The RTO Mirage: Why Office Attendance Is Barely Budging Despite the Noise

Brian Elliott

CEO, Work Forward & Publisher, Flex Index

"We owe our company's massive success to policy compliance."

That is not a phrase I've heard from any successful business leader, ever. Maybe that's why when push comes to shove, the noise around return-to-office isn't resulting in a massive wave of people coming back.

The biggest driver behind CEOs pushing return-to-office these days seems to be the belief that other CEOs are doing the same and that people are falling in line. Neither are true.

Headlines spotlight companies like Caterpillar changing their policies, but what doesn't make headlines? The countless organizations happily hybrid or fine-tuning their approach without drama. It's like reporting on plane crashes while ignoring the thousands of safe landings every day.

Sometimes, “no change” does make the news. The European Central Bank is sticking with hybrid while many big financial institutions have gone back. Chair Carlos Bowles: “It is also an essential element to attract and retain a future oriented workforce, while further building the institution’s resilience.”

Let's cut through the noise with some fresh data and observations from the trenches.

Today's Reality: Barely a Ripple, Not a Tsunami

Multiple data sources tell a consistent story: office attendance remains stubbornly flat, with only minor fluctuations over the past two years:

• Nick Bloom and team's SWAA data and Census figures show work-from-home levels holding steady, even ticking up slightly in March.

• Kastle Systems detected a modest 2-3% uptick in 2025, but the trend line isn't growing.

• Placer.ai recorded decreases in January and February, followed by a March bounce. The net result? Q1 office traffic remains -36% versus 2019 levels, about the same as last year's -35%.

Bottom line: Despite the sound and fury in boardrooms, we're seeing perhaps a 3% uptick in actual behinds in seats. Not exactly the great return some headlines are trumpeting.

Policy vs. Reality: The Growing Credibility Gap

While Flex Index data from Q4 of last year showed 68% of companies maintaining flexible work policies, there's a noticeable shift toward three-day office minimums: firms moving from employee choice models or two-day requirements to three-day expectations.

Amazon was loud about the drive and the need for people to leave if they can’t do five days (except, of course, the 40 locations without enough seats). California’s pushing four days a week for government workers.

Federal workers were thrown into a shredder: required to move with a weekend’s notice, extended commutes, no parking, bring your own toilet paper, work from your phone in your car, and sweat Legionnaire’s Disease. That’s inhumane, destructive and unacceptable. The FDA got to reverse course, one of the few allowed to do so.

But if the average policy moved up, what explains the disconnect between tightening policies and flat attendance? Simply put: policies aren't reality.

Nic Halverson, CEO at Occuspace, reports that companies with five-day mandates and termination threats see the same attendance patterns as flexible firms. The reason? Managers prioritize performance over compliance.

When forced to choose between keeping a solid performer who shows up three days instead of five, or firing them amid pressure to "do more with less," most managers quietly accommodate: hushed hybrid, even in the face of HR being forced to hand out attendance reports.

Will It Get Worse?

Jassy and Diamond are big, well-respected names: does CEO peer pressure mean more CEOs just waiting to drop the hammer – or maybe leverage a downturn? Not really.

Stanford and the Federal Reserve released research showing only 12% of executives plan to increase office time in 2025. Even if unemployment hits 8% in a recession, that number barely budges to 14%.

Auvik CEO Doug Murray, whose company that services mid-market companies notes that "in the mid-market and SMB space, we are seeing RTO level off; year over year it hasn't changed all that much" based on their survey of IT workers.

Murray sees this flexible approach as a competitive advantage for his own company: "We're largely distributed, which gives us, I think, an incredible competitive advantage in terms of where we can hire."

The Hidden Cost of Fighting Yesterday's War

The larger question leaders should ask: Is forcing your 2-day-a-week average up to 3 days worth the organizational energy it consumes?

The real cost isn't just in potential turnover (though that happens). It's in the countless hours People, Workplace, and Comms teams spend crafting enforcement policies. It's in leaders defending mandates they didn't create. It's in the "Dead" emoji reactions sapping team morale while focus shifts from serving customers to tracking badge swipes.

Hebba Youssef, David Rice and I talked about this on a webinar this week: there are so many challenges teams are facing broadly, and that People and Workplace teams are facing in particular. Generative AI adoption isn’t where leaders want it, nor having the impact desired. War rooms dealing with the latest round of tariff news, contingency planning for a recession, resetting plans for a pullback in investment.

Another fight about a policy that has no demonstrable impact on financial performance is a waste of time and energy.

Lessons From the Front Lines

The discussion of “return to office” too often is still cast as polar opposites of fully remote acolytes versus CEO office enforcers. My own understanding continues to grow, and change:

Fully remote doesn't work for most. Only 15% of people wanted to be fully remote, based on global data we collected from 2020 to 2023. Most crave more regular time in-person with teammates. Organizations not born remote often struggle with the cultural and operational transformation required, particularly the shift to being more document-driven and leveraging asynchronous collaboration.

Hybrid isn't any more "broken" than full-time office was. Making hybrid work effective does take effort and modest investment – often the delta on shrinking real estate by half is enough to fund the effort. There are effective ways to get people to do what they want: have purpose-driven time together.

But the five-day, 9-to-5 office week was already mythology for many people and organizations. Pre-pandemic office utilization hovered at 50-60%, with people already tethered to laptops more than desks. You can't "go back" to something that didn’t really exist.

Policies don’t fix performance – investments in ways of working do. Before deciding that a one-size-fits-all policy should be rolled out, ask a few questions:

• What problem are we solving? What data suggests a mandate will improve outcomes?

• What's your talent strategy? Are you seeking engaged contributors or compliant warm bodies?

• Where should the decision get made? Does a one-size policy for thousands of people make sense across customer service, product teams, and global IT?

What's Actually Changing

That’s not to say the field is static either – it’s not at all. Organizations who take a learning mindset continue to adjust. Among learning-based organizations, three trends are emerging:

Consolidation of junior staff. Companies are centralizing hiring in fewer locations, especially for early-career employees. There's evidence in some companies that junior salespeople, for instance, benefit from ~3 days of in-person collaboration. Gen Z also shows the strongest preference for hybrid arrangements.

Stronger time zone boundaries. Despite the promise of asynchronous work, it takes time and effort to get good at it. Teams are restructuring around 1-2 time zone spreads with established core hours (e.g., 9am-1pm Pacific) to make real-time collaboration easier. Team commitments are crucial — individual free-for-alls don’t work.

Increased AI integration for collaboration. Hallway conversations don't feed the generative AI tools that build institutional knowledge. Meanwhile, technologies like Zoom's AI features and tools like Fathom are making distributed meetings more productive. The irony? Forcing everyone back to analog meetings while simultaneously pushing AI adoption is deeply contradictory.

The future belongs to organizations that build systems around results, not appearances – and that requires more sophisticated thinking than a one-size mandate can provide.