Nearly a third of U.S. companies now require a full return to the office, five days a week, and new research on what that mandate costs doesn't match the case most executives make for it in public. That 32% figure, tracked by Axios's Flex Index (opens in new tab), has climbed steadily since 2022. Ask the executives behind these mandates why, and the answer is almost always the same three words: collaboration, culture, productivity. The research on what a mandate produces tells a different story, and it has less to do with where employees sit than with what a policy handed down without their input tells them about how the company sees them.
The clearest test of that claim came from the University of Pittsburgh's Katz Graduate School of Business. Associate Professor Mark Ma and then-PhD student Yuye Ding tracked 137 S&P 500 firms that issued return-to-office mandates between June 2019 and January 2023, comparing each firm's Glassdoor ratings and financial results before and after the announcement. The mandates produced no significant improvement in financial performance, and 99% of the firms studied saw a measurable drop in employee satisfaction (opens in new tab). A policy pitched as a fix for output delivered no more output, and the workforce read the decision for what it was: control being reasserted, not collaboration being rebuilt.
I think firms need to treat the employee more humanely and also give them more flexibility. I see no reason for these big firms to treat their employees more harshly because they're working from home.
— Mark Ma, Associate Professor of Business Administration, University of Pittsburgh's Katz Graduate School of Business
A follow-up study published in October 2025 by researchers at Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business, working with Ma, found that the cost compounds well past the initial morale hit. Tracking more than three million LinkedIn employment records at 54 large technology and finance firms that announced RTO mandates between 2020 and 2023, the researchers measured a 13% to 14% increase in abnormal turnover (opens in new tab) in the months following each announcement, a result that held up against placebo dates designed to rule out ordinary market movement. The departures weren't evenly spread. Turnover among women rose at nearly three times the rate of turnover among men. Mid- and senior-level managers left at a higher rate than junior staff, and highly skilled employees left more than employees with fewer in-demand skills. Job vacancies at these firms then took 23% longer to fill, and hire rates fell 17%, even after adjusting for the wider labor market. Most departing employees weren't chasing a promotion either: the share willing to take a lateral or lower-ranked role in exchange for keeping their flexibility rose from 41.6% to 46.4% once a mandate landed.
None of that supports the productivity case executives make in public, but it lines up closely with what remote and hybrid employees say keeps them at a company in the first place. More than 7 in 10 workers in fully remote (79%) and hybrid (73%) arrangements told SHRM their current arrangement is one of the main reasons they still work for their employer (opens in new tab). Override that arrangement without a real explanation, and employees don't experience it as a neutral business call. They experience it as the company changing the terms of something nobody renegotiated out loud, which costs differently than a bad quarter does. GH Group's earlier piece on why hybrid schedules work better when teams set them covered the mirror image of this same pattern: fairness ratings track less with the actual number of in-office days and more with whether the people living inside the schedule had any say in setting it. A mandate handed down with zero input removes that say completely.
the increase in abnormal employee turnover at large firms in the months following a return-to-office mandate announcement, found across 54 S&P 500 tech and finance companies and more than three million tracked LinkedIn employment records. Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business, "Return-to-Office Mandates and the Hidden Cost of Brain Drain" →
None of this means an owner is wrong to want people in a room together. Plenty of real work benefits from shared physical space, from onboarding a new hire to solving a genuinely hard problem to building trust on a young team, and nothing in the research above argues otherwise. The mistake worth avoiding is dressing up a preference as a productivity mandate and hoping the gap between the two goes unnoticed, because both studies above suggest employees close that gap fast, and the ones most able to leave tend to leave first. A 40-person company doesn't have Amazon's or Bank of America's scale to absorb that kind of loss the way a 50,000-person company can; losing one skilled operations lead or senior salesperson lands far harder on a small team.
The more durable version of this decision starts with an honest answer to a specific question: what is being asked for, and why. If the real goal is more in-person time on certain kinds of work, name those moments and build the policy around them instead of a blanket rule that treats every day and every role the same. If the real goal is closer oversight of a handful of people the owner doesn't fully trust yet, that's worth naming too, since a vague mandate aimed at everyone ends up punishing the employees already doing good work in order to catch the few who aren't. GH Group's Culture Overhaul™ engagement starts from nearly the same premise the Pittsburgh and Baylor researchers arrive at from two different directions: a policy decided without the people it affects tends to cost more than it saves, however reasonable it looked on the whiteboard where it got written. The mandate itself was never really the test. What it tested was whether the people asked to follow it were treated as partners in the decision or as a problem to be managed.
