Why Return-To-Office Mandates Are Not About Productivity
It's all about control.
One of my last full-time marketing jobs was at a non-profit organization. It was a couple years before the COVID pandemic. My workdays there can largely be described as lackadaisical. There was my coworker who frequently visited me at my cubicle to discuss how Star Wars had gone downhill. Then, there were all the times I went to the office kitchen to grab a cup of coffee only to wind up talking to another colleague for nearly 40 minutes because we wound up talking about something deep and engaging.
As we know, the office is prone to a multitude of distractions, which make the above experience a common occurrence when working in-person. Whether it’s being pulled into unnecessary meetings (“This meeting could have been an email!”) or having to listen to colleagues talk too loudly on the phone, the interruptions add up.
During the pandemic, we wondered whether offices were going to be vestiges of the past. But, over the past two years, companies have begun to call people back into the office, with over two-thirds of American companies having return-to-office policies. Companies such as Amazon, Apple and JP Morgan have led the charge with RTO mandates, all in the name of productivity. For instance, when Apple CEO Tim Cook summoned people back to the office he said it was for “in-person collaboration.” Similarly, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that employees would be returning to the office five days a week, he claimed that it was due to “the advantages of being together in the office.”
So, the message from employers was clear: the real work happened at the office and anything outside of the office was unproductive.
But the reality is that working from the office is not linked to greater productivity.
Contrary to what employers seem to think, the numbers say otherwise. “Despite the claims of return-to-office champions, research shows that RTO mandates do not increase workforce productivity,” says Jonathan Villaire, founder of The HR Accountability Project. “In fact, the opposite is true.”
Villaire cites data from Great Place to Work, which found that employees who were forced back to the office were less productive than their hybrid or remote counterparts.
The fact is that, without having to worry about commuting or the constant distractions that I described above, we have the freedom to focus when we work remotely.
Plus, people are in fact spending more time working from home than they would at the office. Recent data from Microsoft corroborates this, confirming that remote workers come online earlier in the day and stay online later, in what’s being called the “infinite workday.”
Then, why are employers pushing folks back to the office?
Most employers are framing the justification of RTO mandates around collaboration, professional development and cultural preservation.
Maybe there’s some truth to this. But there are also other factors in play, such as the visibility or proximity bias, which refers to employers associating physical presence with productivity, as well as real estate justifications, when companies have long leases on offices and need to justify those costs.
Not to mention, there are issues of confidentiality and privacy among employer concerns, as companies worry about sensitive documents lying on people’s coffee tables or confidential calls taking place in crowded coffee shops. These are valid concerns, and they complicate the romanticism of working remotely.
However, and perhaps most importantly, what employers are not saying is that it’s also about asserting managerial control and maintaining power dynamics. In other words, when employers mandate RTO, it means that they’re the ones setting workplace norms and that workers have to ask for permission for the right to work remotely. What was once a widely accepted, negotiated condition of work suddenly becomes a privilege that can be granted or revoked at any time.
During the height of the pandemic, employees gained a rare kind of leverage — the ability to shape when, where and how they worked, and to use that flexibility as a bargaining chip. Post-pandemic, RTO policies have quietly stripped that leverage away. Instead of flexibility being assumed, it must now be justified. Instead of autonomy being built into the system, it’s now something employees have to request, defend and even feel grateful for.
Villaire points out that some companies also use RTO mandates to cut headcounts through volunteer attrition. What this ultimately means is they summon people back to the office, knowing that some employees won’t comply and will leave on their own. Executives even admitted in a Bamboo HR survey that RTO mandates are just a quiet layoff without the legal risk or severance cost.
“Although these executives might think they're saving money by getting people to quit, the opportunity cost is staring them right in the face,” Villaire says.
These costs include disengagement, decreased productivity and a tarnished employer brand.
“Disengagement, in particular, is inevitable when employees feel slighted,” says Villaire.
He cites former Federal Reserve Chair and Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, who wrote a piece with her husband in the '90s called "The Fair Wage-Effort Hypothesis and Unemployment." The article posited employees will exert or withhold effort in proportion to how fairly they are paid. “That correlation extends to the whole employee experience, including flexible work options,” Villaire says.
Like it or not, employers are holding the cards. Even companies that hybrid work as a competitive advantage still ask employees to be in the office more often than not. And that’s why you’ll see “hybrid” job postings requiring three or four days a week in the office.
It’s still possible to negotiate remote work in a return-to-office world.
But all of this doesn’t mean that employees are not entirely without agency. While RTO policies may narrow the space for negotiation, they don’t eliminate it.
The key is to shift how flexibility is framed — not as a personal preference, but as a legitimate condition that supports better work. This means making the request more about the outcome, rather than simply wanting to work remotely, as well as documenting productivity, and aligning with colleagues to push for more consistent hybrid norms. It can also mean being strategic about where, when and how to push back, whether it’s through competing offers, clearly defined arrangements or conversations rooted in accessibility.
While it’s an employer’s game, Villaire highlights that changing things will ultimately take large-scale pressure. Above all, small acts of negotiation, setting boundaries, as well as collective advocacy can help employees maintain some of that lost leverage.