Return-to-office

A new wave of return-to-office mandates has arrived since the New Year, including at JP Morgan Chase, leading advertising agency WPP, and Amazon —not to mention President Trump’s late January directive to the heads of federal agencies to “terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person … on a full-time basis.” 

Five years on from the pandemic, when the world showed how effectively many roles could be performed remotely or flexibly, what’s caused the sudden change of heart?

“There’s two things happening,” says global industry analyst Josh Bersin, who is based in California. “The economy is actually slowing down, so companies are hiring less. So there is a trend toward productivity in general, and then AI has forced virtually every company to reallocate resources toward AI projects.”

“The expectation amongst CEOs is that’s going to eliminate a lot of jobs. A lot of these back-to-work mandates are due to frustration that both of those initiatives are hard to measure or hard to do when we don’t know what people are doing at home.”