Here's Why RTO Mandates Are Backfiring
Bosses need to enhance the office experience, the latest research shows.
As employers continue to tighten RTO requirements, many leaders face a difficult balancing act. They want stronger collaboration, innovation and culture-building that often happens most naturally when people work together in person, yet employees have grown accustomed to flexibility—and expect the office to offer something more compelling than just a desk.
New research suggests that the answer isn’t choosing between remote work and the office. It’s redesigning the workplace experience itself.
According to ezCater’s Future of Workplace Experience Report, employees remain remarkably consistent about what they want. Nearly 3 in 5 say hybrid work is their preferred arrangement, compared with about a third who prefer fully remote work and fewer than 1 in 10 who want to be in the office full time.
Those numbers closely mirror Gallup’s ongoing research, which has consistently found that roughly 3 in 5 employees with remote-capable jobs prefer hybrid work, while fewer than 1 in 10 want to work entirely on-site. Rather than being a temporary post-pandemic adjustment, hybrid work has become the long-term expectation for much of the knowledge workforce.
Mandates Come With a Cost
The challenge for employers is that many are moving in the opposite direction.
ezCater found that more than a quarter of hybrid and remote employees expect their organizations will eventually require full-time office attendance. But when those mandates arrive without any new benefits or incentives, they can have unintended consequences.
The study found that remote employees required to return to the office without additional perks are 27% more likely to be actively looking for another job.
That’s a significant warning for HR leaders already struggling with retention.
Rather than viewing RTO as a policy issue, organizations may need to think of it as an employee value proposition. If workers are asked to commute, spend more time away from home and give up flexibility, they increasingly expect the workplace to provide experiences they cannot get sitting alone in a home office.
The Office’s Competitive Advantage
Perhaps the most interesting finding in the report isn’t about remote work at all. It’s about relationships.
Nearly 4 out of 5 employees say workplace friendships contribute to better business outcomes. Around 7 in 10 believe socializing with colleagues improves both their productivity and loyalty to the organization.
Yet employees also report that workplace friendships are becoming less common than they were just a year ago.
That trend should concern leaders because decades of organizational research points in the same direction.
Gallup has found that having a best friend at work is strongly associated with higher engagement, better communication, improved safety, stronger customer outcomes and lower turnover. In fact, Gallup argues that close workplace relationships have become even more important in the hybrid era as employees seek meaningful connection amid more distributed work.
Gallup’s research also shows that work location affects emotional wellbeing. While fully remote employees often report higher engagement, they also experience higher levels of loneliness than their on-site counterparts, with hybrid employees generally falling somewhere in between.
In other words, simply getting people back into the building isn’t enough. The workplace has to create opportunities for genuine interaction.
Food: More Strategic Than It Looks
One of the more practical findings from the ezCater research centers on something many organizations already provide but may underestimate.
Two-thirds of employees say they expect recurring food benefits such as weekly or daily meals. Among hybrid and remote Gen Z employees, food is particularly influential: they’re 48% more likely than older workers to say food perks would encourage them to come into the office.
The reason appears to extend well beyond free lunch.
Sixty percent of employees say they’re more comfortable asking someone for a work favor after they’ve shared a meal together in person.
Robert Kaskel, VP of people at ezCater, explains:
“You can’t mandate belonging, but you can design for it. When organizations invest in bringing employees together, especially over food, they create the connective tissue that strengthens bonds and keeps teams engaged.”
That idea aligns with a growing body of workplace research suggesting that the office’s greatest value is increasingly social rather than transactional. Employees can complete individual tasks almost anywhere. What they cannot easily replicate remotely are spontaneous conversations, relationship-building and trust.
It’s telling that nearly 3 in 5 employees in the ezCater survey envision the office of the future primarily as a place for collaboration, not simply a location to sit at a desk.
Giving RTO a Rethink
The debate over remote work often focuses on attendance requirements. But the organizations seeing the strongest engagement may be asking a different question altogether.
Instead of asking, “How do we get employees back into the office?” they ask, “Why would employees want to come in?”
Flexible scheduling, meaningful collaboration, stronger workplace relationships and thoughtfully designed perks all contribute to answering that question.
Gallup researchers argue that employers need to create a compelling “workplace value proposition,” making the commute worthwhile by offering experiences employees can’t duplicate at home.
The latest data suggests that many employees are open to coming together in person. They simply expect the office to deliver value equal to the flexibility they’re giving up. But will bosses listen up?