Return-to-Office Mandates Expose a More Uncomfortable Problem

When a professional services firm I work with rolled out its return-to-office mandate last year, the executive team invested significantly in getting the communications right. Town halls, manager talking points, a well-crafted rationale. What they spent almost no time on was a harder question: did their teams have the design and leadership conditions to be effective together in person? Three months after the mandate, attendance was up. Engagement scores were not.

This pattern is showing up across industries, and the data behind it is worth taking seriously.

A 2024 study by University of Pittsburgh researchers analyzed more than 3 million LinkedIn profiles across 54 S&P 500 technology and finance companies that implemented RTO mandates between 2020 and 2023. The findings documented a 14 percent increase in employee turnover following mandate announcements, concentrated among the employees companies can least afford to lose: senior leaders, highly skilled contributors, and women (Ding, Ma, et al., 2024). Companies that issued mandates also took 23 percent longer to fill vacancies afterward and saw hiring rates drop by 17 percent. An earlier study from the same research group found that RTO mandates did not improve financial performance or firm value for the companies that issued them.

When executive teams encounter findings like these, the typical response is to sharpen the communications strategy and, unfortunately, that response misidentifies the problem.

The Misdiagnosis at the Center of Most RTO Strategies

The assumption underlying most return-to-office frameworks is that proximity is the variable that needs to change. Bring people back together and collaboration returns. Culture strengthens. Innovation accelerates. It influences these things, but is not a “cure all”.

McKinsey’s 2025 talent trends research, based on surveys of more than 8,000 U.S. employees across 15 industries, challenges that assumption directly. The specific working model, whether in-person, hybrid, or remote, was far less predictive of employee experience and productivity than the practices organizations put in place. Fewer than half of employees working mostly in person rated their organization’s collaboration, innovation, or mentorship as effective (De Smet, Weddle, and Hancock, McKinsey, 2025). The companies that had already completed their RTO transitions were still failing at the very outcomes they cited as reasons for the transition.

Edgar Schein’s foundational work on organizational culture is instructive here. Culture, Schein established, is not what leaders announce in town halls or express in policy documents. It is the pattern of behaviors that actually gets repeated, rewarded, and reinforced over time. An organization that mandates office attendance without changing how decisions get made, how accountability is structured, or how managers are developed has changed the location of work without changing the work. The mandate becomes a compliance layer on top of whatever dysfunction already existed.

What the Research on Team Effectiveness Actually Shows

Amy Edmondson’s research at Harvard, replicated across industries and organization types for more than two decades, established that psychological safety, the shared belief among team members that they can raise concerns, admit errors, and challenge ideas without fear of repercussion, is the most consistent predictor of team learning and performance. In her original study of 51 work teams, Edmondson found something counterintuitive: the highest-performing teams were not the ones that made the fewest errors. They were the ones most willing to surface errors before they caused harm (Edmondson, 1999). Google’s Project Aristotle later formalized this at scale by analyzing 180 internal teams to identify what separated high-performing groups from the rest. Psychological safety ranked as the single most important factor, ahead of individual talent, technical expertise, and interpersonal compatibility.

Neither psychological safety nor the leadership behaviors that create it has any inherent relationship to physical proximity. They are produced by how leaders behave, consistently and over time. A team that lacks psychological safety in a hybrid environment will continue to lack it after the mandate. The office simply gives people a different location in which to stay quiet.

What Distinguishes Organizations Getting This Right

The difference between companies navigating RTO effectively and those generating sustained internal resistance is not which policy they chose. It is the quality of the leadership and team design infrastructure behind the policy.

JPMorgan’s return-to-office stance has been directive and consistent, but it has been paired with visible senior leadership accountability for performance. The expectations behind the mandate are explicit, which gives it coherence. Netflix has avoided prescriptive attendance requirements altogether, operating instead on a talent density model that holds individuals accountable for outcomes rather than hours or location, from the point of hiring onward. Amazon’s full five-day mandate, despite the organizational credibility behind it, continues to generate significant internal friction. The University of Pittsburgh research suggests that friction correlates predictably with mandates that impose attendance without strengthening the management practices and team structures underneath them.

McKinsey partner Bryan Hancock captured the underlying principle in a 2025 interview: “It doesn’t matter where you ask someone to be. What matters is what you do with them once they’re there.”

The Flex Index tracked revenue growth across nearly 4,000 companies from 2019 to 2024 and found that fully flexible organizations grew revenue 1.7 times faster than mandate-driven firms after adjusting for industry and size. That finding does not prove causation, and the companies choosing flexibility may differ from mandate-driven firms in important ways. What it does do is complicate the assumption that attendance discipline is a meaningful driver of competitive performance on its own.

What Executives Can Actually Do

For executives leading teams or functions through this transition, the practical leverage points are more specific than most RTO frameworks acknowledge.

The first is to design what in-person time is actually for, before issuing a requirement for how much of it there should be. Richard Hackman’s research on team effectiveness established that the structure of work itself, including clear purpose, defined roles, and explicit decision rights, predicts performance more reliably than any contextual factor, including location (Hackman, 2002). For most organizations, a quarter-by-quarter audit of what actually happened on in-office days would reveal that those days looked structurally identical to remote days: the same meeting formats, the same one-way information flow, the same absence of deliberate team problem-solving. Proximity cannot compensate for that absence, and adding more required days of it will not either.

The second is to treat management capability as the primary mechanism for making in-person time productive, not a secondary consideration. Most managers were promoted for individual expertise. They were not developed to design and sustain team effectiveness. The companies generating the most meaningful results from RTO are the ones that invested in management development at the same time as the attendance policy, not as an afterthought six months later.

The attrition risk deserves separate executive attention, and more granular attention than aggregate turnover numbers provide. The University of Pittsburgh findings showed that RTO mandates produce disproportionate departure rates among senior employees, highly skilled contributors, and women. These groups tend to have the strongest external market alternatives and the least willingness to announce their dissatisfaction before they act on it. An executive decision about attendance policy that does not model the differential retention risk within those specific populations is accepting a more expensive trade-off than the headline numbers reveal.

The Right Question for Executive Teams

The debate most RTO decisions center on is a logistics question. It produces logistics answers: badge data, attendance reports, enforcement conversations between managers and direct reports.

Consider instead what it would mean to commission a structured team effectiveness diagnostic before the next policy cycle. Imagine knowing, across your functions, which teams have an explicitly shared purpose, which have defined decision rights, and which have any measurable baseline for psychological safety. That information would reshape what in-person time gets designed around. It would also reveal which leadership gaps are producing the performance problems that RTO is currently being asked to solve.

The mandate cannot answer that question. The leadership conversation it should prompt can.

Resources

Ding, Yuye, Mark (Shuai) Ma, Betty (Bin) Xing, Yucheng (John) Yang, and Zhao Jin. “Return to Office Mandates, Brain Drain and Gender Difference.” SSRN Working Paper, November 2024. https://ssrn.com/abstract=5031481
Ma, Mark (Shuai), et al. “Return to Office Mandates Don’t Improve Employee or Company Performance.” University of Pittsburgh Pitt Business Research Summary, 2024. https://www.business.pitt.edu/return-to-office-mandates-dont-improve-employee-or-company-performance/
De Smet, Aaron, Brooke Weddle, and Bryan Hancock. “Returning to the Office? Focus More on Practices and Less on the Policy.” McKinsey Quarterly, February 14, 2025. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/returning-to-the-office-focus-more-on-practices-and-less-on-the-policy
Hancock, Bryan, quoted in “How to Get Return to Office Right.” McKinsey Talks Talent, February 6, 2025. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/how-to-get-return-to-office-right
Edmondson, Amy C. “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.” Administrative Science Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1999): 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
Google re:Work. “Guide: Understand Team Effectiveness (Project Aristotle).” https://rework.withgoogle.com/en/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness
Hackman, J. Richard. Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances. Harvard Business School Press, 2002.
Schein, Edgar H. Organizational Culture and Leadership. 5th ed. Jossey-Bass, 2017.
Flex Index. “Flex Report Q4 2024.” https://flexindex.com

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