As COVID-19 becomes a memory, pressure has built for those who have been able to work from home (WFH) since the start of the pandemic to return to the office on an increased or full-time basis.
Pre-COVID-19, there was an impression that, generally, office workers spent their contracted hours in their company offices. A 2024 report titled Return to the Office by the UK-based Centre for Cities (CFC) compared central London with five roughly analogous competitor cities (the CBDs of Paris, New York, Toronto, Singapore and Sidney). All six cities have a high-skills, high-knowledge workforce based in their centres and CFC’s research found that pre-pandemic, on average, workers were in the office slightly fewer than four days a week – and only three in Singapore, although this may be explained by Singapore already being in partial lockdown when the data was gathered.
The rate at which workers have remained WFH has varied across the six cities: London and Toronto workers have the fewest days in the office at 2.7 each, while Parisian workers have returned 3.5 days a week and Singapore staff have increased their pre-COVID-19 attendance from 3 to 3.2 days
The report argues that London is disadvantaged by clinging onto WFH long after it ceased to be a necessity. While staff may prefer WFH, areas such as the City and Canary Wharf rely on agglomeration, concentrating their skilled workers together and creating a virtuous circle of, what the authors term, “knowledge spillovers” – a culture of absorbing and developing skills by being surrounded by expertise. A weekly survey conducted by Remit Consulting LLP makes for worrying reading, in that case. It records the number of keycard swipes made into offices in several UK cities as a means of measuring occupancy in leased spaces. The average for high-end central London in the week ending 24th January was 44.5% (albeit up from 37.3% in January 2024).
“Central London has a very interesting mix of people and different businesses working together and that’s what allows it to thrive,” says Roddy Houston MRICS, a commercial property consultant and chair of the RICS Commercial Property Professional Group Panel. “In my view, what has happened in the office market replicates what has happened to retail over the past 20 years. People have gone online and there’s no longer as much need to have shop premises. COVID-19 has accelerated it but offices are going the same way. The decline is much quicker, there’s less demand generally.”
One of the reasons many companies want their workers in the office carries little personal benefit: they have leased – and are stuck with – large premises which they do not wish to keep empty. About a third of Resume.org’s 900 respondents have leases that run until 2028 and cite this as a reason for their return to office policy (a substantial proportion – more than 40% - said they would reduce the days required in office when they were able to lease smaller spaces).
Managers enforcing office attendance because they have an office premises to fill – to the possible detriment of their most valuable employees’ loyalty – seems a high-risk strategy. But a thriving commercial quarter feeds into a local – often a national – sense of prosperity as well as creating beneficial interdependent business networks and helping to establish the knowledge spillovers noted above.
In London, where so many employees choose to be work Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, many workplaces can feel lonely on a Friday - CFC found only 40% of workers attended in office during 2024 and data from Remit’s survey suggests that the figures for Friday office attendance hovers around just 20%.
Such was the level of alarm that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, experimented with lower public transport fares on Fridays, a measure that was not wholly successful as so few people were aware of it. Lower fares may, however, partly explain Parisians’ enthusiasm for the office – not only are they much cheaper in Paris, but companies are also legally obliged to reimburse staff’s commuting costs by 50%.
“The thing that prevents workers returning to the office which really stood out was transport costs,” says Oscar Selby, co-author of Return to the Office. “It’s no coincidence that when you look at the city which has the highest in-office rate, it’s Paris.”
Conversely, in Singapore, where a 50+ hour working week is not unusual, Bill Jones FRICS says the return to work has been relatively relaxed, in part because of the increasingly crowded train network. “It’s about a work-life balance and pressure on public transport. The government here has brought in new laws that mean people have the right to request flexi-working.”
The proportion of vacant offices in the CFC’s Return to Office cities show that all six have had an uptick in vacancies – and at an alarming rate for Sydney and Toronto. While there has been a glut of office completions after the pandemic, WFH definitely takes a share of the blame for this. Not only directly – fewer people in the office means companies that can be flexible need less space – but indirectly: some companies are relocating from older buildings to better-serviced, better-located premises.
Houston too maintains that this is a trend in central London as well – “Canary Wharf isn’t so good” – and that the asset owners that are really succeeding offer a great product. “Those that are building very close to transport hubs and providing very good quality office spaces on all types of different terms are in demand.”
Using carrot instead of stick, they have figured that a more inviting work environment might entice employees back to their desks more often. Workers have made an investment in their home offices, the thinking goes, and expect their employers to take similar consideration with their corporate workplaces. As a consequence, some businesses are trying to tempt them back, according to a January 2025 article in the Wall Street Journal, by snapping up premises which offer restaurants, gyms, and are convenient to travel into. In a JLL report about incentivising workers back to the office, a spokesman suggested, “Part of the answer lies in making sure the corporate workplace provides similar utility as their homes in terms of the quality of life.”
Selby is less convinced. “You hear about workplaces being retrofitted with gyms and beanbags but our survey suggests the biggest factor is the commute.”
He reports that, of the six cities in the report, London is the one least likely to reach a target of 90% office attendance of January 2020 levels, putting it at a disadvantage. This, the report suggests, is because London has accepted current working patterns as the new normal, rather than a staging post in the return to a (perceived) full five days in the office. Employers are unwilling to enforce mandates and there are plenty of good reasons for employees to want to WFH (in particular, the dead time of the commute and the cost of childcare – the 35–44-year-old cohort are keenest to WFH, typically an age when workers have young children).
This has led to concerns about efficiency. The British businessman, Stuart Rose, claimed that WFH means “not proper work… We have regressed in this country in terms of working practices, productivity and in terms of the country’s wellbeing, I think, by 20 years in the last four”.
There have been pleas from business organisations to increase office mandates amid fears of hollowed out areas such as the City of London and Canary Wharf, devoid not just of office workers, but the armies of staff that service them – security, retail, transport and hospitality workers. Meanwhile, a culture war around the return to office has arisen, aligning it with a quasi-patriotic duty and civil servants who were resistant to the idea of 3 days in the office were publicly ridiculed. According to the Office for National Statistics, productivity in the public sector is about 8.5% below its pre-pandemic levels, although it is unclear if this is a result of WFH.
Jones is suspicious of the commercial imperative to get people in their offices: “There’s pressure to reduce the size of premises and [asset managers] are constantly pushing the return to the office model because there’s a fear their jobs will disappear. They don’t want to be turkeys voting for Christmas.”
Nevertheless, there are conspicuous advantages too for workers in spending some of their time in the office: better collaboration; better opportunities to benefit from knowledge spillovers; more networking opportunities; better training and development of soft skills. This is supported by findings that younger people in London are much keener to work in the office than their older co-workers (but is not replicated in the other five cities). This could also be attributed to a lack of space for remote working in their homes and – the commute again – generally living closer to the city centre than their older, suburb-dwelling colleagues.
Although no one likes to admit to it, there is a clear advantage to presenteeism for its own sake too. Being seen to be working could be at least as valuable as the work you do: a 2023 survey by KPMG reported that 87% of CEOs would favour in-office workers with promotion, pay rises and better assignments. This figure is exactly matched by the number of employees who were found, by McKinsey, to want to WFH, at least some of the time.
Yet, the high-profile return to office mandates persist; firms such as Goldman Sachs ruled that its workers must be at their desks five days a week as far back as far back as March 2022 and were followed by UPS, Boeing, Santander and Boots. Last autumn, Amazon instructed its office staff that they must return full time by January 2025 – later revised to May due to lack of useable office space.
Amazon’s CEO, Matt Garman, was quoted as saying that employees who didn’t like the mandate could find jobs elsewhere and many observers have speculated that wholesale return to office rulings might be a covert way of cutting numbers. This suspicion was supported by a survey from BambooHR which found 25% of executives hoped that return to office mandates would lead to voluntary resignations. As if to underline this, in November, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, co-heads of the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency, wrote, not so covertly, in a Wall Street Journal column: “Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.”
It's a blunt tool with which to reduce staff as it disproportionately risks losing talented, highly-skilled workers who are more likely to find another job with ease, as well as indirectly discriminating against women and disabled workers who have benefited from remote working opportunities. Stanford professor of economics, Nicholas Bloom, has called these blanket mandates a foolhardy move and claims that companies demanding in-office attendance will revise or rescind their policy within a few months.
Losing good staff is a legitimate fear – personnel organisations estimate that replacing a highly-skilled professional can equate to more than a year of their salary in recruitment costs, lost productivity and training a replacement. But one of the findings of Return to Work was that, while a fear of losing valuable workers is one of the reasons that businesses are reluctant to increase days at the office (37% in London and 79% in Toronto cite it as a reason not to demand workers come in), the reality can be less alarming. Only 9% of London and Toronto workers said that they would look for another job if forced to return fully to the office.
However, a survey by the Canadian research firm, Pollara, found 42% of employees would leave in similar circumstances, albeit with only 5% quitting immediately while the other 37% waited until the right opportunity arose. Strength of feeling on the subject is clearly high in Canada: a union is currently suing the government over attempts to makes its civil service members increase their days in the office.
A significant negative commercial outcome of this is that companies that dictate a full return to the office have been shown to have slower workforce growth than their more flexible counterparts. Last November (2024), the University of Pittsburgh published an analysis of 3 million tech and finance workers’ LinkedIn profiles and found firms that had issued return to office mandates grew at only 1% compared to 1.6% for firms that accommodate some WFH. The researchers also noted that it took longer for office-based firms to recruit and that they lost more senior and diverse staff, concluding, “Our study highlights brain drain as a significant cost of return to office mandates.”
Depending on its success, Amazon’s mandate may encourage other smaller companies to direct their staff back to the office full-time. But, for many companies, despite the perceived tension between the bosses and workers, there is an acceptance that hybrid working is best for both classes and CFC concludes that it is unlikely any of its six cities will reach their pre-pandemic levels of office activity. It is achieving the correct balance which seems to be sticky. Employees find travelling in a hassle and, sad to say, the BambooHR survey found that the main reason employers wanted them back was so that they could track them more effectively.
Ultimately, Houston thinks we should ask ourselves what the office is for. “How do we create a business in which people do what they need to do and it doesn’t matter when or where they do it? How do we manage people in a different way?”
