a similar story. Kastle Systems, which tracks access-card use in US office buildings, recorded its highest weekly average since early 2020 in December 2025: 56.3 per cent of the pre-pandemic level. Offices are fuller than they were, but they are still far from full.
Why the Office Still Matters
None of this means the office is obsolete; far from it. New joiners can learn a great deal by watching experienced colleagues at work. Some collaboration, negotiation and mentoring is simply easier face to face. Why that is so is much studied and debated, but that is a subject for another discussion. A well-designed hybrid workplace gives people a reason to come in, rather than a rule that they must.
The trouble starts when attendance becomes the goal in itself. A mandate that counts access-card swipes measures presence, not performance. It can push out the experienced people who have the most options elsewhere, and it can reward the appearance of work over the work itself.
A Risk-Managed Return
A return to office is a change programme, and like any change it carries risks that can be identified, measured and managed. Before announcing a mandate, here are some questions to ask:
• What problem is the return meant to solve? How will we know when it is solved?
• Which roles and activities genuinely benefit from being together, and on which days?
• Who are we most likely to lose, and what would replacing them cost?
• What will (or must) people do in the office that they could not do at home?
The answers usually point to a deliberate mix of office and remote days, built around the work rather than the calendar. That is also where the future of work is heading: fewer blanket rules and more thoughtful design.
The Problem: A return to office decided by instinct rather than evidence risks losing talent without gaining productivity. Treat it as a risk to be managed, not a rule to be enforced.
