Stephen Smysnuik
What’s the point of return-to-office mandates?
Olena Hromova / Shutterstock
The Topline
- The Ontario government announced earlier this month that all employees return to office four days a week starting in November, and full-time in January.
- Major banks and corporations, including RBC, BMO and Rogers, have implemented their own return-to-office (RTO) mandates beginning in the fall
- An Angus Reid survey found 79 per cent of Canadian workers prefer remote or hybrid arrangements when asked to return to the office.
For innovation's sake
Office life is the company’s engine.
Senior executives seem to be banking on the idea that innovation requires friction. Data supports the idea that remote setups work fine for execution, but it’s lousy for invention. Inspiration often strikes by accident – y’know, overhearing a conversation on your way to the coffee room that ignites a new idea, or a little small-talk that evolves into a brain storm. You can’t replicate that through a webcam.
RTO supporters argue that if Canadians want its businesses to actually innovate – and they do – rather than just plod along, people need to be in the same room on the regular, rather than siloed at home.
Without in-person rituals and happy accidents, companies risk becoming a loose band of freelancers instead of a cohesive team. CEOs also worry that an entire generation of young workers risks missing out on professional osmosis — the subtle lessons picked up by watching how someone with more experience handles a client call or a crisis – which could lead to professional and financial stagnation down the line.
There’s also the macro argument. Downtown cores are dying. Office towers are empty, and satellite businesses like restaurants and coffee shops are struggling to survive while transit ridership stagnates. RTO isn’t simply about work culture, it’s about salvaging the urban economy from collapse.
But the dark heart of the matter is that some bosses simply don’t trust that people are actually working from home. Reasonable or not, RTO reduces the gap between perceived and actual productivity, and in a lot of ways, what your manager perceives is the reality.
This matters at the individual level for performance reviews, for promotions, and for professional growth, as well as a sense of cohesion across the organization.
So what?
KPMG’s 2024 CEO survey found that 83 per cent of Canadian executives expect a full return-to-office in the next three years – and what they say goes, for better or worse.
RTO is about culture, mentorship, creativity, accountability, and, like it or not, optics. It’s inconvenient for employees, sure, but for companies trying to build cohesive teams to ensure financial stability at a challenging time for many organizations, the push for RTO makes sense, even if it’s ruthless and unpopular.
A waste of everyone’s time
Strip away the talking points and RTO looks a lot more like an executive power trip.
It’s easier to manage – or micromanage – when everyone is visible. And it’s reassuring for CEOs who don’t trust their staff, or who have large, unwieldy organizations to run.
But it’s 2025. The labour market is still very competitive for skilled roles and workers have leverage. Push too hard and the talent will walk. Multiple studies have found no performance benefit from RTO mandates, but instead lower job satisfaction and higher turnover after they’ve been implemented.
Parents, caregivers, and people with disabilities benefit disproportionately from remote work. Stripping away flexibility isn’t just inefficient, it actively pushes out talent that companies claim they want to attract. A rigid RTO mandate narrows the workforce pipeline and reduces diversity on a whole range of levels – in seniority and experience, in talent, in gender and culture representation, and so on.
Ontario unions have pushed back against the initiative, claiming it risks creating costly disruptions that are simply not necessary. Work-from-home setups may actually save organizations money from increasing worker retention.
The fact is, society has moved on. Everything is different now post-pandemic, and the expectations of the workers – the people who do the actual work that drives the economy – have evolved right along with it.
Then there’s the macro argument – it’s not the worker’s responsibility to “save downtown,” nor is it on them to subsidize real estate developers and other business owners. It’s not their fault that office rent prices have inflated, or that transit has been poorly designed to feed into a downtown core that has become functionally irrelevant because of the way society has shifted.
None of this makes enough meaningful sense to disrupt workflows and work patterns that have become established over the last five years.
So what?
RTO is about control, nostalgia for a by-gone era, and protecting downtown real estate values. Employees are productive from their home offices, and there are still plenty of organizations that offer flexibility. If companies insist on dragging people back, they may well have a whole different set of problems on their hands.
