‘Work from home is essentially done,’ says expert – but not for collaboration and productivity reasons
A new study from Robert Half Canada has found that 84 per cent of new Canadian job postings in the second quarter of 2026 are now fully on-site — up from 63 per cent in the final quarter of 2025. This shift reflects the fact that the return to office (RTO) isn’t primarily a policy decision – it’s a labour market outcome, according to David Zweig, professor of organizational behaviour and HR management in the Department of Management at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
"Work from home is essentially done,” says Zweig.
Robert Half Canada's analysis of more than 48,000 Canadian job postings in Q2 of 2026 paints a clear picture. Only 13 per cent of new postings now offer hybrid arrangements, and just three per cent are fully remote — figures representing a sharp reversal from the pandemic era. Forty-four per cent of employers report that the number of days employees are required on-site has increased in the past year, according to the report.
Labour market dictates employer flexibility
The catalyst has little to do with evolving management philosophy and everything to do with supply and demand, says Zweig. "Way back when, after the pandemic, as people were debating whether or not to go back to the office, I always said it depends on the labour market – if the labour market is tight, people will still be allowed the option of working from home," he says. “In a loose labour market like the one we have right now, there was no doubt in my mind that employers would push for a return to office.”
Canada's labour market hasn’t been tight for some time. As reported in HRD Canada's analysis of Canada's labour market outlook for 2026, hiring rates were sitting roughly 22 per cent below their pre-pandemic norms earlier this year – characterized by analysts as a "low-hire, low-fire" environment that leaves workers with considerably less leverage than they held during the post-pandemic talent crunch.
This means the window for using flexible work as a market differentiator may have narrowed considerably, at least for now. "As long as the labour market is loose, there isn’t a lot of flexibility for people," Zweig says. "They aren't going to be able to expect that they can have the opportunity to work from home in any meaningful sense anymore, given the way things are going where most organizations are returning everyone to the office."
Presence as a proxy for performance
As for what's actually driving RTO mandates, Zweig believes it’s more about control. "The push to go back to the office was never about productivity or collaboration," he says. "It was mostly just about this illusion of control that leaders had, that we needed to see people in person in the office as a measure of performance."
The distinction matters. If the true driver of RTO is managerial comfort rather than measurable business need, HR leaders may face being asked to implement and defend policies whose stated justifications don’t hold up to scrutiny from their own workforce.
That tension is visible in the data. Robert Half found that 63 per cent of Canadian workers say work-life balance and remote work options would motivate them to change jobs. Among the 44 per cent in the Robert Half study who say they are already planning to look for a new role in the second half of 2026, a significant share cited a desire for more flexibility as a primary reason, raising the spectre of retention issues in the wake of RTO mandates.
“Having the opportunity to work from home and being able to work successfully from home for a number of years showed us that work-life balance is a great thing,” says Zweig. “It doesn't mean we want to exclusively work from home anymore, but having that flexibility certainly allows us to obtain a little better work-life balance.”
However, in the current labour market, organizations should focus less on retention concerns and more on morale, he says. “When you have a tight job market where organizations aren't necessarily hiring like they were during the pandemic, it's going to be much stickier for [workers] to consider leaving for other opportunities,” he says. “So HR people really need to focus on how can we deal with the fact that people have this autonomy and flexibility, made it work, enjoyed the work-life balance, and now that's been taken away from them.”
Hybrid may become a talent advantage
If the majority of Canadian employers are racing to full-time on-site requirements, the minority who retain some flexibility may find themselves with an unexpected competitive edge — but only if they understand what that flexibility is actually doing for them, says Zweig.
"It could be a very good recruitment tool for some organizations that are willing to understand that presence does not necessarily equal performance," he says. Extending even partial autonomy over scheduling, he argues, can generate meaningfully stronger commitment and engagement than blanket mandates allow. "If they're not going to have a strict RTO policy that has some flexibility for people that allows them to at least have some autonomy over their schedule, I think that could be a real driver of commitment and engagement – to give people a little bit of that autonomy back that they may no longer have."
The physical momentum is evident across the country. For example, Toronto's office vacancy rate has been cut in half within a year, driven largely by the banking sector's shift to four-day-per-week in-office requirements. But filling office space and retaining talent aren’t the same equation, says Zweig.
Getting ahead of the RTO mandate
HR leaders tasked with implementing policies they didn’t design must remember that the rollout can’t be divorced from the rationale, and that rationale needs to hold up to scrutiny from the people being asked to comply with it, says Zweig.
"The reasons for returning to office, whether it be four days, five days a week, whatever it is, need to actually have some validity to them," he says. "Otherwise, people are just going to be like, ‘What's the point? I was working better from home. I had a lot more flexibility. I didn't have to do the two-hour commute.’"
Zweig acknowledges the difficulty with creating equity between roles that genuinely require in-person presence and those that function equally well remotely. Employees will notice and likely object if they perceive the rules are applied unevenly across the organization, he says.
As for whether the RTO wave will eventually recede, Zweig thinks it’s unlikely things will go back for the foreseeable future. "It's happened very fast and I don't think it's going to change at all unless the labour market changes," he says. "This is all going to be tied very closely to the labour market."
