Believe it or not, corporate America has been talking about return-to-office mandates for nearly five years.
Covid-era workplace flexibility started waning in the summer of 2020, and some employees rejected RTO plans. Some companies compromised with hybrid schedules. Others, like Amazon and Dell, followed suit before eventually requiring their employees to come back to the office five days a week.
With 2025 just a few weeks away, HR Brew chatted with workplace experts about how executives and employees are feeling about RTO mandates—and how HR pros can referee their tug-of-war.
Employees are not happy. Flex work has positively affected employees’ work-life balance, burnout, and productivity. And now that they’ve gotten used to flexible schedules, 43% of US workers would rather lose their romantic partner or get a divorce than RTO full-time, according to a recent LiveCareer report.
“Someone mandating me to go back into the office means I have less control over my time, and my time is directly equated to how I feel about my life, how I feel about myself,” Jasmine Escalera, a career expert at LiveCareer, told HR Brew. And for employees who, during the Great Resignation, joined employers that championed flexibility, a reversal could lead to tension and negatively impact their well-being.
“There’s a lot more conversation about not just wellness, but about burnout, about stress, about toxic workplaces, and how these environments can really affect you,” she said. “Employees are just more keen to be proactive about asking for what their needs are.”
Executives are reminiscing. When Amazon announced its five-day RTO, in the name of “strengthening our culture and teams,” some experts called CEO Andy Jassy’s decision an example of a phenomenon called “executive nostalgia,” Bloomberg reported. Think of it as leaders yearning for the workplace of their past, Leena Rinne, VP of coaching solutions at Skillsoft, told HR Brew.
“Executives just want it to be like it was yesteryear. They think, ‘If we can just get people back to where it was, maybe we can recreate what was there before,’” Rinne said.
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HR can be an advocate. When senior leaders create an RTO plan without consulting their HR team, she said they’re missing an opportunity to get a “pulse” on how employees feel, and what they need.
“Innovation, collaboration, cross-functional work—that happens when you’ve got a culture that drives those things,” Rinne said. “Us being in the same office doesn’t mean we’re collaborative, inherently. Us being together physically doesn’t mean we’re innovative. And, if the culture suffers, if your leaders aren’t well equipped to lead, you can get everyone all together and you’re still not getting those outcomes.”
People pros should explain to senior leaders that an RTO mandate might not benefit innovation and collaboration, and encourage them to have a deeper conversation about other ways to enhance those two aspects of the company.
“What are the behaviors that, for example, drive collaboration. What leadership skills are needed to create a culture of innovation? Let’s start there if we’re really looking at the outcome that we’re saying we’re looking for,” Rinne said.
HR can foster acceptance and empathy. If the RTO plan moves forward, HR pros can help employees achieve a level of “neutral acceptance,” Shawntà Hooks, keynote speaker and belonging and mindfulness expert, told HR Brew.
“Whether you’re the employee on the receiving end of the policy or you’re the HR leader on the enforcing end of the policy, everyone needs to understand and accept the other person’s perspective,” Hooks said. “None of these policies are truly bad or good. They just are.”
Amid RTO changes, HR pros can help employees cope with any heightened nerves, she said, as employees are often faced with myriad stressors during transitions.
“Start shaping the return-to-office conversation in such a way that you can help solve that problem, because that’s the problem. It’s not the office,” she said. “It’s the disruption to my nervous system that is caused because of the office, so let’s address the nervous system so that we can get greater acceptance, empathy, and just actual performance."