The Catalyst by Softchoice

The Mandate Episode: Why Return to Work is a Losing Fight

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If you read the headlines, you'd think nearly every major employer marched its workforce back to the office five days a week. The data says otherwise. And so does the human cost when companies push it anyway.

In this episode of The Catalyst, Brian Elliott of the Flex Index, an anonymous 30-year IT veteran and former Marine, and Softchoice's Lisa Walkden lay out what return-to-office mandates are actually about — and what they cost the leaders who issue them.

Here's what you'll take away:

  • Why only about a third of US companies actually went back to five days — and what's really driving the ones that did
  • How a 30-year tech veteran ended up quiet-quitting his job, and what that reveals about the real cost of a mandate
  • The reframe one Softchoice leader uses with executives weighing RTO — and the data that backs it up
  • Why the same companies still picking the RTO fight are often the same ones struggling with AI adoption

Featuring: Brian Elliott, founder of the Flex Index and CEO of Work Forward; Lisa Walkden, Senior Manager of Workplace Experience at Softchoice, a World Wide Technology Company; and an anonymous IT leader who agreed to share his story on condition we don't name his employer.

#ReturnToOffice #HybridWork #ITLeadership #WorkplaceStrategy #FutureOfWork #FlexIndex #TheCatalyst


Guests


Research & Data Cited

  • Flex Index quarterly reports — flexindex.com/reports
  • Stanford Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (Nick Bloom, WFH Research) — wfhresearch.com
  • Richmond Fed Economic Brief No. 24-16 (May 2024) — "Return-to-Office Orders: A Survey Analysis of Employment Impacts" by Grey Gordon and Sonya Ravindranath Waddell — richmondfed.org
  • "Return-to-Office Mandates and Brain Drain" — research from the University of Pittsburgh and Baylor's Hankamer School of Business (3M+ workers tracked via LinkedIn data) — hankamer.baylor.edu
  • CBRE data on workforce-manager geographic distribution (cited by Brian Elliott in interview)

More from Brian

The Catalyst by Softchoice is the podcast dedicated to exploring the intersection of humans and technology. 

Katey

Took a job almost a year and a half ago with a place that had a hybrid work policy. Seven months into the job, they arbitrarily announced five days in the office. I start phoning it in, but I'm still moderately engaged. I like what I do, but I work in an incompetent shit show. Last month, eight months after the RTO announcement, the overlords announced that they will stoop to allow us to telework two days a week for the month of May. Everyone kept asking if it was going to return to the old policy, but we found out today, nope, just May. I couldn't be more thrilled if they threw a pizza party. I'm about 170 weeks away from retirement. And those 170 weeks will be a contest to see how little I can do and remain employed. I'm done with this shit. That's a post that went up on a remote work subreddit in May. 1,800 upvotes. 169 comments. We track down the person who wrote it. He agreed to talk on one condition that we don't say his name and we don't identify his employer. So we'll just call him John. John has spent 30 years in tech. He's three years from retirement. And about 18 months ago, his employer recruited him out of a job he'd held for years with a promise. Two days at home, three days in the office. The kind of hybrid arrangement that, depending on which headline you read, is either the new American workplace or the dying breath of an experiment that never really worked. Seven months in, his employer broke the promise. From SoftChoice, a worldwide technology company, this is the catalyst. I'm Katie Tekasing. This season, we're doing things a bit differently. We're making audio documentaries, real stories from the front lines of IT, exploring the challenges of small teams chasing big dreams. Today's episode: What happens when a return to office mandate meets a workforce that's already decided? We're calling it the mandate episode. Why leaders keep picking a fight they were never going to win. Act one, the diagnosis. Before we get to John, what he was promised, what got broken, what he decided to do about it, we need to take a step back because John's experience isn't an outlier. It's a data point. And the person who has the most data on this is the one that we called first.

SPEAKER_02

I'm Brian Elliott. I'm the CEO of Work Forward. I work with executives on future work topics, helping them figure out how to change and evolve their organizations to meet today's and tomorrow's needs. We're also the publisher of the Flex Index, which tracks the back-to-office policies and processes for about 9,000 US-based companies.

Katey

The Flex Index is the most cited data set on workplace flexibility in the United States. It tracks the policies of about 9,000 companies, what they say their people are supposed to do, and where. And the first thing Brian wanted our producers to understand was that the headlines you read about in returning to the office are not the same thing as the data underneath them.

SPEAKER_02

If you read the headlines, what you'd think is that everybody's returned full-time to the office. Only about a third of companies in the U.S. have come back to five days a week in office presence. That tends to be, though, what grabs the headlines when you've got uh Jamie Diamond saying that uh everybody needs to get back in the office or the federal workforce being pushed in. That's what grabs the attention. Most firms have found a place to meet their employees in the middle.

Katey

A third. Not most, not even half, a third. The other two-thirds settled somewhere in between. And the most common, somewhere by a wide margin, is three days a week.

SPEAKER_02

Three days a week is sort of the standard default, most common policy out there. But if you dig a little bit deeper, what you also find is that there's huge variation depending on what people need and what they do.

Katey

And here's the gap nobody's talking about. According to the latest Flex Index report, citing data from Stanford's survey of working arrangements, required office days have increased about 13% over the past year. But the actual days workers spent working from home? According to Stanford economist Nick Bloom, those numbers have stayed as flat as a pancake. The companies are pushing harder. The workers aren't moving. That's the macro. And underneath it is something even more interesting. The reason is collaboration. What they often mean is something else. Something more complicated. And in Brian's experience, after watching this for five years, something that doesn't have much to do with productivity at all.

SPEAKER_02

There's been the debate about uh the office uh and and productivity for teams and what happens uh when you push people back into you really get higher productivity. There's no definitive study that says it actually goes up. There's plenty that say it actually is better if you give people some flexibility.

Katey

No definitive study. None. So if it's not about productivity, what is it about? When Brian sits down with the executives he advises, what do they actually say?

SPEAKER_02

The main reason why you see CEOs pushing for five days a week comes down to control, a lack of trust in their employees, and increasingly, especially in the past couple of years, a desire to kick up attrition without having to pay severance.

Katey

That's a designed feature, not a side effect.

SPEAKER_02

The desire to kick up attrition um without paying severance is actually documented. Federal Reserve Board actually put it in a paper a year ago. When they talk with CEOs and CFOs, part of the answer that they get back for why people are doing the four and five day a week extreme RTO mandates is it's a way to see who's the true believers that are really dedicated to the company and who's gonna lead.

Katey

The Federal Reserve paper Brian's referring to is from the Richmond Fed, a 2024 economic brief that surveyed about 200 CEOs and business leaders, asking directly what they expected from their RTO mandates and what they intended to drive. The pattern was consistent enough to write down. A separate survey from Bamboo HR found that one in four executives openly admitted to hoping their mandates would push some employees to quit. They had a name for it internally. They called it passive layoffs. And the people who walk first, when companies do this, they're the ones with somewhere to go.

SPEAKER_02

The people that have the greatest tendency to leave are the ones that actually have choice in the market, meaning data scientists can go find a job someplace else. But the other group that this is disproportionately impacted is women. Women by a three to one factor, more than men are likely to leave a company when they go with these really strict uh return to office demands.

Katey

The three-to-one figure has been confirmed by independent research. A 2025 study from Baylor University tracked the employment histories of more than 3 million workers using LinkedIn data. Their finding? When a company mandates a five-day return, female employees leave at nearly three times the rate of men. And it's not just gender. The same study found that mid-level and senior managers, the people with the deepest institutional memory, were leaving faster than junior staff. And high-skilled workers were leaving faster than low-skilled ones. In other words, the brain drain runs straight through your most valuable people. So if you piece together Brian's diagnosis, there's no productivity case for a five-day mandate. The data on the ground says workers are quietly ignoring it anyway. And when companies enforce the mandate harder, the people who walk are the ones that can't afford to lose. Which raises the obvious question, why do leaders keep doing it? And to answer that, we don't need an analyst. We need to meet someone who's living through it. Let's get back to John, the person who wrote the Reddit post about quiet quitting. Again, John isn't his real name. Once you've heard his story, you'll understand why he wanted to stay anonymous. But what's striking when you actually talk to John is how much he likes the work itself.

SPEAKER_03

I've been working in the technology industry uh since the mid-90s. Um bounced around in a bunch of different roles. I tended to work more in small business organizations, small, medium businesses, helping them grow from where they started to where they're trying to go.

Katey

30 years.

SPEAKER_03

So long before I got there, when they came out of COVID, you know, of course, everyone during COVID had 100% remote policy. Over time, they backed that off to a hybrid policy where it was two days remote, three days in the office. As a matter of fact, as they recruited me away from a role that I had been in for years, I was very happy at it.

Katey

The hybrid policy was the reason he took the job. His commute is short on paper, but the city he lives in has serious traffic, and a short drive on the map can take the better part of an hour some mornings. Two days from home meant he could plan a real life around his work. For a few months, the arrangement was exactly what he signed up for. And then seven months into his tenure.

SPEAKER_03

Out of the blue, they just announced, hey, forget it, we're not doing any more telework. Everyone's in the office five days a week. There was kind of a rationale that was given for it, but it wasn't a rationale that really made any sense whatsoever.

Katey

Ryan Elliott's data described it. A third of American companies that went five day. This was John's employer sliding right into that third, with in John's view, no real reason at all. What followed wasn't anger exactly. It wasn't grief. It was the slow, quiet recognition that the deal had been broken, and the people who broke it weren't even going to acknowledge that they had.

SPEAKER_03

I could shout loudly and people would hear me, but we're still on TV. Why am I in the building?

Katey

This is what an RTO mandate looks like inside the building. Not the news clip, not the announcement at the all hands, just a person sitting at a desk on a Teams call with people he could shout to from his chair. Then, eight months after that mandate, something strange happened. His employer, for one month only, gave back the two telework days.

SPEAKER_03

And then all of a sudden they said, Hey, in the next coming month, we're gonna go back to our old policy. Everyone can work two days remote. And they at the time they said it's only gonna be for the next month, but you know, the chatter around the office was this may be a full return to that policy. But after four weeks of once again saying, hey, it's okay if you work remote two days a week, bam, right back in the office again.

Katey

A taste and then a revocation. Whatever trust was left in that room, John said, fell apart the day the email landed in everybody's inbox. When you ask John what the foundation of a working organization looks like, he doesn't reach for management theory. He reaches for something he learned at 19.

SPEAKER_03

As a 19-year-old kid, signed up for the Marine Corps, and immediately I'm put in charge of 13 people. And the first thing that you learn is that you just need to take care of those people. Make sure that they have what they need to do their job, make sure that they are well rested, well fed, well taken care of, give them a clear objective and let them go do their jobs. And then invariably, if you hire the right people and you assess them properly, if you take care of them, show them that they're important to you, they're gonna run through walls for you.

Katey

Take care of your troops, they take care of the mission. It's a leadership principle John has carried for 40 years, through the Marines, through three decades in tech, and what it requires before anything else is trust.

SPEAKER_03

Must be a high trust environment. You have to trust your people. Otherwise, you're going to be sitting there looking to see if the green dot on teams turns red or yellow. And if you're managing time and attendance rather than managing the work that your organization does, telework's not for you. But I find in general, if you're managing time and attendance rather than managing work, you're probably not a very successful organization, anyways.

Katey

A high trust environment is exactly what John no longer believes he works in.

SPEAKER_03

You're telling them I don't trust you, I need to watch you. They no longer feel cared for and they disengage. And that's what he did. You don't care about me. You're not going to keep promises that you made. So at this point, it's about a paycheck. And the less that I do to get that paycheck at the end of the day, well, it works out better for me.

Katey

The work John does has real consequences in the world. He's not the kind of person who would let that fall apart. And so he doesn't. He keeps doing the minimum required of him with care. But the discretionary effort, the going above and beyond, that's gone.

SPEAKER_03

I'm also not going to go above and beyond and cycle to implement processes that would make the organization better. I'm not going to, you know, stick my neck out and really invest myself as heavily as I otherwise would.

Katey

This is what economists and management consultants call quiet quitting. It's also what Brian Elliott's data describes: workers complying with the mandate, technically on paper, while the actual work goes flat. Remember that flex index report from earlier in the episode? The one about required office days going up 13% while actual homework days stayed flat? That's not just a number. That's millions of John's. And when you ask John what his employer thinks they're providing in exchange for what he's no longer giving, the answer is bleak.

SPEAKER_03

One of the things they'll talk about the most is how much you're a family and how much they take care of their people. And there will be, you know, all the fluff that doesn't matter. You know, it's like love mobbing in a relationship. You got someone who's just showering you with praise and affection and it's all over the top. When it's really crap underneath.

Katey

The ideas he doesn't bring up in meetings, the processes he doesn't fight to fix, the mentorship he doesn't offer the people who would have learned the most from him. Now that, Brian Elliott would tell you, is the actual cost of a five-day mandate. Not the headcount you lose, the people who stay. John has one piece of advice for the kind of manager who looks at all of this and says, well, that's just one disgruntled employee.

SPEAKER_03

As much as I'm an advocate for remote work, I'm an advocate for remote work in organizations where it makes sense. You gotta build your organization, fight for it to make sense. But if you have, and you're keeping people in the office just because you want to keep them in the office, you're probably crushing the souls of people that you want to be a little more resistant.

Katey

Act three, the counterexample. If the data says five-day mandates don't drive productivity, and the cost is your most senior people quietly checking out, what does the alternative actually look like? Not in theory, inside a real company. That's the question our producers took to Lisa Walkden.

SPEAKER_01

My name is Lisa Walkden, uh, and I am the senior manager of Workplace Experience with the Workplace Umperience group here at Soft Choice. Um so we are historically what would have been referred to as facilities. We think we're much more than that, in that we see that real connection between people and space and experience. So my role was really anything workplace design, uh, workplace technology, workplace analytics, um, and our overall workplace strategy. So how our people connect to space.

Katey

Lisa cites at the unusual intersection of three departments most companies keep separate: facilities, IT, and workforce analytics. She decides what the desk looks like, what the meeting room technology does, and what the occupancy data actually tells the leadership team about how people are working. SoftChoice has gone through a renovation in the last few years. Lisa led much of it. And when she sat down with our producers, the first thing she did was reframe the question. Because in her view, the conversation about whether RTO mandates are right or wrong is the wrong conversation entirely.

SPEAKER_01

I think when you look at mandates as, you know, whether they're right or wrong, I'm not sure that that's necessarily the right question. I think the question should be: why do you want to impose a mandate? So what's underneath it? What is making a company kind of go through the process of mandating their people back?

Katey

Why? That's the question Lisa keeps coming back to. Because when she lists out the reasons companies actually do this, when she peels away the corporate language about collaboration and culture, what's underneath is usually something more banal. It's a lease that's coming due and an empty building. It's a leadership team that lost its team cohesion muscle and doesn't know how to rebuild it. It's a control reflex. And in each case, the mandate isn't really the answer. The mandate is just the easiest thing to type into a memo. So what's SoftChoice's approach? It's a strategy the company calls Work Your Way.

SPEAKER_01

Our workplace strategy at SoftChoice is called Work Your Way, which is essentially allows the flexibility and autonomy for our people to choose what works for them while still being accountable to ourselves and to our customers. I mean, we are a sales company. You know, gone are the days of kind of this hierarchical space planning where if you're an individual contributor, you get a 30 by 60 desk and a task chair.

Katey

Instead of the desk by rank approach, SoftChoice. Has rebuilt its offices around what the industry calls activity-based working. People choose space throughout the day based on what they're doing. A focus call needs walls. A project review needs a big table. An afternoon of heads-down work needs quiet. And critically, there's no mandate on how many days you're in.

SPEAKER_01

We are 100% not mandated. We started what was called team charters. So what we did was rather than mandates, we allowed the teams to come together and decide amongst themselves what made sense for them and their connection and their work. So a really great example of that is our territory sales group. They're by far our largest population of sellers, and they're our largest consumer of space overall in all of our offices. And they love to come in. In the Toronto office, they love to come in on a Wednesday. So we've actually opened up a floor in our Toronto office that isn't used, and we don't necessarily need it, but we've allowed them to use it on Wednesdays. They come in, they co-locate, they they put kind of more senior people with more junior people to learn from each other.

Katey

The Wednesday floor is a working example. Soft Choice's territory sales team, the largest single group at the company, gets a dedicated floor opened up for them on Wednesdays. Not because the company told them to come in, but because they choose to. Senior reps work next to junior reps. They mentor by osmosis. They go to lunch together. They ring their gong. That space exists because they wanted it to. And on the days they don't want it, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, the floor stays closed. That's a practical answer to Brian's diagnosis. Not a mandate, a choice that the company supports. But the more provocative thing Lisa said wasn't about the building. It was about how leaders actually measure performance.

SPEAKER_01

Performance does not mean bums and seats. And we say that.

Katey

The metric Brian Elliott would tell you correlates with nothing. So if you take that metric away, what fills the vacuum? Data. Lisa pulled the occupancy numbers herself.

SPEAKER_01

We did a really interesting kind of exercise where I pull all the occupancy data through Azure. So we don't measure our occupancy through badge swipes because it's unreliable. Then we also started to layer on sales data. So performance data, really high level. But what it showed, interestingly enough, is that our top performers are actually coming in fairly regularly. They're choosing to come in, not all of them. Again, some of our top performers are 100% remote. And which is again another reason to kind of dig into why you're mandated. Because if we got our top performers sitting at home and they're pulling in big numbers and they're doing great and they're motivating their team, why would you mess with a good thing?

Katey

SoftChoice's top performers are split. Some come in regularly because they want to. Some are fully remote because that's where they do their best work. The data doesn't say the office is the answer. It says people, given a choice, will find the conditions that let them be excellent. And those conditions are not the same person to person. A five-day mandate would have homogenized that, which means a five-day mandate would have made some of SoftChoice's best people worse. And the SoftChoice approach has a structural insight worth pulling out for the IT leader who's listening. There are three legs to making hybrid work, not just one.

SPEAKER_01

It can't all be about space and it can't all be about tech. Our, you know, People and Culture team has really done a fantastic job over the last few years at leading a large leadership training exercise. I think that's the missing piece in a lot of cases. And often where you see these hybrid work policies fail is where one of those three legs of the stool falls apart or isn't there. So, you know, space and workplace is one, tech to support it is another. Training our leaders properly so they know how to manage hybrid people.

Katey

Space, tech, and leadership training. Three legs of a stool. And if any one of those are missing, the whole thing tips over. Most companies that try hybrid and fail are companies that built out the space, deployed the technology, and skipped the third leg. They asked their middle managers to figure out how to lead distributed teams without ever training them on how. Then, when the results were uneven, they blame the model. This is the IT leader takeaway from Lisa's experience. If you're being asked to make hybrid work in your building, the tech is solvable. The space is solvable. The thing that breaks every time is the manager who doesn't know what to do with a team they can't see. And to land one more idea on this, the same orgs that built the muscle for hybrid in Brian Elliott's data are the ones now best positioned for what's coming next.

SPEAKER_02

The same redesign work has to happen when you want to factor in AI as well. So AI is the next wave of technology that's hitting the companies that are taking the time that took the time during the pandemic to redesign how they uh have done work actually now have a distinct advantage because they're more, they built more muscle around thinking through any given process at work. How does it actually work today and how are we going to redesign it in a way that takes advantage of this next technology wave?

Katey

The orgs that did the redesign work for hybrid are now ahead on AI. And that's not by accident. The muscle is the same. The willingness to interrogate how work actually happens and to redesign rather than mandate is the same muscle in both cases. The companies still picking the RTO fight in 2026, they're often the same companies struggling to deploy AI without fumbling it. That's not a coincidence. It's the same root problem expressed twice. At the end of our conversation, Lisa was thinking about John. Not John specifically, but everyone like him. The people who are going to walk or who haven't walked but have stopped trying.

SPEAKER_01

If you dig your heels in and you mandate, you're gonna lose a lot of really great people. We have so many people that are amazing, wonderful people that contribute massively to their organizations, and mandates would potentially they would lose those people. Is it worth it? Is my is my bottom line.

Katey

If you're an IT leader listening to this and you're being asked to enable a return-to-office mandate that you have questions about, questions about what it actually costs and the people that you can't afford to lose, you don't have to figure it out on your own. SoftChoice has support for IT and business leaders navigating exactly these decisions. Not a sales pitch, a working conversation about the gap between what leadership wants to mandate and what your workforce, technology stack, and your space can actually deliver. You can learn more about how we help at softchoice.com. The catalyst was reported and produced by Tobin Dalrymple and the team at Pilgrim Content, editing by Ryan Clark with support from Philippe Dimas, Joseph Bayer, and the marketing team at SoftChoice. A special thanks to Brian Elliott of Work Forward and the Flex Index, to Lisa Walkton of Soft Choice, and to John for trusting us with his story. This is the Catalyst.