For many employers, the return-to-office debate has been settled. The path is clear; with a growing shift towards a full return to the office of 5 days per week by mid-2026. However, nearly a third of employees are still considering quitting their job if called back to the office full-time. That tension is real. Employees are not walking into a return-to-office decision with neutral expectations. They are walking into it after several years of new routines, greater autonomy, and a recalibrated view of what flexibility means. So, if an employer has decided on a return to the office, the most important question is whether leaders can implement this change in a way that protects engagement, motivation and productivity instead of quietly eroding all three.
A Return to Office Won’t Fix What’s Broken
The remote-versus-office debate is no longer the most useful for leadership teams. The better discussion is work design. Research by McKinsey makes this point clearly; the policy itself matters less than the environment and practices around it. Telling people where to work does not automatically create better work. There are still gaps in collaboration, innovation, mentorship, even with a fully on-site work arrangement. (McKinsey & Company, 2025).
This should be both reassuring and challenging for leadership teams. Reassuring, because a return to office does not have to disrupt engagement. Challenging, because it will not rescue your culture. The real risk in a five-day return to office is not resistance on day one. It is cynicism by day 100. Employees can show up physically while pulling back discretionary effort. That tends to happen when a return-to-office shift is experienced not as a better way to coordinate work, develop talent or serve customers, but as a signal that leadership values visibility over outcomes.
This is where perception matters as much as policy. People will ask themselves a series of basic questions: Why now? Why five days? Why this role? Why our team? Here’s where change management matters. People do not adopt change simply because it has been announced. They need awareness of why it is happening, knowledge of how it will work, ability to succeed within it and reinforcement over time. Change succeeds when organizations prepare, equip and support people through the transition, not when they simply communicate a new rule.
If leaders skip that human side, they create a vacuum filled with assumptions, such as “this is about optics” or “this is about control”. Assumptions become even more powerful when employers say they trust employees while simultaneously signalling that career growth will increasingly follow presence. Whether intended or not, that creates real risk of proximity bias and the perception that attendance is being confused with contribution.
There is also a wellness question that should not be ignored. Policies that sound neutral on paper rarely land neutrally in practice. In the 2025 Benefits Canada Healthcare Survey, half of plan members ranked remote work, flexible hours and job-sharing among the top things an employer could do to support health and well-being. That does not mean employers cannot require more office time. It does mean, however, there are important trade-offs. When employees feel that flexibility and well-being are reduced without a clear purpose, it can directly impact the discretionary effort organizations rely on to excel. (Benefits Canada, 2025)
Leadership Capability Test
So what does a constructive return-to-office strategy actually look like?
It starts with defining the business problem and forming a clear plan. “We want people back” is not a strategy. “We need faster cross-functional decisions, stronger mentorship for early-career talent, more consistent collaboration and better knowledge transfer” is a strategy. Employees are far more likely to accept inconvenience when the reason is concrete, operational and tied to outcomes. If leaders say they want more collaboration, mentorship, innovation and skill development, then those outcomes should be visible in how office time is actually used. It can create challenges when employees sit near each other yet still default to virtual meetings.
The next step is to separate enterprise standards from team-level coordination. People experience work through their team, not through a memo. Productive teams perform better when they create the roadmap that defines how they work together and how they use on-site time. The organization can set the broad attendance expectation, but teams still need autonomy on meeting norms, focus time, collaboration windows, and manager availability. Coordination does not happen because everyone badged into the same building. It happens because the plan is clear.
This matters more than many leaders realize. In my experience, role clarity has seen a huge decline since 2020, yet employees who have a clear definition of exceptional performance are several times more likely to be engaged. During change, ambiguity multiplies. Where am I expected to be? For what purpose? How will performance be measured? If leaders do not answer those questions directly, employees spend their energy decoding and making assumptions instead of doing the work.
Then there is manager readiness. In reality, a return to office is a manager capability test. Managers are the ones who will interpret exceptions, handle resentment, rebalance workloads, coach people, onboard new employees and keep teams productive. Gallup has completed studies that indicate that managers explain 70 per cent of team engagement variance. As well, the same studies indicate that 50 per cent of managers think they are giving weekly feedback, while only 20 per cent of individual contributors agree. The gap should concern every employer. Managers need practical tools for setting team norms, handling flexibility requests, recognizing performance, spotting burnout, addressing friction from increased commute, and holding one-to-ones that focus on development. The manager’s role is not to police attendance. It is to help the team succeed. (Gallup, 2024)
What’s your Value Proposition?
Even with strong leadership alignment and manager readiness, one question remains. Why should employees want to come in?
Office time needs to be intentionally designed to deliver the benefits of in-person work. This is where many return-to-office efforts fall short. Employees aren’t defaulting to virtual meetings because they’re disengaged, it’s because this is how work gets done now. Digital workflows, collaboration tools, and remote habits have reshaped how we operate. The opportunity for leaders is not to reverse that shift, but to be purposeful about how in-office time complements it. If organizations expect people onsite more often, that time needs to be used for what works best in person, such as problem-solving, faster decisions, coaching, relationship-building, and creativity. That is the value proposition, and leaders need a clear answer to the employee question of ‘what’s in it for me?’
Two employee groups that require more attention are early-career and new hires. These employees often benefit most from observation and informal learning. Job shadowing, debrief after meetings, coaching, and access to decision-makers all matter more than simply being in the building. Gallup’s 2025 engagement analysis found younger workers saw some of the sharpest declines in feeling they had fair opportunities to learn and grow. Employers need to build developmental moments into the employee experience, rather than assuming they will happen organically. (Gallup, 2025)
Operational details also matter. The first weeks of a return-to-office shift are when employees decide whether leadership has thought the change through. Small friction points can become large culture signals. That is why protecting autonomy wherever possible is so important. A five-day policy does not mean every part of the employee experience must become rigid. Can start and end times flex when business needs allow? Are there sensible accommodations for caregiving or personal circumstances? Employees do not necessarily see structure and flexibility as opposites. They tend to see fairness, consistency, trust, and empathy as signals of respect.
Communication, Trust, and Metrics that Matter
Effective communication answers the why first, then explains what the change means for people. Employees do not need spin. They need transparency. Tell them what the organization hopes to gain. Tell them what will be difficult and what will be adjusted if there are unintended consequences. That is how trust is built during change.
After an important communication, it’s equally important to reinforce the right behaviours. This is one of the most overlooked parts of return-to-office strategy. If leaders praise people for being visible but fail to recognize collaboration, mentoring, learning, impact and problem-solving, employees quickly understand the real system. Recognition shapes culture because it tells people what truly matters. A return to office effort will fail if your most important metric is visibility. Real success looks like faster coordination between teams, stronger onboarding, better knowledge sharing, deeper relationships and visible employee development. (Gallup, 2025)
HR has a particularly important role here. The job is not to soften a business decision after the fact. The job is to support leadership in treating the employee experience as a driver of business success. That means asking harder questions than many executive teams ask themselves. Are we seeing avoidable turnover? Are employees actually getting enough coaching? Are collaboration and decision making improving? Are employees provided with flexibility that supports their well-being? Are stretch assignments and promotions awarded only to those who are most visible?
The most useful metrics are not mysterious. Track voluntary and avoidable turnover, engagement (in the areas of role clarity, recognition, workload, and manager support). Track business indicators such as cycle time, decision speed, quality, onboarding effectiveness, learning participation. And do not ignore qualitative data. Pulse survey comments, manager roundtables and stay interviews will tell you faster than a dashboard when employees begin to interpret the policy as control rather than coordination.
Return to Office is not a Policy
Leaders also need to remember that a return to the office is the beginning of the change efforts, not the end. Change management requires reinforcement because people naturally test whether it’s real, useful and sustainable. It’s important to revisit the approach at 30, 60 and 90 days, publish what you are hearing and show where you’re making adjustments. Responsiveness does not weaken leadership, it strengthens credibility.
Success is not about having the toughest return to office mandate. It’s defined by answering an employee question convincingly; how does spending more time in the office help us do better work, together? If employees find you credible, and the experience matches the messaging, they will adapt to it and find value in it. If the answer is unconvincing, or if the lived experience is all commute and no payoff, the organization will pay for that gap in less motivation, loss of trust and decreases in discretionary effort.
A return to office, in other words, is not just a workplace policy. It is a leadership test. And how leaders navigate it and drive change will determine whether employees simply show up or truly commit.
References
Benefits Canada. (2025). Most Canadian employees prefer hybrid work: Survey. https://www.benefitscanada.com/news/bencan/most-canadian-employees-prefer-hybrid-work-survey/
Gallup. (2024). What people need most from leaders right now. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/655817/people-need-leaders.aspx
Gallup. (2025). The post-pandemic workplace experiment continues. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/657629/post-pandemic-workplace-experiment-continues.aspx
Gallup. (2025). Employee retention depends on getting recognition right. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/650174/employee-retention-depends-getting-recognition-right.aspx
McKinsey & Company. (2025). Returning to the office: Focus more on practices and less on the policy. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/returning-to-the-office-focus-more-on-practices-and-less-on-the-policy
About the Author
Greg Hussey is a human resources professional with over 15 years of experience supporting organizations in building high-performance, engaged workplaces. He specializes in partnering with executive teams to develop and implement people strategies that drive organizational effectiveness.
Greg holds an MBA from the University of Alberta and is a Chartered Professional in Human Resources (CPHR).