Bank of America has announced a unique change to its hybrid work policy: it will prohibit employees from working remotely on consecutive days.
Starting on September 14, Bank of America staff in hybrid roles will still have two remote days each week, but they can’t be back-to-back. The decision is intended to promote collaboration and optimize the usage of the bank’s real estate by ensuring some employees are in the office every day, a bank spokesperson told Fast Company.
The updates were based on employee feedback and considered the nature of the work performed by affected employees, the spokesperson told Fast Company. Most of Bank of America’s client-facing employees, such as those working at financial centers and in sales, have already returned to the office full time.
Bank of America is not the first company to restrict which days its hybrid workers must be in the office. Apple, for example, has long employed the concept of “anchor” days: hybrid workers attend work in person on Tuesday, Thursday, and a third day determined by their team. In March 2025, Swiss bank UBS told hybrid workers that one in-office day had to be either Monday or Friday.
One reason for such policies is to solve a real-estate headache created by hybrid work: offices that are packed Tuesday through Thursday and comparatively empty on Mondays and Fridays. Perhaps even more critical is ensuring employees are in the office at the same time as the colleagues they came there to see.
Indeed, Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom, a leading researcher on remote work, has argued that giving employees free rein in choosing their own in-office days can undermine one of the main purposes of coming into the office: interacting with colleagues. A 2023 study supports this view, concluding that companies could improve hybrid arrangements by helping workers facilitate “co-attendance”—i.e., letting them coordinate schedules so colleagues are in the office together.
Overall, the share of Fortune 500 companies offering flexible work policies declined by 11% from Q2 2024 to Q2 2025, while the share requiring employees to be in the office full time nearly doubled, from 13% to 24%, according to the Q2 2025 quarterly Flex Index report.
In banking, JPMorgan Chase has required workers to be in the office full time since January 2025, while Truist has done so since January 2026.