Is full-time WFH working out?

Ask a roomful of Australian executives in 2026 whether letting people work from home paid off, and you won't get the blunt consensus forming in the U.S. and Canada. Some are thinking of an employee logging in from the kitchen table two days a week. Others are thinking of someone they haven't laid eyes on in months.

The most rigorous research available says both groups have a point. Hybrid work is holding up fine. Full-time remote, the version where nobody ever comes in, is where things get messy. But Australia's largest employers, unlike their American counterparts, mostly aren't picking a fight over it — they're negotiating around the edges instead.

Hybrid and fully remote are not the same experiment

Most of the mandate debate lumps every arrangement short of five office days a week into one bucket labelled "not really working." The research says that bucket is doing a lot of unearned work.

Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom ran the largest controlled study yet of the question, about as close to a randomised drug trial as workplace research gets, of more than 1,600 employees at the travel company Trip.com, published in the journal Nature. Staff who worked from home two days a week were just as productive and just as likely to be promoted as their fully office-based peers, and resignations among the hybrid group fell by 33%.

"The results are clear: hybrid work is a win-win-win for employee productivity, performance, and retention," Bloom said of the findings, which Trip.com credited with saving the company millions of dollars in reduced turnover.

But Bloom is explicit that fully remote work is a different animal entirely. "There definitely are studies, there's one in Nature Human Behavior, there's a bunch of stuff showing that is damaging for innovation, that's damaging for mentoring, for connectivity," Bloom said in a Stanford Engineering interview, describing fully remote work specifically, not hybrid.

In his own randomised field experiment on remote call-centre workers, quit rates among the fully remote group fell by nearly half because people were happier at home, but so did their promotion rates. "The one big sting in the tail is their promotion rates were almost half of the ones at the office," Bloom told the American Enterprise Institute. "So it's a bit of a mixed blessing."

A separate body of research points to wellbeing costs too, with fully remote employees more likely to report feelings of isolation than colleagues who have some in-person contact.

Australia is negotiating, not mandating

That's the research. What's striking is how differently Australia's largest employers are responding to it compared with the US and Canada, where blunt five-day mandates have become the default weapon of choice. HRD's own coverage frames Australia's approach as a genuinely different national path, not a slower version of the same trend, and the detail bears that out.

The big four banks have mostly avoided flat day-count mandates altogether. Commonwealth Bank requires staff to spend at least 50% of their work time in the office, a percentage threshold rather than a fixed number of days, applying to roughly 49,000 staff. Westpac and NAB sit at two to three days a week for most employees, though NAB has directed senior staff specifically back to full-time attendance. ANZ has gone further still, but sideways: rather than mandating a day count, it's told staff that attending less than 40% of the time could cost them up to half their variable pay, depending on seniority. Bendigo Bank has actually moved in the opposite direction, softening its office attendance requirement. Woolworths, meanwhile, has taken a phased approach, gradually increasing in-office expectations over several months rather than issuing a single hard deadline.

"Return-to-work mandates may achieve short-term compliance, but they are unlikely to deliver sustainable engagement or performance," Jayne Clow, head of people and culture ANZ at NTT Data, has told HRD. "From a people leadership perspective, mandates can undermine trust and increase attrition risk in competitive talent markets," she said, part of a broader argument that flexibility is becoming the baseline employees expect, not a perk employers can withdraw at will.

The clearest sign that Australia is heading in a different direction altogether is regulatory, not corporate. From September 2026, Victoria will give employees whose roles can reasonably be performed remotely a legal right, not just a right to request, to work from home at least two days a week — believed to be the first provision of its kind in the country. The Business Council of Australia has opposed it, arguing the change would reduce flexibility rather than protect it. Whether that becomes a Victorian exception or a national template is now one of the more interesting open questions in Australian workplace policy.

The graduate picture looks different here, too

In the U.S., the case against fully remote work has picked up an uncomfortable ally: a genuinely difficult entry-level job market that's often blamed, at least in part, on AI absorbing junior tasks. Australia's data doesn't tell quite the same story, and it's worth being honest about that rather than importing the American narrative wholesale.

Australian graduate job postings fell almost 15% in 2025 compared with the year before, and were down 35% from their 2023 peak, according to Indeed Hiring Lab Australia. But postings showed a modest rebound in early 2026, and while hiring in occupations more exposed to AI fell more sharply than average, the report's own analysis is careful to note that the timing makes it unlikely AI adoption is the primary driver. Jobseeker searches for graduate roles also haven't picked up, suggesting graduates aren't finding it meaningfully harder to land work than they were.

That's a more measured picture than the one playing out in America, but it doesn't remove the underlying argument for in-person mentoring. Fewer routine tasks for junior staff, whatever the cause, still means fewer chances to be corrected, coached and gradually trusted with more. Whether that mentoring happens in an office running a 50%-time policy, a three-day hybrid week, or a fully remote setup remains, for now, a live and mostly unresolved question in Australian workplaces.

So, is it working out?

Not as a single national answer, because Australia hasn't tried to force one. Hybrid, done well, looks like a genuine win on productivity, performance and retention, wherever it's been rigorously studied. Fully remote trades some retention and happiness for real costs to promotion, innovation and mentoring, according to the same research. What Australia has largely avoided, at least so far, is the blunt five-day mandate that assumes every non-office arrangement is the same problem.

That restraint carries its own risk: without a clear position, employees and employers are left negotiating case by case, bank by bank, sometimes team by team. But it also means Australian employers haven't yet made the mistake, visible in the U.S. mandate wave, of using a five-day rule to solve what is really a coaching and connection problem. Whether Victoria's new legal right to work from home spreads nationally, or stays a one-state experiment, may end up mattering more to how this plays out than anything the big banks decide next.