RTO is the Biggest Topic for Workplace Leaders in 2025—Here’s How to Think About It in Your Organization

A Guide to Managing RTO Mandates for All Company Leaders

There are fewer hotter business topics than the return-to-office (RTO) debate that’s raging at the moment.

Major organizations like Amazon, Google, JPMorgan, and even the federal government have recently issued orders for employees to return to the office. This chorus of RTO mandates has caused a trickle down effect, with many organizations using this as cloud cover to issue their own orders.

But does RTO make sense for your organization? And how do you implement it effectively without disrupting productivity or employee morale? Read on to find out more.

Why is RTO the Dominant Trend in 2025?

When Donald Trump and Elon Musk do something, people take notice. Their joint command that federal workers are no longer permitted to work remotely is this year’s most high profile RTO mandate.

But even before the Trump-Musk edicts, an increasing number of companies had issued their own return to office orders.

This corporate shift was largely justified in the name of concerns about collaboration, culture, and performance. Simply, many leaders continue to believe work done in the office is more productive–and hybrid models have proven messy.

As Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, put it: “We don’t need all those people. We were putting people in jobs because people weren’t doing the jobs [remotely] they were hired to do in [the] first place”.

There’s also the economic reality. Market conditions, real estate investments, and shifting employer-employee power dynamics are influencing decisions. There is also, many suspect, an unspoken motivation: companies’ desire to cut headcount by forcing voluntary resignations from people who want to stay remote.

To RTO or Not to RTO, That is the Question

Whether to order employees back to the office is a deeply personal assessment for company leaders. It’s a deeply philosophical question, the answer to which, ultimately, rests in the mind of company leaders.

The trap smaller companies need to be wary of is seeing large corporations like Amazon and Google make the decision, and then thinking it naturally makes sense for them too.

What’s overlooked in this follow-the-big-guys approach is that these large companies can afford lay offs, attract top talent, and offer compensation that keeps employees, regardless of work location. These advantages typically don’t exist for smaller companies.

So, let’s take a look at five considerations when making the decision around RTO.

1. How to Make the Call on RTO

Beyond personal biases or assumptions, it’s important to assess your RTO decision through a strategic decision-making process.

First, you need to be clear on why you are considering RTO. Is it a productivity-related decision? If so, it’s important you have productivity data to back it from tools like staff management software Insightful.io or Jira to validate your thinking about the impact on location on productivity. When you make claims it’s better for productivity, having the data to prove it helps your case.

Your industry and team roles play a big factor in RTO decisions too. Do your teams benefit from in-person collaboration (e.g., finance, healthcare, manufacturing) or is remote work still viable (tech, marketing, customer service)? This role-specific approach means RTO doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. It can be set – and justified – at a team level.

Employee sentiment also comes into your decision around RTO. What do your employees want? Surveys and employee engagement data can provide clarity – though you need to decide how much weight you place on this information when deciding, so you don’t end up with a tail-wagging-the-dog situation.

2. Implementing RTO Without Disrupting Productivity

When workplaces were suddenly forced into remote work during COVID lockdowns, this significantly disrupted productivity and workflows. Rapidly unwinding remote work can have the same effect. That’s why, when choosing to issue RTO, it’s important to be strategic about it.

Once you call employees back to the office, it’s best to adopt a phased approach. From a productivity standpoint, this minimizes the disruption for employees and the company. By recalling people in tranches – say, 10 to 20 per cent at a time every few weeks – you enable the majority of your workforce to continue with business as usual.

Taking this gradual approach also eases the logistics of getting hundreds, and possibly thousands, of people back into the office at one time. Doing things gradually may also mean bringing employees back a couple of days a week initially, then ramping up to five days over time.

There’s the opportunity to be even more nuanced with your RTO policy too. RTO can be part of an ongoing hybrid model, which still affords employees some days working from home. Here, again, it’s important to have workforce management or time and attendance systems to assess employee performance to guide your hybrid model.

3. Weigh the Costs (Financially & Emotionally)

On average, companies spend between $4,000 to $15,000 per employee annually on employees who work from an office. This includes rent, utilities, work stations, and more. The exact figure depends on location and office fit outs.

For many companies, cutting these costs is the main appeal of remote work. It delivered a windfall of savings. When reverting to office-based work, these additional costs need to be factored into your decision. Then there are also the additional costs to calculate, like employee attrition and hiring costs.

It’s important to calculate and make projections around the financial costs of resuming office work. Once you have this data, it should be interpreted in the context of productivity data. Simply, the cost-benefit analysis you need to do is: Are the costs of having employees back in the office less than the dollar amount of productivity we will gain?

There’s a second cost to consider here too. The potential cost of diminished employee engagement if employees resist returning to the office. Addressing employee engagement, whether through more office perks, flexibility, or increased compensation, is key to managing the emotional cost of RTO.

4. Turning to Technology

The RTO debate is subjective. But the process itself doesn’t need to be. The best decisions around RTO will be data-driven, not opinion-driven. Accessing this data depends on integrating technology into your process pre-RTO, during the process, and once employees return to the office.

Companies that leverage workforce analytics will have a competitive advantage in crafting effective RTO policies. With an understanding of how employees work in and out of the office, you gain a true sense of the impact of work location on productivity.

This data also supports more detailed and evidence-back conversations with employees. It allows you to point to data and say, here’s why we are mandating our version of RTO. It’s harder to dismiss empirical evidence.

5. Communicate the Benefits

Often, RTO mandates come down from above, accompanied with the reasons why the decision has been made. Typically, the message is how RTO will be better for company performance. But there’s a better way to communicate RTO mandates: by driving home the benefits to employees.

Working in the office plays a role in career progression, friendships, social interaction, networking, and mentorship. Like it or not, proximity has been shown to play a meaningful role on who gets more opportunities and is first in line for promotion in workplaces.

Communicating these benefits to employees must be part of your communications strategy around RTO. These benefits are especially valuable to the newest wave of Gen Z workers. Many of whom have never worked in offices, yet carry ambitions for rapid career progression.

RTO Debates Will Continue to Rage

RTO debates aren’t going anywhere. Too many employees have developed a taste for remote work that is at odds with RTO mandates from company leaders. So long as this tension exists, so will RTO debates.

For those willing to work in the office, this may become an advantage in the job hunt. For others set on remote, there will continue to be opportunities at remote-first organizations. Either way, it’s important for your company to take a data-driven, strategic approach to your RTO decision.