The start of 2025 has seen a lot of debate around the workforce being forced to return to the office. Return to office (RTO) mandates are being rolled out by large corporations, such as Amazon, Asda, Barclays and Salesforce, whilst small businesses still tend to lean towards flexible working.
Flexible working, which can be defined as working outside of 9-5 hours, from home, or from another location away from company HQ used to be a luxury, offered only by progressive employers. Now it is the norm for some or a necessary measure for others, such as working parents, myself included, and with the Flexible Working Bill which was passed in April 2024, flexible working has restructured how we work these days.
So, what are the reasons behind the return-to-office trend? It has been suggested by larger employers that continued remote working following the pandemic has negatively impacted productivity, collaboration, employee development, such as opportunities for promotion, the building of company culture and that a centralized office set-up is more cost effective and allows better strategic long-term planning.
Software giant, Dell have undergone a U-Turn from their remote working policy of 2022 where their ambition was for ‘60% of our workforce to operate remotely on any day’. – source, ‘The Future of Work: A Journey to 2022’, Dell Technologies. Now, it has been widely publicised that remote workers were informed of “trade-offs” which included career development. Remote staff are found to be 24% less likely to receive promotions compared to in-office and hybrid colleagues.
Despite perceived threats and “trade-offs”, pushback to RTO mandates is being felt from employees who still support hybrid ways of working and argue it is beneficial to their work/life balance. For example, carrying out a full workday and not having a long, time-and-cost consuming commute, working parents being able to do the school-run and still log-on in time, finishing at 5pm and getting to the gym or being present in family life, WFH for some means they can prioritise their personal life too.
It could also be argued that mandatory “catch-up days” in the office have become just that, less focussed and more social. Filled with in-person meetings that don’t go anywhere. This would suggest that time spent in the office could be refocussed for development and collaborative working.
Businesses can fill the gap between remote working and the much-needed collaboration that traditional offices bring by embracing co-working. Co-working spaces serve as a third place, separate from home or the office that could be essential to bringing employees back to a physical workspace.
With workers wanting to avoid long commutes, suburban co-working spaces act as a professional, distraction-free satellite office near their homes. Unlike standard commercial property leases, co-working spaces allow companies to scale their operation up or down depending on their business needs and demands, whilst keeping costs in check.
These flexible, fully equipped ecosystems align with the changing requirements of the modern workforce.
