Here’s how workers feel about return-to-office mandates

Many workers hate the prospect of returning to the office five days a week — so much so that they’d quit their jobs if told to come in full-time.

To that point, 46% of workers who currently work from home at least sometimes would be somewhat or very unlikely to stay at their job if their employer scrapped remote work, according to a recent poll by Pew Research Center.

Yet, employers have reined in remote work.

About 75% of workers were required to be in the office a certain number of days per week or month as of October 2024, up from 63% in February 2023, Pew found.

“There’s a certain creeping up” of return-to-office policies, said Kim Parker, director of social trends research at the Pew Research Center.

Companies like Amazon, AT&T, Boeing, Dell Technologies, JPMorgan Chase, UPS and The Washington Post have called at least some employees back to the office five days a week. President Donald Trump signed an executive action on Monday calling federal employees back to their desks “as soon as practicable.”

Similar to the Pew survey, a poll conducted by Bamboo HR found that 28% of workers would consider quitting due to a return-to-office mandate.

The data “underscores how comfortable people have become with this arrangement, and how it really fits in with their lifestyle,” Parker said.

Workers consistently cite a better work-life balance as a “huge benefit” of remote work, Parker said.

Indeed, they see the financial value of hybrid work as being equivalent to an 8% raise, according to research by Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University who studies workplace management.

Many economists think that the higher prevalence of remote work, relative to the pre-pandemic era, has become an entrenched feature of the U.S. labor market.  

“Remote work is not going away,” Bloom previously told CNBC.

That’s largely because it boost profits for companies: Workers quit less often, meaning employers save money on recruiting and other functions tied to attrition, Bloom said. Meanwhile, data shows that productivity doesn’t suffer in hybrid work arrangements, he said.

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More than 60% of paid, full workdays were done remotely in early 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic — up from less than 10% before the pandemic, according to WFH Research, a project run jointly by researchers from MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago and Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

That share has fallen by more than half. However, it has leveled out between 25% and 30% for about two years, according to WFH Research data.

About 31% of employers reduced remote work opportunities in 2024, down from 43% in 2023, according to according to a ZipRecruiter survey. Yet, another 33% expanded remote work, up from 32% the prior year.

Companies that imposed RTO mandates have annual rates of employee turnover that are 13% higher than those that have become “more supportive” of remote work, ZipRecruiter said.

“The ability to work from anywhere remains a top priority for many professionals,” according to a 2024 poll by consulting firm Korn Ferry of 10,000 workers in the U.S., U.K., Brazil, Middle East, Australia and India.

Some businesses force workers back to the office precisely because they want workers to quit, experts said. It’s a stealthy way of reducing headcount without having explicit layoffs, they said.

“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome,” Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who Trump tapped to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency, wrote in a November op-ed. (Ramaswamy has since bowed out of that role.)

Of course, there are also tradeoffs to remote work for businesses and workers.

About 59% of employers cite concerns that remote work harms company culture, according to ZipRecruiter.

About half of workers — 53% — who work from home at least part-time say it “hurts” their ability to feel connected with co-workers, Pew found in a 2023 poll.

“It’s the one big downside we’ve seen consistently,” Parker said.

“That seems to be a tradeoff: You get the work-life balance but lose some connectivity with coworkers,” Parker said.

Even if workers quit, they may not be able to find a job.

The labor market remains strong, with low unemployment and low levels of layoffs, meaning workers have good job security, according to economists. However, companies have also pulled back on hiring, making it a challenging environment for job seekers.