The five-day office comeback: Why stricter return-to-office mandates may push top performers out (and leave US companies weaker in the long run)

In the most recent wave of office call-backs, companies like Stellantis and Home Depot have told employees it’s back to the office five days a week, joining employers such as Amazon, AT&T and JPMorgan Chase (1). About one in three American companies now require employees to work fully in person, according to data from Flex Index (2). Executives say the move is about more than desks and attendance.

“In-person engagement enables more meaningful support for store and field associates, drives results and reinforces our people-centric culture and inverted pyramid,” Home Depot CEO Ted Decker said in a message to employees (3).

The move comes as tensions simmer between leadership and staff. While many leaders argue that fully on-site work boosts efficiency, creativity and company culture, it remains the least popular option among workers, especially those in their 20s and 30s.

Which raises a bigger question. Will these mandates actually rebuild collaboration and community, or push employees to look elsewhere for jobs that offer more flexibility?

Flexibility in a tighter market

For Ryan Essenburg, a business development director in Mountain View, California, the return-to-office shift was more than just inconvenient. When his employer moved from a hybrid setup to five days a week in the office, with flexibility reserved only for top performers, the message felt less about productivity and more about control.

Employees who didn’t hit their quotas, Essenburg included, were suddenly back at their desks full time, where, he told the Wall Street Journal, they felt micromanaged and “treated like children (4).” Not long after, he left in search of a role that offered hybrid flexibility.

Hybrid work, Essenburg says, isn’t about status or performance; it’s about what actually works. At a previous company, everyone from the CEO to entry-level staff came into the office on the same day each week.

“It worked great,” he said. “There was no tension.”

For workers debating whether to push back or pack up, the timing couldn’t be worse. A cooling job market has shifted leverage back to employers. Hiring slowed in 2025, with U.S. employers adding just 584,000 jobs, the weakest year for job growth outside a recession in more than two decades, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data (5).

At the same time, the unemployment rate has remained relatively stable around 4.4% late last year, masking a deeper strain in the labor market (6). A rising share of unemployed workers have been out of work for six months or longer, making flexibility feel less like a right and more like a risk.

The exit strategy

Some economists argue that for some companies, stricter office policies may double as a subtle headcount strategy.

Nick Bloom, a Stanford economics professor who studies work-from-home trends, has suggested that requiring employees to return five days a week can lead to a predictable wave of voluntary exits without the cost of formal layoffs.

When workers leave on their own, companies avoid severance packages and redundancy payouts, trimming payroll through attrition instead of announcements.

Officially, leadership teams tend to frame these mandates around more traditional goals: boosting productivity, accelerating innovation, strengthening mentorship and rebuilding company culture. Research suggests the workers most likely to quit after new return-to-office rules aren’t necessarily the least engaged or least productive. In fact, they’re often the opposite.