Are office mandates still missing the point?

Ever since companies began issuing mandates for employees to return to the office, the debate around in- person work has remained heated. 

At HR FutureFest, a session titled “Because I Said So: Keeping Cool During Mandated Office Returns” picked up that conversation, digging into how organizations can manage employee pushback—and whether it’s time to rethink office mandates. 

Moderated by Stephen Muscat, global talent leader and former VP Global Talent Acquisition at Altus Group, the session panel featured Joe O’Connor, CEO and founder of Work Time Revolution.  

The speakers debated the traditional notions of productivity and if it needs to be re-thought altogether. 

The event was held on June 3 at the Toronto Event Centre. 

How Altus did office mandate 

The panel started with Muscat sharing the Altus Group’s approach to office mandates.  

He says his team used the opportunity to re-evaluate their value proposition. 

“As an organization, we made the decision to be able to use flexibility as one of our pillars of our value proposition, " he explains. “We knew we were going up against — as far as talent, attraction and retention — other organizations who were weren't going in the same direction we were.” 

Muscat notes that it was a calculated risk, as competitors in the commercial real estate and analysis sectors had pushed for a full in-office mandate.  

Instead, the Altus model allowed roles — not leadership — to determine which model to follow, whether hybrid or remote. 

“We were able to consistently maintain productivity levels, as well as drive up engagement and drive down turnover,” he adds. 

The real problem isn’t location 

However, O’Connor argued that the return-to-office debate misses the real issue: the crisis of “busy work.”  

He pointed to a past study by Asana which found that 60 per cent of workers spend time on “work about work”, such as chasing updates, attending unnecessary meetings, and switching between tools—which leads to missed deadlines and poor productivity. Whether you're in the office or working from home, distractions exist—but they can be managed, he says.  

“The real issue is fragmentation, focus, and distraction, which our modern tools and technologies have left unaddressed,” he continues. 

Rather than having conversations focus on a narrow view of productivity and efficiency—where it’s all about hours worked and output—Oconor believes HR and organizations need to focus on “human productivity”. 

“In an AI-augmented future, efficiency will be the trait of our tools, not of our talent,” he says 

 “Human productivity will mostly be about effectiveness, and that relies on things like judgment, creativity, decision-making, connection. Those are the types of conversations we should be having when we think about productivity—whether it’s in the office, hybrid or remote.” 

Flexibility still leaves gap  

 Even when organizations offer flexibility work polices for employees, O’Connor says it can deepen gender disparities. 

“I think there's a big difference between what I would call flexibility by exception and flexibility by design. And so, a lot of flexibility models within organizations are based on policies,” he explains. 

Many organizations, O’Connor says, offer the flexibility model based on individual accommodations. The types of individuals that tend to opt into them are women. 

He cites a University of Southampton study that found 52 per cent of women, compared to five per cent of men, who work flexibly are more likely to take on childcare and security-related responsibilities. 

“The reality is that women take on more caring and domestic responsibilities within the home. As long as we have work models that rely on individual accommodations rather than structured collective solutions that everyone is participating in, these could actually reinforce the existing gender biases that exist,” he says. 

 O’Connor says organizations need a collective approach, where individuals manage their workflows rather than a flexible policy defined across teams solely based on other people’s availability. 

“What this does is, number one, create a sense of shared responsibility within the group. And number two, it forces people to have collective conversations about things like how we collaborate, how we connect, how we meet”. 

Return to office myth 

Both speakers also challenged whether the idea of a normal return to the office ever really existed before COVID-19. 

Muscat shared last year that his team looked at a study their organization conducted on occupancy rates for downtown core team members, pre-COVID. It found that the occupancy rate was mainly at 68 per cent but it never hit more than 80 per cent. 

“You're never going to hit 100%,... people were generally three days a week at that time a year ago, and we never hit more than four days a week,” he explains. 

Muscat says he “finds it fascinating” that leaders and organizations still hold a perception of where we’re supposed to be with office mandates—when it was never achieved on the “best days, pre-COVID.” 

O’Connor says he sees the future as flexible—especially with factors such as economic uncertainty, generative AI, and Gen Z entering leadership roles in the workforce. 

“I don't believe that the genie is going back into the bottle in terms of returning back to pre-COVID ways of organizing work,” he says.