Asking employees to come back to the office is like trying to ‘jam the toothpaste back in the tube’

Amazon, JPMorgan, and AT&T are among the most recent companies to require a full-time RTOs. But some of these mandates have faced obstacles, including a lack of office space and dissatisfied employees.

Amazon, for example, said in September, it wanted its 350,000-person workforce in the office by early January. As of February, many of their offices didn’t have enough desks to accommodate the return, leaving many employees continuing working from home. AT&T had a similar issue. In response to JPMorgan’s RTO mandate, employees expressed their outrage on an internal platform. The company then disabled comments. Some JPMorgan and Amazon workers have also signed petitions protesting their employers’ requirements.

What’s missing from some of these RTO plans is the recognition of a cultural change, said Jennifer Moss, workplace strategist and author of Why Are We Here?: Creating a Work Culture Everyone Wants. The post-pandemic workplace should combine lessons from the pre-pandemic and pandemic-era models, she said.

“When we’re trying to get people back into the office, we still are executing the office in the same way that it used to be,” Moss told HR Brew. “We just can’t jam the toothpaste back in the tube.”

Recognize the new environment. Improved collaboration, culture, and productivity are often cited as reasons for an RTO, Moss said, but being in the office won’t necessarily help employees achieve these goals.

“People are going into the office, unfortunately, it feels very much like what it feels like to be at home,” she said. “You’re still on Zoom, and you’re still spending your day doing the exact same things you could be doing at home. It feels very arbitrary.”

To facilitate this new era of work, employers should embrace a model Moss called “the third office.” Instead of “pushing” for employees to go back to pre-pandemic norms, she said, employers should consider how they can incorporate the benefits of remote work, like autonomy and flexibility. To that end, a hybrid approach, she said, typically works best.

Moss also urged mindfulness around how the physical office space can affect employees. If a company doesn’t have enough desks, for example, she said HR leaders should rethink how employees work in the office, and create quiet or collaborative spaces outside of the open floor plan.

“The [third office] is a place where you have challenging discussions, where you learn to network, develop soft skills, be able to have team building, build up that social energy and that cohesion,” she said, adding that these activities were undervalued pre-pandemic and lost during the pandemic, and should be part of this new era.

Eventually, however, companies that require five days in the office should offer employees their own dedicated workspace, Moss said. It may seem simple, but being able to personalize a desk is something that, she said, may help employees feel more connected to their workplace.

Identify and communicate the play-by-play. Some executives want RTO to alleviate their own “trust issues,” without considering how it might affect employees, according to John Frehse, the global head of labor strategy at consulting firm Ankura.

“You only trust me when I’m in the office. You don’t trust me when I’m at home. What kind of a worker and employer relationship are we dealing with?” Frehse told HR Brew.

Sujay Saha, an employee experience strategist and founder of consulting firm Cortico-X, emphasized the need for a plan. “Don’t make the decision and then try to figure it out, how do I make that decision happen for people…that is the biggest problem in a lot of this,” Saha said. He suggested HR start by identifying employees’ “personas,” like whether they’re working parents or belong to the sandwich generation. This can give HR a sense of employees’ needs and schedules, which can help inform what kind of RTO might make sense.

“There are pros and cons in all of this, so the most important thing that we can tackle is how we do it,” Saha said. “Maybe there is a pace at which you could do it…Reduce the pace and give people that mental adjustment time that is needed genuinely, to take care of their lives before you change [their lives].”

Frehse also advised against focusing an RTO announcement on the enforcement and repercussions of not following the mandate. Instead, communicate the steps and value-add for professional growth.

“It’s both culturally and intellectually lazy to announce a certain number of days of return to office each week, without listing in heavy detail the reasons why—not just benefits for the business, but the benefits for the employee,” he said.

Saha agreed. “Don’t do it, just for the heck of doing it…Be clear about why you’re doing it.”

This report was originally published by HR Brew.

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on February 28, 2025.

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