It’s not just students who will be commuting more this September.
After years of experimentation with hybrid work, an increasing number of companies are whittling down days at home to one, or none at all.
The push comes amid rising economic uncertainty that’s leaving workers with less leverage and companies under pressure to boost productivity. Even as some experts point to a lack of evidence that more days in the office is good for business, corporate leaders are increasingly convinced it is.
“There are lots of clients who are slowly but surely increasing the in-office requirement,” said Alex Gallacher, managing director of Engage HR.
Big banks including RBC, Scotiabank and BMO have mandated at least four days in office starting in September, while Canaccord Genuity is reportedly moving to five, mirroring moves earlier this year by U.S. giants Amazon and JPMorgan to also go all-in on the office.
More moves are likely on the way, with 83 per cent of Canadian CEOs saying they expect to move back to full-time in the office within three years, according to a 2024 KPMG survey, a big jump from the 55 per cent who thought so in 2023.
Companies have been citing all sorts of benefits to being in the office such as easier collaboration and teamwork, mentorship opportunities and better communication, while Gallacher sees it especially driven by companies trying to get workers on the same page.
“What’s really driving it is culture,” said Gallacher.
“This desire to have a culture that is more cohesive, and that effectively supports what the business is trying to do strategically.”
For customer-oriented services like banks, working together in person can help emphasize the people-oriented business they’re trying to achieve, he said.
Banks have said the same themselves, with RBC noting it was moving to more days in-office because it’s a “relationship-driven bank” whose in-person, human connection is core to its culture.
Scotiabank noted the collaboration, engagement and career development benefits, as well as a stronger culture and sense of belonging as part of its reasoning to move to four days in office in September, though it noted some teams will take longer to get there because of office space or other constraints.
But companywide policies are a fairly blunt way to try and achieve results when location policies actually demand more nuance and specificity, said Linda Duxbury, chancellor’s professor of management at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business.
“The decision makers are just making decisions, like the banks, everybody comes back, or the Government of Canada, three days … it seems like very arbitrary decisions as opposed to doing the hard work necessary.”
While companies aim to boost results, it’s quite difficult to measure productivity or how well a return-to-office mandate, or home time, is working, said Duxbury.
“They don’t have good performance metrics to measure the productivity of a lot of their knowledge workers,” she said.
“So to make the business case why this person can work from home and this one not, it takes a lot of work.”
Some researchers have aimed to quantify the effects, such as a research paper out last year from Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom that studied 1,600 workers at Chinese travel company Trip.com.
It found employees who worked two days a week at home were just as productive and likely to be promoted as their fully office-based peers, while turnover among them fell by a third.
But even as some data supports hybrid work, companies are making the move because they’re convinced the experiment isn’t working, said Duxbury.
“They’re not just on a whim going, well, hey, I’m going to really make everybody who works for me mad by making people come back in for five days. There’s something triggering it.”
A sense of culture, of the spirit holding a firm together, has come up a lot in her research, though it can also come down to managers not being able to get in contact with employees too many times, she said.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon didn’t hold back when pointing to unreliable employees as one reason the firm moved back to fully in-office.
He complained in a February town hall that he could never get ahold of anyone on Fridays, in a recording that was posted by Barron’s.
He also invited those who didn’t like the policy to quit, underlining how retention is becoming less a concern than it was during the peak labour-shortage years of the pandemic.
But while it might require broad policies to manage the more than 300,000 employees at JPMorgan, smaller firms seem to be finding it easier to navigate.
The KPMG survey, for example, found that only 20 per cent of leaders of small- and medium-sized firms expect to go in-office full time.
A big contributor to that trend is also the fight to find and keep talented staff, said Gallacher, noting the push toward more days in office isn’t happening as much outside big cities, especially for firms needing more specialized positions.
“If you were to try and go hire a claims manager in the insurance world in southwestern Ontario right now, it is literally like pulling teeth.”
But as trends shift and employee leverage fades, Gallacher said it’s important to get clarity from any potential employer about what their plans are in terms of office work.
“It’s probably as important as salary as a question in terms of, you know, can you manage your life.”
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