In 2025, Amazon, Dell, Apple, Google, IBM, Meta, Salesforce, and dozens more have doubled down on demands for employees to return to the office (RTO) at least three days a week, if not all five. And they’re getting exactly what they want.
Now, when I say “exactly what they want,” you might be expecting me to paint a picture of workers happily returning to their daily commutes, overcrowded highways, cavernous or claustrophobic offices, constant interruptions, and extra expenses, and all of it resulting in massive productivity gains.
That’s not happening, the productivity-gains part. And the longer we play this out, the sillier the performances of “productivity theater” have become. The truth is, the science on productivity is still out.
So you have to go with your gut. Or your experience. And what 30 years of gut and experience tells me is that the real question isn’t whether people are more productive at home—it’s whether companies can afford to lose their best talent over this.
Right now, tech workers are desperate. Companies know it. That’s why Amazon can demand five days in the office and get compliance instead of resignations.
But the labor market isn’t static; it never was. In fact, it tends to whipsaw back and forth every few years. Remember 2022? Companies were begging people to take jobs. Signing bonuses, remote work, unlimited PTO—whatever it took. Candidates were ghosting interviews. That shoe was totally on the other foot, and it was a Doc Marten.
But if we look at history, even recent history, a lot of companies that are mandating RTO now are writing the future resignation letters for their best employees, to be delivered the nanosecond the tech job market stops being the worst in history.
Let me tell you how common sense foreshadows a reckoning for RTO.
How did we get here?
I don’t want to defend remote work. I really don’t. But I’m a huge fan of common sense.
It’s a little ironic that remote work accelerated with another mandate—that we all stay home for most of 2020 and a lot of 2021. I, for one, still can’t believe that happened. But it’s what happened next that mattered.
As the pandemic restrictions lifted almost universally by 2022, the natural calls by employers for their employees to return to the office were met with an unexpected backlash.
“No, thanks. We’re more productive, our work-life balance is much better, we feel better, and anyway you said we could do this.”
That backlash peaked in 2024, when a bunch of Dell employees, shockingly, chose to take the hit to their company future rather than come back to the office.
“That’s fine. We’d rather do a better job in a more comfortable environment. By the way, we’ve moved to New Zealand.”
Yeah, it got silly. And corporate tech did not take that silliness lying down. Employees needed to return to the office because . . . well, because it’s always been that way. Does it matter that in a post-pandemic internet business world, that physical proximity no longer matters? That doesn’t matter.
As employers started stamping their feet over the mandates, I started talking about common sense. For one, the long-term hits these companies were taking to their talent candidate pool, their employee morale, and their productivity when measured from the employees’ perspective, were costs that were going to far outweigh their sunk real estate costs in the short term.
But then corporate tech got smart. Sort of. Employers started making the misguided assumption that the employees who were most dead set against returning to the office were the ones that the company could live without. RTO became a natural, if completely illogical, weeding-out mechanism.
And that kinda worked. But kinda didn’t. Sure, the troublemakers all found the door and gave the finger on the way out, but the go-along-to-get-along crowd stopped performing and got performative, and the rest of the tech workforce got ready to revolt.
Then the employers got bailed out by the worst tech labor market in history.
When there are more job seekers than jobs, tech companies can mandate a company loyalty sing-along every morning, and the entire workforce will start warming up their vocal cords.
What’s next for the labor market and RTO?
Well, what does common sense tell us?
Productivity is in the eye of the beholder. In any position where creativity, innovation, or even decision-making matters, I’d argue that there is no stable metric for productivity that goes beyond correlation to causation where employee performance is concerned.
So you have to go with simple, common-sense concepts. Evolution doesn’t come with introductory pamphlets. There is no title card for the next phase of the future of work. It just happens, and you evolve or die.
And if we couldn’t connect the dots that the internet had made physical proximity irrelevant in every case where it wasn’t mandatory (i.e., surgery, construction, airline pilot), the pandemic lockdowns ironically hammered that point home.
As an evolutionary concept, the productivity argument no longer even matters. It’s the same productivity argument that was being made when we were deciding whether everyone still had to wear suits and skirts to work.
But if that kind of common sense doesn’t sway the naysayers, I can make the argument even common-sensier.
Yo. 2022.
The job market was supposed to have recovered by now. It hasn’t, and that has emboldened a lot of employers to lean into their leverage with their supply of scarce and valuable jobs. But the market will recover.
When it does, the first questions that are going to need to be answered are:
“Why am I on a Zoom with the person down the hall?”
“Why can we only hire within a two-hour commute of some of the most expensive real estate in the country?”
“Why am I wearing this three-piece suit with matching fedora and a pocket watch? I’m a database administrator.”
Because when an employee has leverage, questions like that no longer make any sense. And the very same companies demanding RTO now will likely be forced to offer remote work again to compete for scarce, valuable talent.
They’ll be right back where they started, while their talent heads to those smart companies that see remote work as an evolutionary concept, and are creating solutions that accommodate both remote and in-office employees.
If you are also a fan of common sense, please join my email list and I’ll shoot you a quick heads-up when I spout something close to it.
—Joe Procopio
This article originally appeared on Fast Company‘s sister publication, Inc.
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