New data shows workers are mostly ignoring return-to-office orders

Fast Company

17 hours ago

At a recent JPMorgan Chase employee town hall meeting, one brave soul brought up a petition pushing back against the firm's decision to force workers to return to the office five days a week.
'Don't waste time on it. I don't care how many people sign that f-ing petition,' CEO Jamie Dimon responded.
Dimon's language might be particularly salty, but his sentiment is common among CEOs of tech and financial firms. Amazon, Disney, Google. One after another, they've ordered employees to return to full-time, in-office work over the last few years.
Which means a whole lot of workers are grumpily packing their laptop bags and digging their hard pants out from the bottom of the closet, right?
You could be forgiven for thinking that return-to-office mandates mean tons of employees are returning to offices. But recent data suggests that a whole lot of people are responding to RTO mandates differently. They're ignoring them.
Bosses crack down on remote work
Employees defying bosses' various schemes and requirements to get them back in the office is nothing new. A Stanford study back in 2022 found that half of workers asked to go back to the office full-time reported they were simply ignoring the request.
Since the pandemic, Reddit and other forums have been full of outraged employees calling their bosses various profane and unpleasant things for suggesting they give up their remote setups.
But these are different times. Many companies are pursuing increased efficiency, including through large-scale layoffs. Like Dimon, bosses seem all too happy to let go of any employee who might defy their RTO orders.
Which might make you think that employees are finally, begrudgingly heeding the back-to-the-office call. Not so, according to Nick Bloom, the Stanford economist behind the 2022 study and a long-time leader in research into hybrid and remote work.
Employees are still ignoring RTO orders
In 2023, Bloom shared real estate and transit data suggesting that most businesses were settling at three days in the office and two at home. 'The return-to-office push seems to have died,' he tweeted. 'The RTO wars were over. Hybrid won.'
The rhetoric from bosses may have heated up since then, but according to Bloom's latest data, the numbers haven't really budged.
'While policy requirements for office attendance have jumped 10% since early 2024, actual attendance has barely moved, increasing less than 2% during the same time period,' reports Time.
The Dimons of the world may be noisy, but 67% of firms still maintain a hybrid policy (and that rises to 70% in companies with less than 500 employees). Even those who have a five-day-a-week attendance policy on paper seem to be hybrid set-ups in practice.
'According to Occuspace CEO Nic Halverson, whose workplace occupancy sensor technology is deployed across Fortune 500 companies, many firms mandating five days in office see almost the same rate of utilization as those with more flexible policies,' the Time report adds.
Learn to lead remotely
Entrepreneurs can take these numbers a few different ways. A few Dimon-style diehards may vow to continue the fight to the bitter end. But others, I suspect, will see an opportunity to scoop up top talent frustrated with bigger companies' constant RTO hectoring.
While data suggests hybrid work is holding steady overall, job openings advertised as remote or hybrid are down. Indeed shows a decline to 7.8% of jobs from 10% in 2022, while LinkedIn saw a fall from 26% to 21%. If you put your openness to remote arrangements in a job ad, you are likely to be deluged with candidates seeking flexibility.
The other potential takeaway here is that, reluctantly or not, bosses need to finally learn to manage remote work. One 2024 survey of business leaders found a shocking 75% said their firms were still terrible at remote work. Other polls find remote employees waste vast amounts of time reassuring and performing busyness for anxious managers.
You can try to browbeat and threaten your team into coming in five days a week, but the latest data suggests you probably won't have anything close to perfect success. That makes adapting for our new world of remote work and shifting how you lead a logical choice.
Bloom and other experts have tips for making this transition, including setting communication norms and core office hours for hybrid teams and avoiding mixed messages from leadership. Read more about them here.