Five days in the office went from outlier to default fast. Among Fortune 100 employees, the share required in the office full-time hit 54% by mid-2025, up from 11% a year earlier — Amazon, AT&T, Walmart, JPMorgan Chase and Dell among the names driving it.
What hasn't kept pace is evidence that it works.
What the research actually found
The most-cited study comes from the University of Pittsburgh, which looked at S&P 500 firms that issued return-to-office mandates. Three findings: the mandates followed stock-price declines rather than preceding recoveries, they produced no measurable improvement in firm value afterward, and they significantly lowered job satisfaction.
That middle finding is the awkward one. The stated case for five days in the office is performance. The performance improvement doesn't show up in the numbers.
Stanford's work points the same direction from a different angle: hybrid schedules deliver productivity on par with full-time office attendance while cutting resignations by roughly a third. Same output, fewer people leaving. Stanford's broader remote-work research has also found fully remote employees averaging about 13% more productive on individual task completion, driven by fewer interruptions, no commute fatigue and more control over their working environment.
The costs that do show up
Where the data is unambiguous is on the human side.
Gallup found employees required in the office five days a week reported 43% higher burnout than hybrid workers, and 31% higher than fully remote workers. Research tracking more than three million employee profiles found firms experienced an average 13–14% increase in abnormal turnover after announcing RTO mandates.
Put those together and the trade looks poor: no demonstrated gain in firm value, a measurable rise in burnout, and a meaningful increase in people leaving — which carries a replacement cost nobody puts in the mandate memo.
Why companies do it anyway
The gap between evidence and behaviour is real, and worth being honest about rather than dismissive of.
Some of it is that these studies measure what's measurable. Individual task completion is easy to quantify; mentoring a new hire, the unplanned conversation that kills a bad idea early, the cohesion that carries a team through a hard quarter — much harder. Executives arguing for the office are often arguing for those, and the absence of data isn't proof they're wrong.
Some of it is timing. The Pittsburgh finding that mandates followed stock declines suggests RTO sometimes functions as a visible action during a difficult period — something decisive a leadership team can announce.
And some of it is simply that offices are expensive and empty ones look like a mistake.
The version that has evidence behind it
The research doesn't say offices are useless. It says undifferentiated five-day mandates aren't earning their cost, and that hybrid appears to capture most of the benefit without the burnout and turnover.
The distinction worth drawing is between time in the office and purpose in the office. Days built around collaboration, onboarding and the work that genuinely benefits from being in a room are defensible. Days where everyone commutes to sit on video calls with people in other buildings are the ones the burnout numbers are describing.
If your organisation is heading toward five days, the fair question isn't whether people prefer it. It's what specifically improves that hybrid wasn't delivering — and whether anyone is measuring it. On current evidence, most mandates can't answer that.
Image: RDNE Stock project, via Pexels
