A return to office mandate was one of the most reported workplace stories of 2024 and 2025. Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, the Washington Post, Asda and Walmart all moved to require more days in the office. Employees petitioned, a union objected, and a senior technology executive left rather than relocate. At the same time, several large organizations found their offices were not ready for the people they had called back.
For corporate real estate, HR and workplace leaders, the useful question is not whether mandates are right or wrong. It is what the evidence shows about attendance, performance, retention and space, and what that means for your own plan.
What does a return to office mandate look like?
A return to office mandate usually takes one of three forms: five days a week, a fixed number of office days, or rules about which days people may work remotely. Full-time mandates draw the headlines, but structured hybrid is the most common return to office policy, especially at large enterprises.
The clearest picture comes from the Q2 2025 Flex Index Report, which Kadence co-founder Dan Bladen discussed with Work Forward CEO Brian Elliott in May 2025 in why the data says hybrid has won the RTO debate:
- 43% of U.S. companies had adopted a structured hybrid model, requiring a set number of in-office days per week.
- Just 33% required employees in the office full-time, up only slightly from 31% a year earlier.
- 70% of companies with fewer than 500 employees were fully flexible, while 70% of enterprises with over 25,000 employees had opted for structured hybrid.
- Full-time requirements among Fortune 500 companies jumped from 13% to 24% in two quarters, and required office days rose from 2.3 to 2.9 on average.
Leadership sentiment ran ahead of that data. In September 2024, a KPMG survey found that 79% of CEOs believed their employees would be back in the office full-time within the next three years, a prediction examined in why 79% of CEOs expect full-time office work to return. ZipRecruiter’s 2024 Employer Survey, cited that December in coverage of Amazon’s delayed return, found 40% of companies had embraced hybrid as their primary work model, while only 7% allowed fully remote work.
Asda (November 2024)
In November 2024, Asda rolled out a policy requiring corporate staff to be in the office at least three days a week. The move drew attention because of Asda’s flexible working policy, which said: “We know our colleagues want more flexibility to balance their work and home life. That’s why we offer hybrid working to support them.” The analysis of Asda’s three-day RTO mandate argued that the mandate risked contradicting those stated values and recommended measuring outcomes rather than attendance.
PwC (September 2024)
Some organizations added monitoring rather than a day count. In September 2024, PwC introduced measures to track where its UK employees were working. The case against PwC’s location tracking cited data published by Forbes Advisor: 18% of employees report stress and anxiety from being monitored by their employer, 16% report taking fewer breaks, 39% say monitoring of their online activity harms their relationship with their employer, and 43% say it negatively affects company morale.
Why do employees resist return to office mandates?
Return to office resistance centers on autonomy, commuting costs, caregiving and work-life balance, and on a sense that hybrid work was already delivering. Resistance has taken the form of petitions, union statements and resignations. Surveys suggest the retention risk is real, with roughly half of workers saying they would consider leaving over a full-time return.
JPMorgan (February 2025)
In February 2025, JPMorgan Chase employees launched a petition against JPMorgan’s five-day return to office mandate. As described in the JPMorgan employee petition against the RTO mandate, it asked JPMorgan to keep the flexible hybrid model for roles that had already used it, expand hybrid eligibility to more job categories, and allow remote-capable workers to work from any JPMC corporate office in their region.
The petition stated: “The recent mandate for 100% in-office work is a great leap backward: It hurts employees, customers, shareholders, and the firm’s reputation.” It argued the mandate disproportionately pushes out “women, caregivers, senior employees, and individuals with disabilities,” and pointed to the bank’s own results: “During the years since COVID lockdowns began, JPMC employees’ work has continuously produced record profits for the bank.” One signatory wrote: “My team is spread out through two continents and three time zones. JPMC is a global company–why can’t that include my home office?”
Washington Post (November 2024)
In November 2024, the Washington Post announced a plan to bring all employees back to the office five days a week by June 2025, ending a four-year run of hybrid work. The Washington Post Guild, which represents the editorial team, called the policy “inflexible and outdated.” Its statement read: “Guild leadership sees this for what it is: a change that stands to further disrupt our work rather than to improve our productivity or collaboration.” The coverage of the Washington Post Guild’s pushback noted that for a media company, where talent is everything, losing key staff is a direct business risk.
Sam’s Club and Walmart (October 2024)
Relocation mandates carry a sharper cost. In October 2024, Cheryl Ainoa, Sam’s Club’s Chief Technology Officer for nearly five years, stepped down instead of relocating to Bentonville, Arkansas, after Walmart enforced a strict return-to-office policy. The lessons drawn from the Sam’s Club CTO’s departure focus on what relocation asks of senior people: uprooting families, finding new schools and often facing higher living costs.
What the surveys say
Several surveys, cited at the time, put numbers on the risk:
- Owl Labs: 47% of workers would consider quitting if forced to return to the office full-time (cited November 2024).
- Gallup: 61% of employees would explore new opportunities if forced into full-time, on-site work (cited October 2024).
- PwC: 50% of workers surveyed would consider leaving their job if they lost the option to work remotely (cited September 2024).
- Gallup: 6 in 10 employees with remote-capable jobs want a hybrid work arrangement (cited September 2024).
These are statements of intent, not measured departures. Taken together, they show that a mandate is a retention decision as well as a workplace one.
Do return to office mandates work?
The evidence shows mandates change policy more than behavior. Required office days rose in the Q2 2025 Flex Index, but actual attendance did not move much. Meanwhile, in a controlled trial at Trip.com, hybrid work showed no productivity loss and substantially lower attrition. If the goal is performance or retention, a mandate on its own is a weak lever.
Policy is not compliance
The Q2 2025 Flex Index found that while firms were increasing required office days, actual attendance had not changed. People still worked from home about the same amount as the year before, according to Stanford and Census Bureau surveys.
That does not mean offices sit empty every day. In June 2025, British Land CEO Simon Carter said: “Return to the office is in full swing, with mid-week occupancy back to pre-pandemic levels.” Both findings can be true. Attendance clusters mid-week, so average utilization stays low while peak days fill up. For planners, the peak matters as much as the average.
Productivity and retention
Research by Stanford economist Nick Bloom, cited in the JPMorgan petition and published in Harvard Business Review, found no significant difference in productivity between hybrid and full-time office employees. Hybrid employees reported higher satisfaction and a 35% lower attrition rate.
Other research points the same way:
- Engagement: a Gallup study found 35% of hybrid workers are engaged, compared to 30% of on-site workers. A 2023 Gallup study found employees with flexibility in where and when they work are 57% more likely to feel engaged.
- Stress: Owl Labs reported that 47% of in-office workers stated increased stress levels, compared with 39% of hybrid workers.
- Turnover: organizations with rigid RTO mandates report higher turnover rates than those embracing hybrid models, according to research cited in December 2024.
- Hiring: McKinsey data showed flexible working arrangements were a top three reason people took a new job in 2022, and McKinsey research found 87% of employees would choose a company offering flexible work options.
What happens when the office is not ready for a return to office mandate?
When people come back faster than space is recalibrated, the result is delay, overcrowding and a credibility gap. Amazon postponed its full-time requirement in some cities, NASA staff worked without desks, and London’s banks found they had cut too much space. The common thread is a policy set without data on how space is used.
Amazon (December 2024)
In December 2024, Amazon’s return to office plan hit a snag. Employees in cities including Atlanta, Houston, Nashville and New York would not be required to return five days a week until May, because office spaces were not ready. As covered in Amazon’s delayed full-time return, this was not a new problem: in 2023 the company faced similar challenges enforcing a three-day policy. CEO Andy Jassy argued that full-time RTO fosters better collaboration and cultural alignment. The delay raised a practical question for any leadership team: how can full-time attendance be necessary if the organization is not prepared to support it?
NASA and federal agencies (March 2025)
In March 2025, reports described a chaotic return at NASA. Employees arriving in February were met with cockroaches on the floor and bugs coming out of faucets, according to a Reuters report. NASA spokesperson Cheryl Warner said: “Our team took immediate action to address those concerns, including talking to our regularly scheduled exterminator.” The larger problem was space. Some staff had no desks. At the Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, noise drove employees to take meetings in their cars using personal hotspots.
Matt Biggs, President of the International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers, which represents over 8,000 federal NASA workers, said: “It’s complete chaos,” and “If you don’t have a desk or a computer you cannot do your job. People are much more unproductive.” The same pattern appeared elsewhere. The FDA told staff it could not guarantee desks or parking spots for the approximately 18,000 employees expected to report to the office, and employees at HUD and DHS raised similar concerns. The full account is in lessons from NASA on RTO planning.
HSBC, JPMorgan and London’s banks (June 2025)
By June 2025, London’s banking sector faced the opposite of the problem it had planned for. As detailed in how JPMorgan and HSBC returned to office without a space strategy:
- HSBC, once aiming to shrink its office space by 40%, faced a potential shortage of 7,700 desks. Its new headquarters, meant to be leaner, needed a second building nearby.
- Deutsche Bank, which had consolidated from 21 buildings to four, was exploring an additional 250,000 square feet. It now allowed just two days a week from home, and no Mondays or Fridays.
- JPMorgan was taking over a portion of the former Credit Suisse headquarters in Canary Wharf, and was adding space without increasing staff.
- Across Europe, Bank of America doubled its Zurich banking team and expanded its footprint, ING cut 30% of global office space but kept a 50/50 hybrid policy, and BNP Paribas cut 120,000 square meters in Paris since 2023.
Headcount was not the whole story. Hybrid work changed how space is used: fewer densely packed desks, more collaboration zones and meeting spaces, and social and wellness areas. Ben Cullen, Head of UK Offices at Cushman & Wakefield, explained: “If you bring those two factors together, you effectively end up with more space per person than you would’ve had pre-Covid.” The conclusion is direct: the desk shortage was not a symptom of too much RTO but of not enough insight.
What does an underused office cost?
An underused office is a financial issue as much as a cultural one. Premium floors that sit empty half the time still carry leases, utilities and maintenance. The published figures put the cost of a desk in the thousands of dollars per person per year, which is why CFOs now ask about desk ROI and seating ratios.
In May 2025, Brian Elliott shared that global law firms were seeing desk costs top $16,000 per person annually. With utilization rates still well below 50% in many sectors, that leads to hard questions: what is the ROI of a desk, and does the organization really need a 1:1 seating ratio? An earlier estimate from Global Workplace Analytics, cited in September 2024, found businesses can save up to $11,000 per employee annually by letting them work remotely half the time.
The London banks show the other side of the ledger. Cutting space without understanding how it is used can mean buying it back later. Before changing your footprint in either direction, measure workplace occupancy by team, day and space type, so the decision rests on actual use rather than headcount.
What did companies that made hybrid work do differently?
Organizations that made hybrid work treated it as a deliberate operating model, not a compromise. They tested before scaling, invested in tools, planned in-person time with a clear purpose, and used fewer, better offices. Zillow, Trip.com and WTW took different routes, but each was intentional about when and why people gather.
Zillow (March 2025)
In 2020, Zillow decided there would be no mandatory return to the office. By March 2025, as described in how Zillow makes hybrid work a competitive edge, 84% of its nearly 7,000 employees were fully remote, with the other 16% in compliance-heavy roles or region-based sales positions. Zillow cut its physical footprint from 11 offices to 6, in hubs including Seattle, San Francisco, Irvine and New York, and uses them for collaboration, connection and “Z-retreats,” centrally planned in-person gatherings.
Chief People Officer Dan Spaulding described the intent: “Our CloudHQ strategy is that we want employees to have the ability to choose where they live and work [based on] what is most effective for them on a daily basis. And then we want to be hyper-intentional about when we are together in person.” He reported the results: “We’re in our ninth quarter of outperforming residential real estate,” “I have four times the applicants for every job opening that I had pre-Cloud HQ,” and “94% of our workforce are proud to work at Zillow and 84% believe they have the resources to do their job effectively.” The share of women in the workforce rose from 41% pre-pandemic to 46%. Spaulding did not claim it was easy. The model demands discipline around async workflows, structured collaboration and planning.
Trip.com (October 2024)
In a Trip.com experiment run with Harvard Business School and reported in October 2024, one group kept a five-day office week while the other worked from home two days a week. As covered in how Trip.com made millions with hybrid work, managers expected hybrid work to cut productivity by 2.6%, but after six months they saw a 1% productivity boost. Attrition dropped 35%, hybrid employees reported higher satisfaction, and fewer people in the office each day saved millions in operating costs such as utilities and upkeep. Trip.com also invested in collaboration and communication tools so hybrid employees could stay connected.
WTW (September 2024)
WTW took a less prescriptive route. In a September 2024 conversation, navigating hybrid workspaces with WTW, David Music explained that WTW avoids a one-size-fits-all model and allows flexibility across markets and regions. Rather than forcing in-person interaction, WTW lets patterns emerge and observes which days are busiest and what work is best done in the office. It uses Kadence without relying on desk booking, focusing instead on helping teams connect on timings so people know who will be present and when. The office has become a hub for connection, creativity and shared experiences.
Music named three factors behind WTW’s progress: senior leadership alignment, change management that guides people with empathy and anticipates resistance, and continuous, transparent communication that listens as well as informs.
How do you plan a return to office that works?
Plan the space before you set the policy. Start with the purpose of in-person time, measure how the office is really used, size for peak days, pilot and measure, then communicate a clear and consistent rule. The failures above came from skipping these steps. The successes came from following them.
1. Define the purpose of time together
Brian Elliott put it this way: “The best CEOs aren’t the ones issuing top-down mandates. They’re the ones asking: what’s the purpose of our time together?” Zillow’s Z-retreats and WTW’s focus on connection are two answers to that question.
2. Measure how space is used today
NASA’s experience suggests four questions to answer before any return:
- How much space do we really need? Does the current layout support collaboration, focus work and flexibility?
- Which spaces are underused? Are we maintaining large areas that sit empty most of the week?
- What do employees expect? Dedicated desks, more meeting rooms or quiet zones for deep work?
- Do we provide the right tools for hybrid teams, so moving between home and office is seamless?
Workplace analytics that show who comes in, when, and which spaces are overloaded or underused turn these questions into data rather than guesses.
3. Size for peaks, not averages
Collaboration surges mid-week. If a policy concentrates attendance on the same days, average utilization can stay low while desks run out. Model the busiest day before you commit, and check space management plans against it.
4. Pilot, measure and adjust
Trip.com’s approach offers a template: start with a pilot group, track the effect on productivity and satisfaction, and keep reviewing.
5. Make the policy clear and build trust
The Q2 2025 Flex Index discussion concluded that structured hybrid works best when it is clear, consistent and rooted in trust, because employees want clarity about when and why to come in. The PwC case shows the alternative: tracking signals that presence matters more than performance. Clear team-level expectations and outcome-based measures build accountability without surveillance.
6. Align leaders and keep communicating
WTW’s three factors apply to any return. One JPMorgan petition signatory described the rollout as “so messy and demeaning to employees,” a reminder that how a policy lands matters as much as what it says.
7. Keep the plan adaptable
Return planning has always changed with circumstances. In September 2021, the challenge was a new U.S. vaccine mandate for employers with more than 100 workers, affecting 80 million U.S. workers, and employers used tools such as self-certification before office check-in to manage it. That requirement belongs to its period, but the lesson from it still holds: there was no gold standard, and a return plan had to be agile enough to work for the company and its people.