By Matthew B. Perrigino, Nina Granqvist, Roshni Raveendhran and Lusi Wu
Return-to-office policies are popular among employers, but securing employee cooperation hinges on offering them a fair exchange in return for accepting less autonomy.
Return-to-office policies continue to grow in popularity among business leaders, but face resistance from employees. Understanding how to increase the perception that these policies are employee friendly and will benefit the quality of people’s work lives could prove essential in fostering a more cooperative attitude from the workforce.
The rising popularity of Return to Office
Senior executives and employees have been locked in a tug-of-war over work-from-home policies for several years now.
As businesses recovered from the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, CEOs were staunch in their support for a full return to the office, whereas employees showed resistance to a move that would restrict the greater autonomy they had grown used to thanks to flexible working arrangements.
A 2023 KPMG survey of over 1,300 CEOs reported that 64 percent expected a complete return to office spaces within three years. But that same year, a different survey by Owl Labs on hybrid work in the US found that as many as 94 percent of employees needed to be convinced to return.
Now that 2026 has arrived, how has this tension played out?
An analysis by the London School of Economics and Political Science finds that fully remote work has declined across Europe from its peak in 2021, though it remains above pre-pandemic levels. In Belgium, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden, fully remote workers are around 15 percent of the workforce, but this is more than the European average.
In contrast, hybrid work – a possible compromise between return-to-office and work-from-home policies – remains a fixture of the European job market. In Northern European countries such as Iceland, Norway, and the Netherlands, over 30 percent of workers are in hybrid arrangements.
A YouGov report from December 2025 finds that around 35 percent of British workers are partially remote, and a further 14 percent work entirely from home, showing an almost half-and-half split between remote or hybrid workers and those going into the office every day.
These figures remain largely the same as those from similar YouGov surveys in 2023 and 2024, though 19 percent of UK workers do report their employers have reduced work-from-home allowances, suggesting continued top-down pressure on employees to shift back to working from offices.
In short, the current situation is much the same as it was three years ago.
Employers as a whole have made steady but marginal progress towards engineering a return to physical workspaces, but roughly a third to half of the workforce in many European countries has held on to work-from-home allowances in some capacity.
The purpose of return-to-office policy
Employers have many reasons for wanting workers back in office spaces. When implementing a return-to-office policy, senior executives could be motivated by the perception that it will improve productivity, boost collaboration, increase managerial oversight, strengthen company culture, or any combination of the above.
However, these reasons do not always resonate with employees, who typically view return to office as a restriction on the freedoms they have come to enjoy by working remotely. This may include having greater autonomy to manage their own workflows and an easier ability to balance work with external responsibilities – for instance, childcare or caring for vulnerable relatives.
Achieving a successful return to office requires employers to address the frustration and resistance from employees who perceive their autonomy being diminished. The alternative of simply forcing through return-to-office mandates risks compromising employee engagement and talent retention.
Creating a positive return to office experience
In our paper published by the academic journal Human Resource Management, we set out a framework for how employers and HR managers can design return-to-office policies – and, crucially, communicate these policies to employees – to minimise any potential negative response from the workforce.
The framework distinguishes “employer friendly” policies from “employee friendly” ones, based on employee perceptions of the reasons why a change is occurring.
“Employer friendly” describes perceptions that policies are introduced with little care for the ways return to office restricts employees’ autonomy, and that organizations will take limited or no action to ease the transition for workers. In contrast, “employee friendly” describes perceptions that policies are introduced with an awareness of employees’ preferences and that organizations will take clear actions to mitigate their relative loss of freedom.
Naturally, employees are more likely to be convinced by – and cooperate with – return to office policies that are perceived as “employee friendly”. The question for executives, then, is how to design policies with this framework in mind.
Customised and collaborative solutions
First, CEOs must realise that refusing to budge from a pre-pandemic vision of the workforce risks creating an adversarial employer-employee relationship. Instead, they should consider what they can offer as a fair substitute in exchange for reducing employees’ autonomy over where they can work.
These offers can range in scale and cost. One option is to redesign workspaces to make them more attractive by maximising natural light, providing good quality coffee machines, creating comfortable spaces for group work, and implementing an easy booking system for reserving desks or conference rooms. Another idea could be to encourage informal social gatherings after work, and to foster feelings of excitement for days when on-site work is required. A third possibility is to provide employees with access to services, such as an on-site gym or health centre, free or subsidised childcare, and charging stations for electric vehicles.
HR leaders have an essential role to play in nudging CEOs toward considering these options, and senior executives can then weigh up which approaches are within their budget to deliver. HR leaders can also offer important guidance to customise the array of benefits offered by the company based on employee feedback.
Crucially, these offers should be maintained over time, signalling that employers are willing to invest in facilities and services for employees, and cementing an employment relationship built on communication and compromise, not opposition.
This goal should also be reflected in the way return to office is communicated to employees. Instead of presenting the reasoning primarily in terms of boosting productivity – in other words, what employees can do for the organisation – employers should emphasise the positive impact of what return to office can do for employees’ quality of work-life.
By presenting return to office as an opportunity for employees to access new services, work in an attractive office space, and lead more sociable work lives, employers can better communicate that they understand the value of flexible working for their workers and are willing to offer a fair exchange of benefits in return for compliance.
A complete return to office continues to be a priority for many business leaders, but resistance from employees shows no signs of disappearing soon. CEOs must make peace with the fact that turning the clock back to the world of work in 2019 is impossible. But communicating and enacting return to office in ways that enhance the daily on-site experiences of employees offers a path to moving employer-employee relationships forward in a way that benefits firms and individual workers alike.
Matthew B. Perrigino
Nina Granqvist
Roshni Raveendhran
