Return-to-office policies are leading to increased brain drain in the U.S.

Return-to-office mandates are emerging as one of the most contentious of the post-pandemic work trends that U.S. employees have faced.

Last year, Gartner data identified that 63% of HR leaders reported an increase in expectations for employees to return to the office. That was even from those organizations which had made a firm commitment to remote working during the COVID-19 crisis.

Hybrid policies were initially seen as a good measure, providing flexibility to workers. But this turns out to have been just an interim approach as companies began to row back on flexibility.

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That is in part because many companies have seen low compliance, according to Gartner’s data, and as a result many are resorting to full RTO mandates.

Over the past few months, Amazon, JPMorgan and AT&T are just three of the companies which have been under the spotlight for their insistence that staff come back into the office a full five days per week.

More recently, President Trump announced his plans to shrink the government, via the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). One of its mandates is to get federal workers back into the office. Those who don’t want to do that are eligible for a buyout worth seven months of salary.

It may just be an effective way to achieve another of President Trump’s goals: a “reformed federal workforce.”

In doing so, the President has effectively said the quiet part out loud. “We think a very substantial number of people will not show up to work, and therefore our government will get smaller and more efficient,” he has said.

But tech and finance institutions have so far mostly dressed up return-to-office mandates under the guise of improving productivity and fostering collaboration.

However, many companies calculate that a percentage of workers won’t want to come back, and will therefore quit. It’s a soft way to conduct layoffs, and manages to sidestep the organizational shock around traditional layoffs.

Unintended consequences of RTO

Unsurprisingly, according to Gartner’s study, 74% of HR leaders cite these mandates as a source of conflict.

Another unintended consequence of RTO is that while companies hope underperforming people will leave, some of the best talent in a business or organization will go too.

A new research paper from S&P Global Market Intelligence puts extra detail on this. The paper, titled Return to Office Mandates and Brain Drain, tracked over three million tech and finance workers’ employment histories via LinkedIn. It was able to analyze the effect of return-to-office (RTO) mandates on employee turnover and hiring.

“We find that these firms experience abnormally high employee turnover following RTO mandates. The increase in turnover rates is more pronounced for female employees, more senior employees and more skilled employees.” the reports authors state.

And the paper also finds that getting rid of swathes of workers isn’t necessarily the panacea leaders may think it is.

It takes a significantly longer time for these firms to fill their job vacancies after the mandates, the report has found. “Their hire rates also significantly decrease. These results are consistent with firms losing their best talent and female employees and facing greater difficulties with talent attraction after RTO mandates.”

Some of those highly-skilled, highly-paid employees are leaving for remote working opportunities. This is borne out by figures from Ladders, a career site for six-figure positions. It recently found that 10.4% of jobs offering salaries of $250,000 or more were advertised as remote in the third quarter of 2024. That was up from 8.8% in the second quarter of the year.

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